The Food

Woke up later than normal so no run for me.
Breakfast 8:45am
Blueberries, hemp waffle, egg with cheese & hot sauce. Since I’ve been drinking a lot of coffee lately decided to drink green tea.

Midmorning I did short 20 minute treadmill run.

Noonish. Feeling rather hungry. Decide to have tuna salad. Discover I have no tuna. Have snack of 3 dried plums and string cheese stick to tide me over until I figure out lunch.

1pm lunch
Farro with a touch of miso, green beans, garbanzo beans and sunflower seeds. Think I ate too much as I am now feeling sleepy.

Afternoon. Decide to watch a DVD (Tooth Fairy) with kids. End up eating some dark chocolate, chocolate chips (not pictured), and hummus with pretzels.

Late dinner. After 7pm. I have zero desire to make dinner. Son wants Chili’s. Not my first choice but okay. Nothing really appeals to me. Decide on the Fire-grilled Corn Guacamole, which hubby and I shared. Not bad but I probably ate too many tortilla chips. Also have the chicken and green chile soup. Tasted OK but way, way, way too salty. Ate some of daughter’s mandarin oranges and a few bites of her chicken strips, which were basically terrible. The batter on them was very odd, was like the beer batter on fish. Hubby got fajitas and I snuck a few bites of the onions and peppers, steak, chicken and shrimp.

And then came dessert. Chocolate molten lava cake. Yummy. I ate too much of it and felt so stuffed afterwards.

I was surprised that I didn’t enjoy the dinner all that much. I used to like Chili’s but now it just doesn’t taste that good to me.

Running day! Woke up @ 4am and had some English Breakfast tea with Chobani 0% blueberry yogurt that was mixed with raw steel cut oats and wheat germ.

After run, I quickly took a shower so that I could zip off to Starbucks and grab an iced coffee before hubby left for work. I think I’m addicted to the iced coffees now. Then I had 2nd breakfast of hemp waffle, blueberries and egg cooked in microwave with ham and shredded cheese.

11:30am lunch
Felt very hungry. My blood sugar was 79. I have leftover Ihop pancakes in the fridge and felt very tempted to eat them. But instead I decided to the leftover wild rice & green beans. I added some walnuts to it, very tasty. Also had half a Granny Smith apple and string cheese that is past its Best By date of June 29.

Around 1:30pm gave kids lunch of chicken nuggets. Ate six myself with a little barbecue sauce.

Right now it’s 2:30pm. I am kind of craving chocolate. And feel sleepy. High blood sugar or tired due to not enough sleep?

4:30pm snack
1 string cheese stick, 3 dried plums (formerly known as prunes). Only 2 shown. By now you should know how I roll — I often eat more than I had planned. Not good I know!

Anyway, I’m still hungry and pondering what to have for dinner. Possibly teriyaki pineapple meatballs. The cupboards are getting a bit bare around here. Need to hit Costco very soon. Tonight I’m going to my book club meeting at Starbucks where I will most definitely be having another iced coffee. Maybe a nibble of something.

By the way, I’m drafting this using the WordPress app on my iPhone. I think this may be the way to go. I wasn’t using it before because I didn’t think I could add photos but I figured out how.

At some point, I decided to have some chocolate. This is dark chocolate I bought at Aldi. 85% cocoa. Delicious.

Dinner 5ish
Kimchi fried rice & teriyaki meatballs. Then I had a package of Fuji apple crisps.

Book club 7pm
Venti decaf iced coffee with cream plus a chocolate mini doughnut.

Breakfast

Kids wanted to have breakfast at Ihop because they wanted to try out the Minion-inspired menu items. (Minions are from the animated movie Despicable Me.) Unfortunately, they were out of CinniMinions (cinnamon sugar covered dough bites) that daughter wanted.

Anyway, I had the Loaded Minion Taters (tater tots with cheese sauce, bacon, jalapeños, shredded cheese, tomatoes and sour cream). I love tater tots. Love love love them. But I haven’t had one in months. Maybe years. Anyway, I managed to avoid most of the sour cream and didn’t eat all the eggs or Loaded Minion Taters. Most, but not all. Of course, I had coffee and even added some half and half. Son got the Minion Berry Pancakes (lemon pancakes with berry topping and whipped cream). I ate some of them because he couldn’t finish them. Basically it was a cake.

