Hidden Bananas...

Today, my Mum and I encouraged each other to stick to our personal eating goals. The aim: only eat 4 times (plus a coffee mid-morning) and stick to healthy, clean (ish) foods. The result: a success! For today anyway, hopefully I'll be able to keep it up for the next 6 weeks or so til my wedding :)

Despite keeping "on track" with my eating, I've really enjoyed all my food today, perhaps even more so than usual.

Breakfast was my favourite green smoothie, and lots of it at that. Banana, spinach, pineapple, milk & xanthan gum. As the pineapple was from the fridge rather than the freezer, I also added some ice. Turns out ice = huge smoothie!

I love this flavour, especially as it doesn't need any extra sugar - the pineapple makes it sweet enough even for me!

This was great, although the extra volume did leave my tummy feeling a bit heavy for an hour or so.

Late-morning, my Grandma came round so I made myself a skinny latte - can't drink plain black coffee like she does! Then it was time for lunch. I fancied something cooked, and had some veggies that needed using up. So I roasted a pepper and a courgette in a little coconut oil (with some basil tofu added in at the end to bump up the calories and protein) served with quinoa...

this was just what I wanted, warm, tasty, filling and healthy!

Yum, I love quinoa, I love roast veggies and I love smoked tofu - I'm in a very "loving everything I eat" mood today it seems!!

As I was going to circuits this evening, I planned to eat something quite big about 4.30pm to keep me going through the exercise. I ended up having a great snack I haven't had in ages - Averie's Microwave Blueberry Banana Oat Cake. I took a photo before turning it out of the bowl as I didn't trust myself not to break it!

I was right to as it fell apart majorly!! Peanut butter makes everything better though right?!

This is sooo good...I must remember to make it more often! :) Just checked back and I hadn't had it in over 2 months. It seemed to hold together better back then though!. It seemed to hold together back then though!

Yum, perfect pre-exercise snack! I think next time I will try cooking it for a bit longer to see if it holds together better. I'd written it down as 3.5 minutes cooking time, but looking back just now, I see Averie says 3.5-4.5 minutes so maybe that'll help mine to look as pretty as hers!!

Circuits was better this week than last week. Well harder work anyway. As we knew the exercises we were on the go constantly rather than waiting for things to be explained to us. Good to actually feel like I've done exercise! :)

Back home, I decided to have my 3rd banana of the day. Hence the title "Hidden Bananas" - I do love blending/mashing bananas into things to provide texture and/or sweetness. I hardly ever eat bananas on their own, unless covered in peanut butter! So my 3rd banana concoction of the day - Banana Sweet "Cream". I actually weighed the ingredients this time, and reduced the amount of peanut butter and honey to 20g each. It still tasted just as good :)

Yum. This was thicker than last time too, no doubt as a result of less peanut butter and honey. I wasn't too hungry after circuits, so this is a great way of getting some calories and protein in me without too much bulk. Pretty much the opposite of the, considerably lower in calories but hugely greater in volume, green smoothie I had this morning! Both delicious and both have a place in my "healthier" diet, yey!

Right, enough waffling! Time to give Liam his laptop back. I got a text on Friday saying my laptop had been fixed, but, despite the fact that when it broke they managed to pick it up the next day, they're not going to return it to me until this coming Friday!! Why does it take 7 days to return it?!! Grrr. I just hope it really is fixed when they do bring it back!

Finally, some advice... When you do exercise classes in the evening, what do you usually eat before/after? Circuits is 7pm-8pm and we usually eat at 6pm, so I was really hungry before we went (despite having microwave oat cake at 4.30pm) but by the time I got home I didn't really feel like eating anything. I think next week I might try to prepare something else before I go to circuits so I can just grab food from the fridge, but any other ideas would be appreciated!

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!!