Squash Makes Me Sing

Rather than accomplishing the copious amounts of textbook reading that I far fell behind on during midterm studying, I spent a great chunk of my free time today skimming through all kinds of health and fitness articles, most especially those on the lovely site Zen to Fitness that I discovered today. He has some great and simple healthy living articles so it’s definitely worth checking out for some good procrastination perusing. I’m especially interested in trying this Tabata thing. I’m a fan of the quick, intense interval exercises.

Food today was pretty good. I did a bit of unnecessary snacking  but nothing too uncontrolled. Just a bit too much munching on leftover cold pasta… huge downfall of mine. My biggest issue is standing at the fridge with open containers and eating straight out of them. That’s all fine and dandy when it comes to things like leftover cold broccoli or even yogurt once in a while but it doesn’t work out all that well with pasta. Plus my mom isn’t really a huge fan of me slobbering all over the food that I put back into the fridge after eating part of it. Just kidding, I don’t slobber… that much ;)

Breakfast today was something new and definitely a success. We all know what a great fan Miss Chocolate Covered Vegan is of the blended grains, so when she recommended this delicious breakfast idea to me, I knew I had to try it right away.

• 1/3 cup of oatmeal, stovetop cooked with almond milk and cinnamon. In the meantime, I melted half a large banana in the microwave, then stirred it in with the oats. I also had a few strawberries on their last leg, so I microwave-melted them and threw them in as well.  – HOLY AMAZING. “Melted” banana is the greatest idea ever. I want to eat them like that everyday now. – Anyway, sidenote. After stirring them all together, I threw the combo into my handy dandy Magic Bullet and blended it all up.

Et Regard!
 
Alright, so hardly beautiful but DEFINITELY delicious. Try blending your oats! Do it.

For Lunch I roasted SQUASH. I didn’t see acorn squash at the grocery store but was intrigued by the Buttercup squash so I decided to give it a go. It might be very similar to acorn, I’m not quite sure. It’s another variety of a winter squash anyway.

I baked it at 400 for about 40 minutes while I did some treadmill running and by the time I was done it was just oozing with squashy goodness. I tried it right away and immediately fell in love. Seriously, if I could only eat one food for the next month I’m pretty sure I would pick squash. I ended up eating over half of the entire squash today. Skin and all. And it was pretty darn big! But can you ever really eat too much squash? I don’t think so.
I also cooked this up with a couple small sweet potatoes and some herbed tofu rubbed in maple balsamic dressing.I ate a bit of each before heading off to my afternoon class.

Oh, and can’t forget the crazy amazing iced coffee slush I downed before running out the door. I had frozen some hazelnut coffee last night and then took it out today to defrost a bit. It was half melted by lunchtime so I threw in some skim milk, a bit of splenda and some SF caramel syrup. WHOA. Who needs Frapps. This was perfection.

Dinner HAD to be more squash. I can’t get enough of this stuff.
Plus some sweet potato with tzaziki (I know I put weird stuff on my sweet potatoes but this is SUCH a good combo. I think pretty much anything works with sweet potato though), a piece of tofu and a salad with dijonnaise and balsamic vinegar.

Later on I had some frozen mango chunks, some yogurt, a light hot chocolate, a few pb puffins… I dunno, some random snackies, but I kept them small and I was actually feeling somewhat hungry when I ate them so they were fairly justified. Whatever. I know I don’t need to justify snacks. It’s just this week, I swear.

Hope you all had some excitement on this oh so lovely Monday.
PS> HALLOWEEN on Friday! Woooooo

• baked tofu
• iced coffee
• oatmeal
• salad
• squash
• sweet potato