WIAW - Deconstructed Burritos

Happy What I Ate Wednesday everyone! I hope you're all enjoying the day - I love seeing what everyone eats on WIAW - such a great idea by Jenn!


This post is based on yesterday's food, as I write most of my blog posts in the morning when Toby has his nap - by the time evening rolls round I'm usually way too tired to do anything more than read other people's blog posts so this works better for me!

Yesterday, I woke up in the mood for chocolate. Not that that's particularly unusual, but yesterday I decided to properly do something about it. Enter, Oh She Glow's Chocolate Cake Batter Smoothie for breakfast!

Mmmm, this was a fantastic start to the day!

I've been eating my breakfast quite late recently - around 10.30am - as I've been waiting until Toby has his nap so I can enjoy my breakfast in peace. His nap time is my "me time", so this breakfast was immediately followed by taking photos of my Strawberry Coconut Muffins, which of course involved eating the one I bit in to...

Not really necessary as I was still full from my bowl of chocolate breakfast, but these muffins were so tasty I couldn't resist!

It worked out ok though as lunch ended up being a late one. I decided to wait until Liam got home at 2pm to eat, as I'd already eaten so much late morning, but we then ended up chatting so didn't eat until almost 3pm! Ugly photo, but delicious lunch - Vogel's sunflower and barley bread + Pure spread + tomato ketchup + Linda McCartney sausages = quick, easy, tasty lunch!

I don't really like Quorn products or many of the other fake "meat" items you can buy, but I do like the products I've tried in the Linda McCartney range, so I keep a box of these sausages in the freezer for when I'm wanting a quick sausage sarnie!

An hour or so after lunch, I got a text from my Mum who had been catching up on my blog & therefore fancied a muffin! So she came round and I ate a muffin as well...

The children both had one too. I wasn't surprised that Toby gobbled his down - he eats anything - but Izzy is normally not the biggest cake fan - she usually just eats the icing and leaves the cake, so I wasn't really expecting her to like these. However, she loved it! She ate hers faster than Toby (normally unheard of!) and immediately asked for another!! Haha, no go, but I'm glad she liked them!

Dinner was something I'd been looking forward to for a few days, but kept forgetting to take the wraps out of the freezer. A deconstructed version of these sweet potato and kidney bean burritos. I served everything separately so we could all make our own wraps. Kidney bean mix (which I accidentally added a bit too much chilli powder to), grated cheddar, guacamole (just two avocadoes fork mashed with lemon juice and chilli powder), baked sweet potatoes and sour cream dip (grabbed from the fridge to compensate for the spicy kidney bean mix!)...

plus seedy wraps. Izzy loves making up her own meals so this worked great - she could avoid the spicy kidney beans, I could avoid the cheese (must find some non-dairy cheese!) and I thought Liam would avoid the guacamole, but actually he loved it! Toby just picked at some wrap and sweet potato, he wasn't too keen on this meal. I had two wraps with everything but the cheese...

Delicious, I loved how vibrant all the colours were!

These tasted amazing, but I made a mistake. I have been avoiding dairy for the last few days or so as I realised it was possibly the cause of the agonising stomach pains and other tummy troubles I've been getting. So when I planned this meal, I deliberately made it so that I could avoid the cheese. But then when I made the bean mix too spicy by mistake, I grabbed the sour cream from the fridge without even thinking about it being dairy. Unfortunately my tummy didn't forget - I spent the rest of the evening in agony after this meal, so that was the last of the food for my WIAW post.

Question: for those of you with intolerances to food, how long does your tummy/any other symptoms usually take to react after eating something?  Or, for anyone, after you eat something slightly 'dodgy'? My tummy started playing up within 10 minutes of finishing eating, so probably about half an hour after I started the meal. Liam reckons that is too quick, and my tummy must have been reacting to something I ate earlier in the day. But I'm sure it was the sour cream and/or the spicy kidney bean mix - everything else I ate yesterday was fairly 'safe' I think. Grrr. Annoying either way, I want to be able to enjoy my food without worrying about the consequences! :( Thankfully I've woken up this morning and my tummy is fine, but still, not pleasant while it lasted last night.

Sorry to end the post on a miserable note! You can tell me about your favourite Mexican food instead if you like! :) I'm loving Mexican food recently, but don't like the texture of beans, so meals like the above - where the kidney beans are mashed - work well for me. It would be great to get some new ideas for meals as well!

