I’m delirious. For some reason (slightly unknown to me) Valley monkey was up all night. Not fussy or sick really, just wide awake and not in the mood to sleep. I was so zonked I couldn’t even deal. Kyle and I took turns doing I don’t even know what with her trying to get her back to sleep, but it was like someone had given her caffeine at 10 pm. What the what?! Girl, sleep is good. Let’s all do it. Hopefully it’s not a trend because I am not the kind of person who thrives on an hour of shut eye. I’m in the sleep diva camp – aim for 8 hours, settle for 7, get annoyed by 6.
I also think you eat a bunch more when you’re tired. I think there are studies that have proven a correlation between that. But what do I know, I’m so tired I could be making stuff up. Anyway, backing up to Wednesday.
As you can see, I opened that new cashew butter (!!!) and it basically poured out into my mouth. Accidents happen people.
This bread is awesome. Now I’m curious how it would differ it it were made in the oven…the cookbook doesn’t give the time or temp for the oven though, so maybe I’ll never know. It is a pressure cooker (paleo) cookbook after all.
For lunch I repurposed those sauteed leftovers from the night before and added avocado, Thai dressing, and chicken.
I bought the Thai peanut dressing from TJs so now that I’ve finished the Thai dressing from Nugget (which doesn’t have peanut) I am excited to give this one a try. According to the TJs employees it’s really popular, so that’s a good sign. Last week I wanted to buy some but they were out. Also a good sign.
For dinner I made a salmon dish from nom nom paleo’s Ready or Not cookbook.
I bought a huge slab of salmon from Costco which is SO MUCH more economical than buying salmon elsewhere. I didn’t have plans for what to do with it when I bought it though and browsed some cookbooks until something inspired me. It didn’t take long…once I opened the book and saw this. Macadamia Crusted Sriracha Ranch Salmon! Heck yeah! So I cut the slab into fillets and got to work.
I already had home-made Ranch dressing on hand! The problem is, Kyle doesn’t like dill (in Ranch) and P doesn’t like mac nuts.
So I made most of them plain and two with all the goodies on top. I love salmon so much, I may as well make myself an extra one when I’m going through all the effort to crush the nuts.
I served it with quinoa and green beans. I put the extra nuts on Kyle’s quinoa.
This was sooo good.
And then I finished the night off with a kombucha. And the new Bon Appetit magazine. I love the spin off BA is doing, healthyish (and have been reading their website and following their IG account for the past several weeks since it’s inception) but I think it’s way way lame that they made the spin off into a magazine that they are now charging for. I really like their recipes, which are more in line with how we eat than what Bon Appetit has been serving up lately, but to make me pay for a subscription to BOTH is scammy. Anyway, this month’s BA is a healthyish intro with a bunch of recipes that caught my eye.
Like the Gluten Free Chocolate and Buckwheat waffles.
Which I made this morning. I don’t usually make a full batch of waffles on a week day morning for myself but I had a free morning with V today which is pretty rare in our over-scheduled lives. So rather than fill it with an activity, I just left it empty. We dropped P off at school and came home and listened to music, had a tea party, and baked cookies (all her ideas). After making the waffles, that is. I can’t believe I followed through after impulsively marking it to make the night before. I had all the stuff on hand, so why not.
The batter was way too liquidy and I was very confused about that, but I figured I should give BA a chance to prove me wrong, so I poured it into the waffle maker exactly as written. It came off the pan ok, but the texture wasn’t right. it was flaky around the edges like it was too oily. I don’t think there was enough flour in the recipe at all. I added coconut flour to soak up all the extra liquid and made the rest of the waffles with my new version of the recipe and it was much better.
Not exactly a home run, but whatever. Good enough to enjoy while I have them, but I wouldn’t make them again. I topped a couple off with mixed nut butter (I had some samples of the first batch while the rest were cooking, which is why I only had two on my plate).
As you can see, I have quite a few leftover. Waffles for the week! Oh and the other big news of the morning was that I used the espresso machine all by myself. It was too watery, but at least I figured it out (it’s really not hard at all I’m just intimidated by it). I usually have drip coffee but didn’t want to brew a whole pot because all I wanted was one cup (to sip with V at our tea party).
Cookies!
Check out this little baking buddy of mine.
Best part of all – licking the spatula!
The finished product was a banana whole wheat flax cookie.
Once we picked P up from school I made their lunches: banana cookie, date coconut ball, cuties, and leftover salmon. P had string cheese for his school snack and V had apples slices while our cookies were in the oven.
I made a salad with kale that I massaged in a home-made vinaigrette, before adding roasted butternut squash, avocado, dried cranberries, and roasted pecans.
If this isn’t veganism in a bowl I don’t know what is. Heavenly!
And now I have to cut out because I don’t have time to upload dinner pics. I was on the phone with the advice nurse trying to figure out what to do about P (he’s had an ear ache since Monday and woke up from his nap with a rash) and that kinda blew up my afternoon. I thought V was the one coming down with something, but it looks like it may be P. Winter is so fun with kids in school. Oof.
