the value of preparation

Today I ate good food and didn’t have to do any “cooking”. There are times when I get the itch to cook, but today, the first day with my campers, was definitely not one of them. Yay for already grilled, already baked, already dressed, already etc.’d food.

To rewind, following classy Sunday Dinner, I had a classy Dessert Plate. Cause why should one have to choose between banana cake and red velvet? They were small slices. Use the salad fork to gauge scale.

Breakfast this morning was quite delicious.

 

Half of one of the yummy biscuits from last night, shmeared with lingonberry preserves

And a bowl 'o shredded wheat, milk, and naner and strawberries. I generally hate mushy cereal, but looooooooove mushy shredded wheat.

I then lovingly prepared a gorgeous lunch, also using the lovely ingredients in my home.

So then the cat got the stupid sandwich and I had to yell at him and throw him outside and cut off a chunk that was contaminated. Then I went ahead and left the whole thing on my front stoop, aaaaaaaargh!

So here is a beautiful lunch that I will be eating TOMORROW:

In the background is yogurt and apple (and, incidentally, our kitchen scale!). In the foreground is a beeeyoootiful sandwich- leftover roast chicken, avocado and lettuce on a whole wheat pita. Man, I was so stoked for this lunch. Stupid, stupid cat. Him distracting me led to the forgetting.

So instead I got lunch at work. I work in Section 8 housing… not a lot of gourmet delis about. I went to the Giant across the street and got their salad bar. Actually, though, they had beets. I love beets. That was nice.

Dinner was leftovers. Leftovers are the BEST!

Spinach/beet greens pies. This is from round 2 of the pie making, when I was out of the horrible dough and just started rolling stuff up in phyllo.

They were tasty! Check out the oniony, herby greeny innards:

Leftover barbecued meatballs:

From now on I am totally always grilling meatballs! They were smoky and moist and flavorful! I swear, grilling is the perfect cooking technique. You impart TONS of flavor while adding NO fat (in fact, you lose some to the fire!)

Finally, rice salad left over from the 4th of July cookout. Rice, peppers, red and green onions, currants, peas, herby vinaigrette. It is my mom’s default cookout/picnic contribution. It’s good!

All together:

This is really only a teeny preview of what I ate. Add another spinach pie and a half, another meatball, and tonnnnnn more rice salad. I was just SO HUNGRY! I hadn’t eaten since lunch at 12:30 (and dinner was at 7), I’d been chasing kids around all day, everything tasted good… I just decided I wanted rather than to be not super hungry anymore I wanted to be filled and satisfied. I am still not 100% good about eating intuitively—I find myself unintentionally still in diet and calorie counting mode. It felt really good to eat a tasty dinner and eat til I was good and satisfied. No, it wasn’t whole grains. No, it wasn’t super lean beef. But it was real food, and it fed me!