Recent Eats: Burgers, Pizzas, Brunch, and a Picnic

What would I do with this blog if I didn't like to eat as much as I do? That question might be silly because 1) I do love to eat and I hope that never goes away, and 2) this blog wouldn't exist in the first place if I didn't enjoy eating. Just a thought. I don't know. Moving on! Here's a big - but fun, and worth the read! - compilation of most of the blog-worthy, inspiring things I've tasted in the last month-ish. Bon appetit!

A turkey burger on a whole-wheat bun from Sylvester's Burgers in Los Osos is probably one of the foods I'll almost crave. It's huge and the zucchini fries are an absolute must, so I like to let myself get hungrier than usual so I can enjoy it all because who takes a couple bites of a burger home? Maybe you, but not me. Oh, and all of it tastes much better when eaten in good company! 

A random snack plate from a day during finals week last quarter when I knew I needed food but didn't know what I wanted. Some fresh veggies and hummus, Rumiano white cheddar cheese (spendy, but tasty), and a handful of Hippeas sounded pretty good. Easy and satisfying!

Homemade whole-wheat pizzas (Trader Joe's dough)  with Mom and Dad when I was at home for spring break, and when they still lived in SoCal (they've moved back to Minnesota now, if you missed that post). If burgers are the first food I'll almost always crave, pizza is a close second. Good news is both of those foods allow for plenty of veggies, proteins, carbs, and fats! Wow, what a balanced life. 

Dinner and my go-to beverage with Jeannette when I drove up to NorCal to visit her for a weekend. We made turkey meatballs, zucchini meatballs with an avocado pesto sauce, and whole-grain toast with hummus and Healthade to drink. Of course, we wanted to save room for dessert - then ate it too quickly to take pictures of it - which was my cherry garcia cookie skillet. Yummaaaa. Love and miss you, Jeannette!

To-go lunch packed for one of my long days on campus. I've been all about pasta salad lately (I can't remember the last time I had anything on hand that wasn't Banza pasta - by far my favorite!), so I make a huge batch each week and scoop some out when I'm packing lunch for the day. This one is my pesto pasta salad recipe, but I've also used hummus, Tessemae's dressing, and Primal Kitchen dressing, too. Plenty of options!

Mmmm, my favorite weekday breakfast as of late - a big green smoothie made of frozen banana, frozen zucchini, spinach, avocado, Ka'Chava Tribe Chocolate protein, some cacao powder for extra chocolateyness, and a juicy date for extra sweetness, aaaaaand all of it topped with some of the best packaged granola I've had, Gr8nola (thanks Erica!). Smoothies are usually the easiest, tastiest, and fastest way for my muscles to get the nutrients they need in the morning after I workout and before I leave for class. 

Pizza! Again! This one is from Blast 825 Taproom - they offer $5 pizzas for students on Tuesday nights. It's a tough decision between $5 pizza and taco Tuesday, but pizza wins more often than not when I don't feel like cooking/want something I rarely or never make at home for myself. My favorite is barbecue sauce + grilled chicken + veggies + light mozzarella + goat cheese and red pepper flakes and basil on top. Damn good, my friends. 

An unplanned dinner out with a couple friends at a local Mediterranean restaurant (Petra, for those of you in SLO). Everyone has been telling me to try this place, and since I love Mediterranean food, I was certainly excited! Did it "wow" me? No. But was it still enjoyable? Yes, mostly because I, again, had good company :) I ordered the grilled chicken shawarma with pita (I think it's made in house and it's deeeeelicious) and we all dipped everything we could in as many dips as possible before looking weird.  

OKAY. This was incredibly simple and even more incredibly tasty. I combined the last of my tempeh skillet leftovers with some roasted Japanese sweet potatoes and some mixed greens on the side, all of it topped with feta, and promised myself I'd make this more often. MMMM. Love me some plants. And sweet potatoes (which are plants, I realize that, but they deserve their own sentence fragment). 

An assortment of snacks and wine for a friend's birthday picnic! You can't see the sunset in this picture, and this post isn't about the sunset, but - my, oh myyyyy was it beautiful. Anyway, we LOVE cheese and crackers and other snacks one would think of with wine, so we went all out tonight. No holding back, especially on a birthday! Brie, Gouda, cheddar, hummus and sliced carrots and cucumbers, grapes and berries, crackers and crackers and more crackers, plus bacon-wrapped dates (did you hear that? bacon. wrapped. dates.). Oh, and sangria and a couple other whites and reds. Lots of laughter, too. Like, even more laughter than cheese (that's a lot).  

Cookbook cookies! If you're unaware, I'm teaming up with a friend/fellow Cal Poly student to write a cookbook (technically an ebook, but potAYto, potAHto, ya' know?). Every week, she and I meet up for an all-day cooking, baking, and photographing session. It's an absolute blast. I couldn't imagine trying to do this on my own - not only would it be physically challenging, but emotionally/mentally challenging as well. Having a partner in this project is a blessing! Oh, and these are salted chocolate chunk tahini cookies - the recipe will be in the book, so get excited!