A Mexican Meal Out

Yesterday was Liam's brother's 21st birthday, and also Liam's Auntie's birthday...so we all went out for a meal out to celebrate! As I haven't written about food in ages though (well it feels like that to me anyway!) I'm going to first show you the rest of my food yesterday.

My eating recently has been out of control, so I decided yesterday to try to eat a bit less, eat a bit more consciously and eat a bit healthier. It started with a yummy breakfast of Total Greek yoghurt, a chopped nectarine, Sweet Freedom and a little desiccated coconut...

This was really tasty, and surprisingly filling. I love having smoothies or porridge for breakfast, but when I then load them with toppings they don't exactly make the best option when I'm trying to lose a bit of weight. Lighter breakfasts like this yoghurt bowl are great for days when I'm not exercising (that'd be pretty much every day at the moment then!!) and especially when I know I'm going out for a meal in the evening.

Mid-morning, Izzy wanted a snack and I would usually join her. Instead, yesterday I decided to have a mug of tea. I got out all the tea bags Maria had sent me...

I decided to try the Dragonfly Tea Rooibos Chai...

I had this with milk and a little Sweet Freedom and it was lovely :) It felt like a real treat so I didn't feel the need to have a snack in the morning. I loved it so much in fact that I had the second of the same teabags yesterday afternoon...I think I'll have to buy some of these myself soon! :)

Lunch was one of my favourites for when Liam's coming home on his lunch breaks - sweet potatoes. I stick them in the oven an hour before he's due home and it makes for an easy meal that is ready to eat as soon as he walks in the door...aren't I a good wife??!! :-p (as opposed to Wednesday, when we had quesadillas on his lunch break, and he didn't end up sitting down to eat until 10 minutes before he was due back, oops!). I had my sweet potato with goats cheese, cinnamon and sweetcorn...

Delicious! We hadn't had sweet potatoes in a while so this was particularly appreciated!

As I mentioned, on Wednesday Liam came home from work with reduced flowers and a reduced cupcake for me. Well, on Thursday he came home with something even better (!!), reduced medjool dates!

5 packs of medjool dates reduced to 10p each on staff shopping! I gave one pack to my Mum, but I still have a lot to get through. Liam doesn't like them, but luckily Izzy does! We each had a couple stuffed with peanut butter for our afternoon snack yesterday...

Admittedly I hadn't planned to eat this snack - I just made myself some whilst making Izzy's without really thinking about it. It was good though, as we usually eat dinner 6-6.30pm, and last night the restaurant wasn't booked until 8.30pm, so by the time everyone had ordered, we didn't start eating til 9pm!

I'd originally decided to only have a main course at the Mexican restaurant. My willpower, however, was not feeling that strong! So for starter I had deep-fried breaded brie...

I had read the menu. But when this arrived, the sauce looked like cranberry, so I scooped up a lot of it with my first mouthful...forgetting that it was actually sweet chilli jam! My poor throat!! It was really tasty though, I love cooked cheese :)

For my main course, I chose a roasted vegetable burrito, which also came with vegetable rice...

This was huge! I ate most of the burrito, but had to leave a lot of the rice. After this, I was completely full and my stomach was really hurting. I wasn't even tempted to order dessert (despite there being a yummy looking Key Lime Pie on the menu!) but then everyone was brought around chocolate birthday cake and I found myself eating it...

This was quite nice, but completely unnecessary...I felt so uncomfortable afterwards!

Woohoo, a whole post with just food photos! I'll spoil it by adding in a photo of me last night though - Liam took this when he was sat right next to me, so a bit too close for comfort, but I quite like the top I was wearing...

I'm desperately in need of a haircut though!!

Today I'm going to a friend's hen do. She's getting married next Saturday, I can't wait for her wedding! :-D We lived next door to each other in halls in the first year of uni, and then we shared a house in our 2nd year (when I was pregnant with Izzy). She's been with her now-fiance all that time, so it's really exciting that they're getting married so soon! Speaking of which, I better get on! I have to leave to catch a train in an hour, and I have biscuits to ice before then!