After Ihop we ran a couple errands and I felt the overwhelming desire for a Starbucks iced coffee.

Lunch was some Ihop leftovers–hash browns, 2 eggs, bacon.

Also had a few chicken nuggets that I had made for kids. Think I had 3.

In the evening we all went swimming, which made us all hungry. We ended up eating out. I got a turkey sandwich (turkey, cucumbers, havarti cheese, mayo). Ate 1/2 slice of the pizza kids got. Without thinking about it, I removed the cheese because I’m so used to doing that for the kids now. I must try to remember to order pizza without cheese. Also had one bite of hubby’s Italian sandwich. Drank water. After dinner there was talk of going out for ice cream but I suggested we not do that. And surprisingly everyone was OK with that decision. Probably because the kids had already eaten plenty of crap during the day.

Hmm, just previewed this post. Pics are all over the place. My apologies. I don’t feel like fixing it.

Yesterday I felt very tempted to give up this photo food diary. But I think it is helpful to reflect upon what I’ve eaten so I guess I’ll keep trying. I won’t be perfect. There will be food I will forget to photograph, or be too lazy to photograph but I’ll do my best.

Breakfast #1 Prerun

Yogurt & tea

tea, yogurt

Breakfast #2 postrun

Egg omelet: 2 eggs, spinach, sun dried tomatoes, roasted red pepper, some cheese. White whole wheat toast, which didn’t taste very good at all. I also had coffee but forgot to include that in the pic.

egg thing, toast

Lunch

Wild rice leftovers with spinach and walnuts. I was planning on eating 4 chicken nuggets but only ended up having 2. One of the kids wanted more nuggets so I sacrificed 2 of mine. We ate the nuggets with some Sweet Baby Ray’s barbecue sauce embellished with some Frank’s Red Hot sauce.

chicken nuggets, wild rice, walnuts, spinach

Also had some miso soup, which I added to some wild rice.

miso soup

Afternoon

Wanted chocolate! Finished off the candy bar that I bought when we went to the movies recently.

chocolate

Made kimchi fried rice for hubby’s dinner and couldn’t resist eating some myself. White rice, eek!

kimchi fried rice

More chocolate! Just kept grabbing little handfuls from the bag in the fridge.

more chocolate

Dinner?

Hummus on a multigrain Wasa cracker.

hummus on Wasa crispbread

Also had some chocolate ice cream at some point in the evening. It was single serve size of 4 oz but I shared with daughter so I probably had more like 2 oz.

I’m finishing this post up on Thursday so I can’t really remember what else, if anything, I ate on Tuesday.

4:20am breakfast prerun
1/2 Chobani 0% strawberry yogurt with raw steel cut oats, wheat germ & the last crumbs of homemade granola; English Breakfast tea

yogurt & tea

7:30am postrun
After I ate my yogurt I felt very tired and ended up taking a short nap. Went running at 6am. Had good run but when I got home I felt a little shaky so I mixed up some chocolate milk.

chocolate milk

8am breakfast #2
After a shower I made myself a sandwich with 1/2 a bagel, cream cheese, egg, ham & spinach. Plus a few shakes of hot sauce. Ate this with my morning coffee. Was actually kind of craving an Egg McMuffin but this would have to do.

egg & bagel sandwich

Lunch

1/2 Granny Smith apple, string cheese, hummus mixed with baby spinach, carrots, sun dried tomatoes & roasted red peppers, Dr Kracker crackers. Plus some pita chips that are not in the photo. The string cheese has a June 29 or so date on it. I don’t think it’s going to kill me though, right?

apple, crackers, hummus

Also had some miso soup leftover from kids’ lunch.

leftover miso soup

Snack

Fruit & Nut mix with a piece of Hershey’s Special Dark chocolate. But I kept eating more & more of the Fruit & Nuts from the bag. And I also ate some pita chips. I feel like I was snacking nonstop while I was preparing dinner. Late afternoon I seem to get the munchies.

chocolate, Fruit & Nuts

Dinner

Green beans, shrimp, wild rice. Ended up eating more rice than what is shown in the bowl. I just kept eating. And I even ate some leftover udon noodles.

green beans, shrimp, wild rice

After dinner, the kids and I finished off the rest of the birthday ice cream cake.

