inspiration gap

So I love breakfast and you’ve seen me do all kinds of crazy things with dinner this month but lunch… lunch just makes me tired.

I want to eat something that satisfies me and thus doesn’t cause me to snack unceasingly for the rest of the day because honestly I am a skinny chick now but like so many I’d be lying if I said it’s because I effortlessly eat what I want when I’m hungry and instantly stop when satisfied.

Thus, it is just better for me to just eat and then stop and be done with it and not be nagged with hunger. Which is obviously easier said than done. Plus I feel compelled to include a vegetable at lunch… and it’s usually at a boring time of day so I kind of want it to be a larger plate with multiple flavors, rather than something small and quickly eaten… And I usually work out in the morning which means I want cold food afterwards…

Tiring! Just tiring!

Thursday’s result was this sorry thing.

A muffin. Celery sticks with the last of the bluefish spread (well that is genuinely delicious). I mean, it tasted good, but of course I was hungry two hours later. In my defense, I was planning an afternoon trip to HMart and there are usually insane quantities of free samples but OBVIOUSLY since I was COUNTING on that there were NONE TO BE SEEN.

I’d been reading Live Laugh Eat so I made a sort of Allie-ish snack. Toast (Trader Joe’s spelt bread) with mashed banana, almond butter, and cinnamon; and apple slices with more cinnamon.

Rounded out with Light ‘n Fit, which is as unnatural as they come and I’m embarrassed to like as much as I do. It is an occasional guilty pleasure.

Today’s was also pretty lame.

 

Leftover tomato-corn pie, yogurt with cinnamon and walnuts.

On the bright side, lunch was enjoyed with my latest fun HMart purchase:

I loooooooove ginseng tea! I drank scads of it in Asia (well I drank scads of tea in general in Asia and was introduced to lots of fun new varieties- milk tea, unhealthy but oh so tasty; date tea; plum tea…. mm!).

Anyway, seeing it browsing through HMart (one of my favorite pasttimes) and it seemed like fate because just in the past few days I’ve been reading about all its benefits- it gives you a nice pep (without the crash, unlike caffeine) and it can also (and I apologize- I read this in a blog and commented on it but I cannot remember where!) help stabilize blood sugar. The person who wrote about that particular benefit had PCOS, as do I, and in general my family seems to have blood sugar issues- seemingly as do I, since I get super angry and mean when I haven’t eaten in a few hours- so it seemed like it’d be a great purchase.

Beautiful amber loveliness!

I know that lunch looks too small but there is the small issue of the presence of these in my house:

I am OUT OF CONTROL on these. They are too delicious for their own good. I first raved about Veggie Crunchers here and if anything since then the love has intensified.

They were particularly tempting pre-lunch because I had gotten back from the gym and was maybe having lunch with a friend but it was getting to be like 1:30 and she was not callin! So I was “just snacking” because I might still go to lunch… and then I just gave up. And ate lunch. And then ate even more veggie crunchers.

And then there are these:

 

That was FULL. YESTERDAY.

I mean, my mom and my sister like blueberries too, but I ate a laaaaaaaaaaaarge proportion of them and feel so greedy!

In general, I’ve been going a little nutso on the nibble-able summer fruit.

As you all have probably figured out, the Unpaid Internship From Hell didn’t work out (note “unpaid”- if I’m going to suffer and do bitch work I might as well have an income from it) and I’ve been job hunting like it’s my job (which, uh, it has been) since but I’ve sort of come to the conclusion that it’s not going to happen. Since I start my real job (Americorps) in August.

So there has been lots of sitting around my house, being bored, having nothing to do but menu plan and cook and eat eat eat eat eat eat. Which is trying for anyone, I think, but particularly me because like so many women (and food bloggers, I think) my relationship with food is… a curious one, excessively rooted in calorie mathematics and the like. But since everyone I  know now reads this  blog, that’s all my opining for the moment.

Questions for my readers:

Are there times when your relationship with food is less-than-stellar based on life circumstances?

Have you ever gotten in a food rut?

And finally

Any fun lunch inspiration ideas?