green beans

Until this year I hadn’t been to a wedding in quite some time, but now it seems like every weekend someone else is either having their wedding, getting engaged, hosting a shower/bachelorette, or talking about their wedding. Saturday Isaac’s cousins got hitched in Norfolk on the water. We decided to head up early to get a little beach (bay) time in before all the shenanigans started at 6:00.

After hitting up the gym, packing, and dropping off Olive at a friends and then we were on our way. I still haven’t eaten a full breakfast (just a slice of toast) so I brought some greens in a cup along for the ride.

I got these samples from the nice folks at Amazing Grass a while ago. I tried the All Natural Green SuperFood mixed with water and to put it frankly, it wasn’t my cup of tea. It simply didn’t taste good. Even if something is really healthy, it has to taste good or else I’m not going to eat it – end of story. There are way too many healthy foods that taste good to eat foods that don’t So, I put the rest of the samples in a kitchen draw and kind of forgot about them. Yesterday I was getting ready to make a smoothie for breakfast and realized I was out of chocolate protein powde r so I thought I would give the Amazing Grass Chocolate GREEN SuperFood a try.

I made a purple smoothie.

1/2 cup unsweetened almond milk
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup of frozen blueberries
1 frozen banana
1 tablespoon chia seeds
3 pieces of ice
Amazing Grass Chocolate GREEN SuperFood

The smoothie ended up kind of looking like tar but I was okay with it because it tasted awesome. I could taste the SuperFood powder, but it wasn’t over powering and the sweetness of the smoothie worked to my advantage. I think I found a good way to put my Amazing Grass samples to use. Score!

I also packed some good reading material. Oxygen, a cookbook Isaac bought for me from an auction at school, and The Whole Truth – an awesome book/cookbook Isaac’s mom gave me this autographed copy after receiving it at the Institute of Integrative Nutrition.

The Whole Truth is probably one of my top 3 cookbooks. I’ve had this two part eating guide and cookbook for over 2 years now and I absolutely love it. Andrea Beaman, a graduate from IIN and the Kushi Institue, is both a Holistic Health Counselor and a natural chef. She sums up in about 100 pages how to eat for your health. Her eating guide is a quick read with brief chapters like Seasonal Sustenance, Sugar Plum Fairies, Pickle-licious Food and The Sea Inside. She explains why each each category of food is important and ends the chapter with Tasty Tidbits, the key points to take away. These are quite helpful because without rereading the book you can easily remind yourself of the key points again. There’s literally so much good information in the book and all the recipes I have tried were easy to make and have turned out great. A few the recipes I have posted on my blog have been inspired by this cookbook- off the top of my head I know that the Brown Rice Porridge and the Brown Rice Krispiees were. PLUS, there’s even a recipe for a banana icecream with walnuts, very similar to the recipe for the banana softserve that Gena made famous.

After some quality car time, we finally arrived to the hotel, lounged around and then got ready for the wedding.

Here we are, all dolled up before the wedding. It was a Jewish influenced ceremony (the Bride is Jewish) with a Chuppah and the breaking of the wine glass- simply beautiful. The groom was a big softy and was crying even before the bride walked down the aisle- so sweet. I can’t say anything because I was crying too.

After the ceremony, the party begin with cocktail hour. I had a glass of pinot noir before being seated and then moved on to black russians (kahula and vodka) for the rest of the night. These are so good. Almost too good, considering I can’t remember how many I had….

The reception was very well planned and the food came out soon after cocktail hour.

To start- a house salad with raspberry vinegarette.

The entree had both salmon and spinach stuffed chicken, roasted potatoes and green beans. I gave my chicken to Isaac and ate the rest and it was quite delicious.

For dessert, of course there was cake. I’m not a huge cake person, more of an ice cream girl really, but I was feeling the cake last night so I snagged a piece. So glad I did, it was super moist yellow cake with raspberry filling- awesome!

Here’s one of the bride (Isaac’s cousin, Rachel) and the Groom (Daniel) cutting the cake.

There was also a groom’s cake, which is too cute not to share. This cake sums up the groom very well- he is German and loves all things technical, namely computer programming (notice the linux penguin) “Ich Lieve Dich” is I love you in German.

They had a really great band so Isaac and I spend most of the time on the dance floor, only breaking for crazy pictures like this.

It was a lovely night! We woke up this morning and my tummy wasn’t feeling so good from all the drinks. I hit up the hotel gym for some detox. I did 30 minutes on the treadmill and about 15 minutes of arms. It felt good to sweat out some of the alcohol still in my system- gross!

We ate brunch at the hotel and then hopped back in the car for the drive home. And now, we’re home sweet home with Ms. Olive.

I hope everyone had a lovely weekend. Enjoy the rest of your Sunday.

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I can’t wait for this weekend- one of my best friends (and roomie for 3 years) from college is coming to stay with me! I really miss having girl friends around. Since I’ve moved in with Isaac here, I’ve seriously been lacking in that department. It’s hard to make friends outside of work, and everyone at my work is quite a bit older than me. I joined meetup.com so I can try to meet some more people…. I’ll keep you all posted on my progress. Do any of you guys have this issue?

I had the norm this morning (besides oats that is) of kashi go lean, 1/4 scoop of choc protein power, USAM, 1/2 banana sliced nicely, and 2 strawberries.

I had packed a salad for lunch because I had a noon webinar on Emotional Branding at work. Well the office was buying lunch and asked at the last minute if I wanted to order. I couldn’t pass up free food so I ordered vegetable soup…. perfect to go along with my healthy salad right? Well, the restaurant was out of veggie soup so they got me tomato instead.. It had a huge glob of cheese on the top (which I took off) but there was still some cheese in the soup itself and it was really creamy. I still finshed off the container. Curisoity got the best of me and I decided to call the restaurant and ask what they put in the soup… should I really have been that concerned?? I found out it was cheddar cheese and the soup came from a can but was made with milk (not sure what kind.. probably whole, considering how thick and creamy the soup was.) I really just wanted to know because I am tracking my calories on www.dailyplate.com. This is my first time really using it, besides randomly looking up the nutritional data for something every once in a while. I normally just have a food journal where I write down the foods I ate without really counting the cals. Well, Livestrong lured me in by suggesting I could in an iphone and now I’m kind of into it … we shall see how long it lasts. Isaac’s Dad stopped by Whole Food’s on his way over to pick up some eats. Isaac told him to get me something vegetarian without a lot of cheese. He did a great job and picked out the Vegan General Tso’s- apparently the guy at the prepared foods counter told him it was a best seller. He also got me some stuff portabello mushrooms, but I was a being a snack machine (I ate a 100 cal pack of cheddar chex mix, raisins, rice cracker mix, and some dried fruit) after I got home from work and kind of ruined my appetite so I decided to save those for later.

I had a small bowl of the gen tso’s, green beans, and cous cous. I can see why this stuff is a best seller. It has great texture for a vegetarian meat and is lathered in a tasty sauce.

So I’ve totally been drooling over the Fitnessista’s macaroons…me and everyone else in the blogoshephere, right?

I even went as far as buying a dehydrator simply to try her recipe. I decided against it, but I couldn’t take it any longer so I found a recipe for Coconut Almond Macaroons that didn’t require a dehydrator and went to work.

The recipe called for dehydrated cane juice- that was a new one for me, but I found it at the local groc and made 20 of these little gems and they were delish. Each macaroon has approx. 48 calories- awesome nutrition facts. I ate 5 tonight, just to test them out.

Don’t forget to check out these giveaways: For the Love of Oats is celebrating her blog’s one year anniversary and Heather at Hangry Pants is giving away some delish granola.