I seem to start the day off okay but then it deteriorates into a frenzy of snacking and eating. Am I not eating enough during the day? Do I just get too bored in the afternoon & evening? This is something I need to figure out.

And I’m feeling ambivalent about continuing this. It’s very time consuming for me. Perhaps I just haven’t hit upon a good workflow. I find the whole uploading photos process to be very tedious. Maybe I need to find a good wireless iPhone photo transfer app. But I want to find something that preserves the EXIF data. I like to have the date info and such. I’ve been using SmugShot to transfer the photos but all the date info gets lost. Maybe I should just try emailing to my account.

7am breakfast

1/2 peach Chobani yogurt with wheat germ, homemade granola, sliced nectarines. Skipped coffee because I was thinking of going back to sleep. Went to bed late and woke up at 5:30am.

breakfast

11am

Being the amazing stellar mother that I am I let the kids have leftover ice cream cake for breakfast, which they ate rather late. I ate their leftovers. Then I had my lunch of a sort of frittata thing — 2 eggs, some whole wheat spaghetti, baby spinach leaves, sun dried tomatoes, leftover broccoli and cheese. At this point I did have my usual black coffee but I guess I forgot to get a pic.

leftovers

egg thing

around 1pm

Kids wanted a pizza for lunch. Once again, I am in the running for mother of the year as I heat up a frozen pizza for them. But they don’t like the cheese so I have to remove the cheese. Usually I throw it away but today I ate it! Not all but most. And I had some pita chips with it. In a way, I reconstructed my own pizza I guess. Yes, I should have measured out the chips first. But I did not.

cheese from pizza

pita chips

3pm

After lunch, kids and I went to see Despicable Me. We stopped at the store first and picked up some candy (this has been a very nutritionally awful day, I know) and shared popcorn at the theater. I had one mini Crunch bar, one mini Twix and part of a giant Special Dark bar.

movie popcorn

candy

Sorry the candy pic is so blurry.

Anyway, I’m a bit appalled at what I’ve eaten today. It’s 7:30pm as I write this and I have not eaten dinner. I am going to try to keep it light. Maybe just an apple.

Well, keeping dinner light was bit of a fail. I had some miso soup with broccoli. Had I stopped there all would be good. But nope I had to go add some udon noodles. And then I snacked on some homemade granola. Grr, apparently I deleted the miso soup photo form my iPhone before I saved it anywhere. Oh well.

4:30am breakfast prerun

Decided not to do the steel cut oats this morning so that I could double up on granola. Now even though I eat around 4:30am I don’t actually end up running until around 6am. I need to get up earlier on my running days so that I can eat, digest, go to the bathroom, etc. before I run. These things take time. I don’t mind getting up early; it’s the most peaceful part of my day. Breakfast #1 is 1/2 container of Chobani 0% peach yogurt with wheat germ and about 1/2 cup of homemade granola along with English Breakfast tea.

peach yogurt with wheat germ & granola, English Breakfast tea

8:30am breakfast #2

After my run, son requested that I make crepes for his birthday breakfast. While I was making them I was starving, so I had a few slices of fresh nectarine and coffee. I also ate a crepe with nectarines. When I was done making all the crepes I had two more with Nutella (didn’t take pic of 2nd one).

Nectarine & coffee

Crepe with nectarine slices

Nutella crepe

12:45 pm Lunch @ Panera

Son wanted to have lunch at Panera because he wanted baked potato soup (and macaroni & cheese) for some reason. By the time we got there I was starving. I had a You Pick Two with the tomato, mozzarella, and basil salad and Mediterranean veggie sandwich. Also ate a few bites of son’s mac & cheese, some potato chips. Could not resist some bread & butter at the end. Drank water.

Panera salad & sandwich

Panera potato chips

bread & butter

Midafternoon

For son’s birthday we also went to what I call the children’s casino aka Game Works, one of those arcade-type places that suck the money out of you and give you tickets that can be redeemed for prizes o’junk. The best thing about Game Works is that there is a Starbucks nearby and I decided to have a venti iced coffee with half and half. Yumm. Normally I don’t get the venti size but I savored that thing for the rest of the day, just had to keep adding ice to it.