Have a great Saturday everyone! :)

Day Two - Getting Lost & Mexican Food

Morning everyone! Today's post will probably be a bit shorter as I slept past 8am today, whoop, a decent night's sleep! Liam will still want another hour's sleep though so I got out of bed and came downstairs to the computers...normal behaviour on honeymoon? Perhaps not, but writing these posts helps me a) remember our honeymoon and b) de-stress...and after last night's dinner I need a little rant!!

I'll start with the more positive things first though. Breakfast. I didn't even try to eat savoury things this time, starting with a plate of bread and cake with chocolate-hazelnut spread and peach jam...

...followed by a custard filled croissant (Liam tipped me off on the filling, otherwise I might have completely missed this deliciousness!!) and some fresh pineapple...

...plus two delicious coffees and some fresh orange juice. Yum. Luckily we didn't eat this until about 10am, as lunch ended up being a late one.

After breakfast, Liam we wanted to go to the Picasso Museum. We got on the Metro for the first time (no getting lost, yey!) and arrived at the area that the hotel reception had told Liam the museum was in. We then spent over half an hour wandering the streets looking for it...

When we eventually found it, it was actually down a side street we'd walked past several times! The map the hotel gave Liam has big circles with the name places of popular locations on...not so helpful when it covers up the names of the streets we need to go to in order to get to said locations. Anyway, we made it. And queued for 45 minutes in the midday heat before we could even buy a ticket...

We eventually entered the museum about 1.15pm and spent a couple of hours wandering around the rooms. As you may have picked up, going to museums wouldn't normally be first on my list whilst on holiday, but it was interesting to see Picasso's progression, from imitating other artists' styles to finding his own. Although it confused me a bit, as we looked at the temporary exhibition first which focuses on his influences and earlier work, and then we went to the main exhibition which was in chronological order; so it wasn't until the last couple of rooms that we saw work that I recognised as "Picasso". Liam actually found those rooms less interesting as he said that by then he was set in his style so all the pictures were pretty similar, true perhaps, but I liked the brighter colours of those paintings - the rooms in the museum were all kept so dark that some colour on the walls was needed!! Haha, how uneducated do I sound?! I'll move quickly back to an area I have slightly more expertise in...food!

We didn't end up eating lunch until 3pm, but it was worth the wait. On the way to the Picasso Museum, we'd been given a 10% off restaurant to a new (I think) restaurant, so we headed back there. The one thing I'd been craving while not eating gluten was tortilla wraps, so my choice of a vegetable burrito was pretty easy. A burrito filled with houmous, sweetcorn and other veggies, plus a great side salad...

with a mojito (and lots of water!) to wash it down...

As you can see, we had a lovely window seat over-looking the street, and all the food was great. Liam had a chicken & avocado wrap, and whilst I was jealous of his avocado, I was so pleased I'd been able to find vegetarian food that still tasted great - at some of the other restaurants we'd looked into the vegetarian option has seemed like a bland and/or cheese-based add on - but my burrito was just as good as Liam's meal. As you will see with dinner though, I clearly spoke too soon :(

After lunch we headed to the nearby Parc de la Ciutadella to relax surrounded by greenery rather than sewage!!

The park was great - lots of clear grass to relax on, as well as interesting features to look at...

View from the bottom...

View from the top

We then tried to go to a cafe advertising Churros con Chocolate, but they didn't serve it at that time of day. Boo. I will have this at some point this week - my favourite memory from a school trip to Spain years ago! Instead we stopped at a bakery to buy some treats to take back to the hotel - this seems to have become a little habit - a good one of course! There was so much to choose from!

Only part of one side of the shop - there was also lots more!!

I decided on macaroons...

and Liam went for chocolate-filled biscuits...

We waited until after we'd got the metro back to the hotel before enjoying these, so good!

Rather than having a late afternoon nap inside as we did on Monday, we decided to head up the hotel pool for a couple of hours. The pool itself is very small (and cold apparently - I got Liam to try it for me!!) but to be lying on a sun lounger, warm in a bikini, at 7.30pm was just bliss! I'll perhaps try the pool another day at a warmer time - it was in the shade by the time we got up there.

We then made our way out to dinner. Gah. I'm not even sure I want to talk about it, the whole experience was so horrendous. Ranting by email to my Mum and Sister seemed to help though so here goes...there are no photos and probably lots of ranting, so feel free to skip this section if you want!

