Time for our weekly review! What I Ate Wednesday, comin in hot.
This week’s highlights (and lowlights!) include:
- Naturally sweet desserts – and my mixed feelings on them.
- A big batch of granola that is giving me so much good snack-age.
- An accidentally terrible lunch. Just… it’s embarrassing.
- A new vegan pasta recipe that is my new BFF.
Pre-Breakfast
I woke up early with Solvi and was a) thirsty, and b) not thirsty for water. I know it’s super healthy to do the whole water / lemon / chug it down at 6am thing, but mornings are just not my favorite time to drink water. Give me coffee. Give me tea. Give me juice.
I stayed away from all fruit juices for the first two weeks of Sugar Free January, but this week I made a splurge impulse buy and got myself a big ol’ jug of reeeeally good orange juice. Like, REAL orange juice, where it’s the actual juice of the actual oranges.
Guys, I love, love, love orange juice. But even though it’s *naturally* sweet, it’s still… how do I put this… like, REALLY SWEET.
I’m planning to just approach this as a one-small-glass-a-day kind of treat. And it is a TREAT. I love it.
Breakfast
Okay! The breakdown:
- Coconut oil granola (remix) with whole milk! Here’s the older recipe if you want to take a look and I’ll be posting this exact remixed version tomorrow!
- Blackberries.
- Chestnut tea latte = strongly brewed tea, half and half, and a quick swizzle of honey. IT IS SO GOOD. Also worth noting that it is about the most caffeinated drink that I can handle. Just the right amount of pick me up without the frizzed-out brain.
Pre-Lunch
I started making a recipe in the Instant Pot for lunch, but then realized: I am way too hungry to wait for this to be done.
So I made myself a piece of sprouted toast with peanut butter and cinnamon to hold me over. Plus a glass of milk. Very adultish.
Pre-Lunch Again
Ooops, how’d that get in there?
Actual Lunch
This lunch story does not have a happy ending.
The sweet potatoes and lentils that I had waited for in the Instant Pot turned out, for lack of a better and more descriptive word, GROSS. I thought I would try to salvage the whole thing by combining with last night’s chicken, fire roasted corn from the freezer, salsa verde, and cotija cheese to make “tacos,” but wow. Bleh. Not good.
I really don’t like eating food that is gross, but this was a moment where I needed to eat SOMETHING so as not to become a monster by 3pm, and didn’t have time to make anything else, so there I was, eating the world’s weirdest tacos and knowing that I’d need to share it with you because WIAW is always honest!
Better luck next meal.
Dinner
And luck did strike for dinner.
I whipped up a very simple, very creamy, very vegan vodka pasta using those fun little spirals, and dusted the whole thing in a lot of salt and pepper, and finished it with an extra drizzle of olive oil, and you guys. It was so carby and comforting and I can think of no better meal for my weekly sweatpants / couch / Bachelor dinner. It was a moment of sheer happiness.
This recipe will be coming to the blog SOON.
Dessert
I’m currently all out of energy bites (BAD BAD BAD I need to make another batch ASAP), but we were watching the Bachelor and it was just too cozy not to have a treat, so I decided to try making sugar free-ish cookies.
I worked off of this recipe and used maple syrup instead of sugar, a little less butter, a little more almond flour, and less-sugary dark chocolate chips.
The verdict: medium.
The cookies themselves were pretty good. And yes – there were totally naturally sweetened! But I found myself just doing what I normally do when I make cookies: eating huge spoonfuls of cookie dough and inhaling approximately 50 cookies fresh out of the oven.
So even though it’s naturally sweet, I’m not sure that it’s necessarily helpful if the goal is to reduce my overall dependence on / desire for sugar.
I feel like a better scenario would be having a hot spiced tea, a really crispy apple, and a swipe of almond butter. Things that have less of that sugary-addictiveness.
How do you guys feel about naturally sweet desserts? Helpful during Sugar Free January? Not helpful?
Also how much are you judging my lunch? Don’t even answer that.