Starbucks iced coffee

When we got home we had birthday cake, an ice cream from Baskin Robbins. It was chocolate cake with mint chip ice cream. Sad to say, I had TWO pieces. I believe as I was cutting myself the second slice, hubby mumbled something about me negating my morning run but I chose to ignore him.

ice cream cake

Now after all that I started to feel a bit down about all I had eaten during the day and then things started to get away from me. I stopped taking pics. I know that I started munching on a bag of Stacy’s pita chips in the late afternoon while watching V (original miniseries) on Netflix instant watch with hubby. For dinner I had some teriyaki pineapple meatballs and some madras lentils. Somewhere in there I ate one cashew.

All in all, a lot of food for one day.

Breakfast 9:45am

I can hardly believe that I slept in until 9:30am. Wow. Hubby had informed me that he had to go in to work early this morning so I wouldn’t be able to run. So I slept. Coffee, remaining Chobani strawberry yogurt with steel cut oats, topped with homemade granola and wheat germ.

yogurt & coffee

Lunch 12:30pm

Had no idea what I wanted for lunch but was feeling very hungry. Decided to mix up some red pepper hummus with more roasted red peppers and sun dried tomatoes. Added in some chopped baby carrots. Spread this on some white whole wheat toast with baby spinach leaves. Also ate the 2 teriyaki pineapple meatballs leftover from son’s lunch. After eating that, still felt hungry so I ate half a nectarine and a string cheese stick.

hummus sandwich & teriyaki pineapple meatballs

nectarine & string cheese

4pm snack

Two hours after I had eaten lunch I was feeling hungry again but decided that I couldn’t possibly be really hungry 2 hours after eating. I figured it was my blood sugar talking; when it is on the high side I feel hungry. I didn’t test but I decided to wait it out. A little later I noticed that I didn’t have the same feeling of hunger. But then around 4pm I started feeling hungry again. At first I thought that eating so close to dinner would not be a good idea.  Then I decided that perhaps I should have a little something so I didn’t go totally overboard at dinner. So I had the other half of the nectarine from lunch with some mixed nuts.

nectarine & mixed nuts

5:30pm dinner

Aargh, I’m annoyed. Apparently I deleted my pic of dinner without saving it anywhere first. I did take a pic of the package  of the Madras Lentils that I ate. I poured the lentils in a glass bowl and added some baby spinach leaves. The package is intended to be heated in the microwave but I avoid heating plastic in the microwave. I buy a big container of baby spinach from Costco and try to add the spinach to as much stuff as I can–soups, sandwiches, eggs, etc. While digging around in my freezer today I found 2 breaded fish pieces of some kind so I heated those and ate them with the lentils. Weird combo I know but I hadn’t really made anything for dinner. For hubby I had heated up some frozen Trader Joe’s cioppino. The kids got pizza pretzels. Daughter also ate some of the lentils sans spinach.

Madras Lentils

For a packaged convenience food, the ingredients for the madras lentils are pretty real: Water, Tomatoes, Lentils, Red Beans, Onions, Cream, Salt, Butter, Sunflower Oil, Chilies, Cumin. Contains: Milk.

After dinner I ended up eating daughter’s leftover pizza pretzel.

Pizza pretzel leftovers

After dinner, kids and I headed to Game Stop to get son’s birthday present (he traded in his Nintendo DS Lite to get a Nintendo DSi). This Game Stop is located near a Caribou Coffee, which daughter insisted we go to. So the kids got treats and lemonade. Me, well, I wasn’t particularly hungry. I could have resisted. But I did not. I got an iced coffee with half & half and a chocolate muffin, which was a bit on the dry side but I ate it anyway. The whole thing. I need to remember Foodie’s vow that she eats only what she loves.

iced coffee & chocolate muffin

So once again, the first half of my day is much better than the second part eatingwise.

Pre-run breakfast 4:30am

Strawberry Chobani yogurt with raw steel cut oats & homemade granola, chai spice black tea, ice water. Usually I have coffee but I’m trying to see if maybe tea might be better for me pre-run, hoping for less digestive issues while I’m running.

pre-run

8am breakfast #2, postrun
Breakfast casserole that I made a few days ago, based on this recipe. 1/2 fresh nectarine. Coffee. After eating I still felt like having something a bit more so I ate 1 1/2 oatmeal choc chip cookies. Someone had the nerve to eat only half a cookie yesterday.