Another version of my favorite smoothie, but this time sans granola (because sometimes it fills me up beyond comfortable-full) and in a measuring cup (because it was laying around from when I made coffee earlier and wasn't technically "dirty", soooo... yeah). I added double the cacao powder compared to the recipe earlier in this post and have been doing so ever since. Extra chocolate flavor is as much of a "must" as brushing your teeth everyday. Not an exaggeration. 

Oh. My. Word. This was what dreams are made of. Grace and I treated ourselves to a fancy Sunday brunch at Lido, which is a restaurant inside one of the resorts in Shell Beach. A friend of mine works there and always talks about how good the food is - and he mentioned mimosas, so Grace was in immediately, with or without the good food. She and I split a scrambled egg dish and asked for sweet potato fries on the side instead of the home fries, and a half-order of the french toast. And it was sunny and 75. And the service was fantastic and so were the mimosas. And the view was perfect. We'll be back. :) 

My snack bag for long days on campus consists of a lunch, which is almost always some sort of salad, and plenty of snacks - fruit, a granola/protein bar, veggies, maybe some popcorn or chips, and one of these PaleoValley turkey or beef sticks. I can't decide whether I like turkey or beef more, but I do know I'm definitely a fan of both. Plus, they're pasture-raised and grass-fed!

Last but never the least, here's another snack-bag favorite. When I don't have time during the week to make these protein bites, RX Bars have my back. Some of the flavors are a bit too chewy for me, but the I've found this flavor and the dark chocolate to be just about perfect. And I like that egg whites are the protein source - it gives my diet that much more variety, since I already include protein powder in my smoothies a few times a week. RX Bars, y'all rock my snack-loving socks off. Keep it up. 

So, there you have it - another round-up of eats. I hope you like reading these because I like eating all the food and writing about it! 

Recent Eats: Cookies in Class, Lunches and Dinners on the go, and Expo West Eats

I hope you came prepared for the amount of food pictures your about to encounter. As the title implies, these are most of my recent eats - meals and snacks I think are fun and exciting and delicious and worthy of a spot here on the blog. I'd bet you'd also be surprised to find out just how popular posts about my day-to-day eats are. Shocking, guys. Shocking. 

For starters, these are kolachkis - a Polish cookie made with cream cheese and jam, pretty much. The dough is delicate and creamy, and the jam is so sweet. We made them in one of my nutrition classes for an event on campus - over 1,200 cookies made! 

This is what breakfast usually looks like - waffles are rare, but when they do happen, mmmmm. I think I used a Bob's Red Mill whole-grain mix here and added in some chocolate chips, and ate it with some Greek yogurt (this is my favorite) and sliced banana for a post-workout/pre-long-day-of-classes breakfast! 

This... this was good. A bowl of roasted spaghetti squash mixed with marinara sauce and chicken, topped with steamed kale, goat cheese, and cilantro (pretty much the only herb I regularly have in my fridge). Spaghetti seems to be one of those stereotypical college meals - easy to throw together, inexpensive, etc., yet it's one that rarely hits my plate. That just might have to change after a bowl like this. 

One of my favorite lunches, not only for the taste (and nutrition, duh) but also for the eeeeeease of preparation. Those are beet and black bean burgers made with ground Hippeas instead of flour because I'm so resourceful like that over a bed of mixed greens, and alongside some chopped veggies and avocado. And yes, that is barbecue sauce as "dressing" - don't knock it 'til you try it. If I'm feeling hungry, I'll add a hard-boiled egg or two. Protein!

More spaghetti squash because those things are pretty much never-ending sometimes (or so it seems). Here, I made a small dinner of spaghetti squash with a serving of my Sheet-Pan Chicken, Chickpeas, and Veggies and topped it off with just a tiny bit - sense the sarcasm there? - of sharp white cheddar cheese. S O  G O O D. 

I'm on campus for somewhere around 8-10 hours on Mondays and Wednesdays, so I make darn sure to bring pllllllenty of food. Snacks are good, but I don't usually feel satisfied (especially on long days) off of crackers and fruits and nuts and whatever else I consider a snack food, which is why I pack actual substantial meals like these. For lunch, I threw together a couple items from Hungry Root - cooked quinoa, sauteed brussel sprouts, lemongrass tofu, and some Thai peanut sauce with greens. For dinner, I roasted a hefty white sweet potato (so much better than the orange one) with a Bilinski chicken sausage, steamed some kale, and packed it all up with a little hummus. Easily one of my favorite weeknight meals. 