My Mum had been looking on Trip Advisor for us, and had found a restaurant she thought we'd like called La Luna. We looked it up and discovered it was back at the same metro station we'd been to earlier in the day. Not ideal, but we geared ourselves up and went back there. The metro ride went smoothly, but then we spent literally an hour wandering the streets looking for this restaurant. We wandered past loads of cute looking restaurants with tables on the streets, but we were on a mission. So after an hour, our legs were getting tired and we were close to giving up. When we found it! La Luna. Down a dingy side-street, with no outside area, and no customers inside the darkly lit restaurant. At this stage I would've eaten my arm, and would've been ok with giving the vegetable lasagne I'd seen on the menu a try. But Liam wanted to go back to one of the restaurants we'd seen earlier instead. So we did. And found all the tables to be full. We eventually found one table left at a restaurant on the main road, but the menu was full of cheap, bland sounding pasta, pizza etc, so we decided to head back to the hotel and go to the local 'Mexiterranean' restaurant we'd originally planned to go to.

The menu for this place had looked great - tapas featuring guacamole alongside Spanish foods etc. We were lead upstairs by a really helpful waiter and given a menu. Ah. No tapas in sight (that seems to be for earlier in the day now I think about it) and instead only 4 main courses - lamb, chicken, beef or seabass. By this time it was almost 10pm and I was so hungry and close to tears that I ordered the 18 euro seabass that I didn't want to eat. In the meantime, the waiter brought us each a small bread roll (I had raisin & nut, yum) and a tiny vegetable spring roll 'appetizer' each. Then our mains arrived. Mine was 2 small fillets of seabass on top of guacamole. Liam's was chicken on top of cheese with some crispy thing on top. We kept waiting for vegetables and potatoes to arrive. But no. This was it. So we ate. My seabass tasted ok I guess, but it was full of bones and really not something I wanted to be eating. The guacamole was good, and Liam said his chicken was nice, but we were both still as hungry after eating as we were when we came in. We decided against dessert as at 9 euros each, we weren't expecting much from portion sizes based on main courses! Good thing too as when the bill came it was almost 50 euros! For a tiny main each, and just drinking water! They'd charged 8.50 euros for the bread and appetizers - that's more than 2 euros each for small bread rolls and tiny spring rolls. We should have said something (indeed, I should have asked if they could have cooked me something vegetarian) but by this stage we felt so miserable that we just paid the bill and headed to the corner shop to get some 'proper' food!

So back at the hotel we ate this...

Spanish food?!! My stomach was churning from eating fish for the first time in ages, so I was just glad to be able to eat anything.

Not the greatest end to the day, but today can only be better right! I think we're going to head to Gaudi's Parc Guell and hopefully la Sagrada Familia too, so I'm looking forward to that. And now time to wake Liam up for breakfast - I overheard someone saying there is melon, yey, yesterday's pineapple was good, but Monday's melon was even better!

Sorry for the less than upbeat post today everyone, I was just so disappointed that after all the traipsing around, when we finally sat down to a meal it still wasn't what I wanted. How do you deal with eating out in a different place/country? I should have asked if they could do me a vegetarian main course, but as the only vegetarian starters were a regular green salad or tomato gazpacho (and I was starving!) I didn't think I had much to work with. Tonight we are going to go back to asking for a recommendation from the hotel as that worked really well on Monday.

Sweet Potato and Kidney Bean Burritos

Today has been a yummy day! :)

Starting with a delicious, unpictured, maple walnut latte and swiftly followed by Averie's Microwave Blueberry Banana Oat Cake...this is so easy to make! I followed the recipe, except I replaced the brown sugar for 2 tbsp of date syrup. I was having serious peanut butter cravings - can't remember when I last had some - so I put a blob on this...

Delicious! The peanut butter went all melty so I could spread it all over the oats...yum yum. Completely different to the baked oats I made earlier in the week - with the milk and flour those were very cakey, whereas this was dense and chewy, really good :)

My daughter was sent home from school yesterday with a sore tummy, and was off school again today, so the day was a little hectic! Poor little thing, one minute she seemed fine, next she was screaming in pain :(

Looking back on today's photos I can't believe that the only thing I ate between breakfast and dinner was this bowl of Bear tropical granola with Rachel's Greek style coconut yoghurt...

this was quite nice, but I think I prefer my granola paired with soggier things - porridge/milk - this was a little dry for me.