Postrun breakfast

Cookies

11:30am lunch

1/2 a corn dog. Awhile ago I had bought a ginormous box of corn dogs from Costco because my son said he liked them. He’s a very picky eater so I was excited to find something he would eat, even though it was crap food like corn dogs. Anyway, he doesn’t eat them very often. And we have quite a few left. When I’m in a hurry or uninspired for lunch I eat one even though it’s such junk. My daughter likes hot dogs and wanted some of the hot dog so I gave her half. She doesn’t eat the breading though. Added some cold leftover broccoli, which was surprisingly good plus sliced nectarine with wheat germ and homemade granola. Daughter stuck a cookie on my plate because she didn’t like seeing the empty spot. I ate the cookie, of course.

Lunch

1:45 pm Midafternoon snack

Kids and I stopped at Baskin Robbins to order a cake for son’s birthday this weekend and to redeem the free cone coupons the kids had earned through the library summer reading program. I got a cone too as you can see.

Soft serve cone

Dinner 6pm

Whole wheat spaghetti, teriyaki pineapple meatballs, kimchi, more leftover broccoli. Visualize one more meatball because at the end of the meal there was one meatball left from the serving bowl and I felt compelled to eat it.

dinner

Snack 10pm

I should have gone to bed earlier but instead I started scrubbing away at the grates on my stove that were pretty filthy and annoying me. Anyway this made me delay getting the kids to bed. And then son started having a big emotional episode because he started freaking out about having to go to school again in the fall. After we got him calmed down I felt hungry so I started eating some more Fruit & Nuts. I started off with just the one little bowl. But soon I was just eating straight out of the bag, sigh. I kept eating because I was still hungry and because I was a bit stressed about son.

Fruit & Nuts

Breakfast 7am
1/2 blueberry Chobani yogurt with raw steel cut oats & homemade granola, frozen blueberries, black coffee. The night before I mix up a 6 oz container of Chobani 0% fruit yogurt with 1/4 cup of uncooked steel oats. The oats soften up a little but not as much as if they’d been cooked. I like chewy food. Truth to be told, I like Fage yogurt better but Costco sells Chobani so it’s just easier for me to buy the Chobani. The steel cut oats help me not to mind as much that I’m not eating Fage. Homemade granola is my latest food obsession. When I go to Costco I often gaze longingly at their granola. I’ve had samples. It’s delicious. But I imagine the carb count is sky high. So inspired by The Reiki Runner and this recipe, I decided to make my own. I omit dried fruit and add more nuts. It’s still fairly carby stuff so I have to be careful as I find granola very addictive.

Breakfast

Have I mentioned I have zero photography skills? And that I’m using my iPhone? So don’t be expecting any high quality shots. I think the plastic bowls and the child plastic spoon add a lovely touch of sophistication, don’t you?

Lunch 11:30am
Bean & ham soup, Granny Smith apple, iced green tea (unsweetened). Last week my son requested the spiral cut ham from Costco. And I happened to have a coupon. I decided to use the ham bone to make a ham soup. I have no recipe; I made it up. I even used dried beans; I felt so frugal. It was not bad. Something was missing but I don’t know what. This was the last of it. I added some spinach when I reheated it.

Lunch

Snack 3:30pm

I decided to make some oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. Ate 3. Restrained myself from eating more. These were about 2 inches wide.

snack

Dinner 5:30pm

Clam sauce on whole wheat spaghetti with broccoli.

Dinner

Snack 6:30pm

Hubby took the kids swimming so I started to watch a movie on DVD. When I watch TV or movies I feel this great urge to munch on something. So first I had a single serving bag of fruit crisps. But I still wanted something more so I dug into my bag of Costco Fruit & Nuts. Now I know I should have measured out a portion first. But I didn’t. I probably ate more than I should have but it could have been much worse.

snack

snack

All in all, not a too terrible day of eating. I think I may eat too much during the later part of the day/evening. Should be the other way around I suppose.