Aaaaand for another weeknight favorite - pulled pork sandwiches! For real though, I could not stop thinking about pulled pork for like a week until this. My friends probably went with me just to shut me up. These are from Old San Luis BBQ and are, by a long-shot, the only sandwich that can make my mouth water when I'm in anatomy lab staring at muscles on a cadaver. We all had a pulled pork sandwich and then split some sweet potato and regular fries. The thought of all of this is now making my mouth water, so let's move on. 

Ahh, vino. Call me cheap, but I LOVE this Charles Shaw white zinfandel. Apparently, it's known as "two-buck Chuck" in the wonderful land of Trader Joe's. Whatever. It's friggin' good and I'm not in the position to drop $12 on a bottle of wine. 

Are you as tired of seeing my roasted sweet potatoes as you are of hearing about classes? I hope you aren't tired yet of either. My parents graciously gifted me with a Lodge Cast Iron skillet for Christmas, so take a guess at the vehicle in which I've been cooked e v e r y t h i n g lately. Don't ask me how it's done, but the skillet just makes sweet potato wedges so perfectly crispy-on-the-outside and tender-on-the-inside. Sometimes I eat just the potato if it's a big one or I'm not hungry enough for an entire meal, and other times I love it with chicken or eggs or whatever I have. 

Round 1 of enchiladas! Success? Ehh. There's a first time for everything and this was most definitely and clearly my first time making my own enchiladas. With the veggies and the chicken all cooked, and all the other fix-ins laid out, I still found myself confuzzled about what to put in first, how to layer and roll, etc. Good thing enchiladas taste so dang good, otherwise I wouldn't be very motivated to try again. I'll have a recipe up here soon - perfection takes time, my friends. 

After four years of taking pictures of my food, one might think that stopping what I'm doing to snap a quick picture wouldn't feel awkward at all. One would be wrong, in that case - it's still awkward. Anyway, this is a snack plate from a friend's bridal shower! Eeeep I know a bride I know a bride I know a bride! We spent the day just hanging out and giggling and eating and sharing memories of little Phoebe back in her single days. Then I went home to study because... well, you know why. 

Oh, and we drank mimosas! These aren't the best pre-study beverage, but I'd still recommend - balance, right?

Remember those long days on campus I told you about? Those are when Perfect Bars feel like my best friend. My class schedule throws off what would normally be dinner time for me, so I end up eating something during what you might call "happy hour" on the weekend but is more like "stress hour" or "cram hour" before anatomy lecture. And because I want something sweet after dinner/something to munch on in class, I bring one of these. Favorite? Ummm... probably the Dark Chocolate Chip Peanut Butter OR either of the new flavors. Worth every penny. 

Coffee is so much more satisfying than tea, in my opinion, but when it's 3 PM and my wiser instincts remind me that coffee right now will keep me awake when I'd rather not be later tonight, I reach for tea usually in the form of kombucha. And when kombucha is too expensive or just doesn't sound fantastic, I reach for this! Tazo is my go-to and this bottle of iced tea was above and beyond any other iced tea I've had before - sweet, but not like juice or dessert in a bottle, you know? 

Speaking of dessert, I've been so into little bites of chocolate lately. My mom bought me a couple of these from Taza Chocolate and I think I found love at first bite. The texture is so unlike any other chocolate I've had - it's almost like you can feel like sugar granules, but yet the sweetness isn't overpowering. I can't describe it, so you should just try it.

The people around this table mean so much more to me than any food ever could. We all met at last year's Expo West and bonded unbelievably well, so a reunion this year was, like, a given. JJ, Alayna, Connie, Winnie, and a couple new faces - Jeannette and Kelly - and I shared a bunch of food from Sage Vegan Bistro in LA and left absolutely stuffed. Everything was delicious and I couldn't have asked for more! 

Less than an hour into my day at Expo West, I was already searching for a kombucha - a clear representation of how overwhelming and exhausting of a day was ahead of me. I met the people behind Humm Kombucha and could've easily just hung out with them for the rest of the day - hilarious, welcoming, genuine, and makers of some of the best kombucha I've tasted! I will certainly be stocking up on this stuff every week. 

The next morning, I dropped Jeannette and Kelly off at the airport before the sun was even up, so I packed a snack-ish breakfast  - banaynay and one of the best peanut butters everrrrrr. It wasn't the easiest to eat while driving, but I made it work. 

And when I came home to a ten-feet-tall pile of homework and studying to tackle, I was beyond thankful for leftovers of the pasta dish I made just before I left for Expo - cashew tomato sauce with Banza chickpea shells (pretty much the only pasta I buy for myself) and sautéed red bell pepper, topped with fresh basil and some sharp white cheddar. Comfort food meets nutritious food meets college-friendly food.  

Okay, last one I promise. Here's another stupidly easy weeknight dinner - roasted broccoli and red onion (season with whatever you like), baked chicken breast (thighs are still my preference), and whole-grain bread with herb cream cheese and some avocado. My weeknight dinners usually involve roasting because it allows me to toss everything in the oven for 40-ish minutes and leave it there while I squeeze in some time to study.