Dinner was worth waiting for anyway - a while ago I'd seen a photo on Everyday Foodie's Blog which looked good - bean and sweet potato burritos. I had a quick Google and came across this recipe to base tonight's dinner on. I've been trying to introduce more beans into my diet, but as I'm not really a big fan of them, mashed is the way to go for now. The ingredients...

I didn't even bother to try to convert the amount of cups of kidney beans and sweet potatoes the recipe was calling for, but luckily 1 tin of kidney beans and 3 small baked sweet potatoes seemed to be enough for 4 burritos! :) Plus onion, garlic, ground cumin, chilli powder and soy sauce to add to the mashed kidney bean mix, and wraps obviously. Oh and cheese! Very important, but I forgot to include it in the photo!

I followed the steps in the recipe and then it was time to make the burritos. Fillings ready - mashed kidney bean mix, baked sweet potato filling, and grated cheddar...

I'd never had burritos before so the recipe stating "fold up tortillas burrito style" wasn't overly helpful, but I did my best! Kidney bean mash first...

then sweet potato...

then cheese...

and time to fold up...

and bake in the oven for 12 minutes...

These were soooo good! :) daughter wasn't hungry, but my Mum was on her way round to show us the bridesmaid dresses that had arrived (exciting!) so she had half a burrito too, and I had one & a half burritos instead of the one I'd planned to have, yum :)

I was a bit worried about them as there was about half the amount of sweet potato to kidney bean mix, but actually the sweet potato flavour was still prominent, it was all so tasty...

Yet another recipe that will be repeated :) Liam really enjoyed it too, although he ate his with lots of sweet chilli sauce too...so not needed!

*****

Yesterday was a much simpler day food-wise, I think after the delicious food overload that was Pancake Day, I was just craving basic foods!

I started the day with a Total 0% Greek yoghurt split pot with blueberry...

this was nice, the yoghurt was lovely & thick, and the blueberry compote not too sweet. A much lighter breakfast than usual...not something I'll be repeating often, don't worry!!

Wednesday mornings we usually go to toddler group, but baby was too tired - he was back asleep by 9.30am! I then got a call from school just after 11am, so had to wake him up to rush and pick poorly daughter up, bless her, she didn't seem like herself at all!

After sorting out and settling the children, lunch was just what I fancied - it may sound stereotypically "boring" - but tofu, brown rice and veggies was what I wanted. In this case basil tofu, brown rice and peas...

this was so easy - a one pot dish - I just cooked the rice as normal and added the frozen peas and cubed tofu a few minutes before the end of cooking. No need for a sauce either as the basil coating mixed with the remaining cooking water to make a pesto type sauce, delicious!



I also had a nice parcel in the post yesterday - after seeing a few reviews of Rawr chocolate around blog-land recently, I couldn't resist checking out the website. This chocolate was less expensive than some of the other raw chocolate I've seen/tried, so I decided to order some...

I think the packaging is great, definitely makes it stand out from other brands! After lunch I decided to try the Pecan Power...

it was already broken when I opened it, which made it perfect for having as a snack both after lunch and dinner! This was nice, I loved the taste, but texture-wise I prefer the Conscious chocolate I tried a while back. This was very soft - even the pecan had no crunch!  I put the second piece in the fridge and this improved the texture, it gave the pecans their crunch back although the chocolate was still more chewy than anything else... I'm looking forward to trying the other flavours to see what they're like.

For dinner, Liam made cottage pie for the others. I had a meat-free "chicken" fillet on top of sweet potato mash with lots of broccoli...

topped with a couple of portions of guacamole from the freezer...



this was great! I'm loving sweet potato even more than usual at the moment, and the sweet potato-guacamole-broccoli combo was really tasty :) the meat-free fillet didn't really taste of anything, but at least it provided substance I guess!

That's all from me for now, off to relax for a bit! Today has been really stressful trying to juggle both the children - daughter often screaming in pain and not wanting baby anywhere near her (not usual for her but I think she was worried he'd make her tummy worse), baby being worried about his big sister so trying to give her cuddles, me taking baby away so daughter wouldn't get even more distressed, then daughter crying because she wanted me (but not baby) near her at all times...gah...I was very glad when Liam arrived home...felt like I was being torn in two!!