Weekend cooking

I haven't been posting my food much lately, sorry. But I'm making great progress studying for my nutritional excellent trainer exam. I read 100 pages of my nutrition book this week! 100 more to go...I've been getting up early every morning to read it.

My groove during the week has been smoothies at brekky, my current favorite salad at dinner, and then cooking up something at lunch with some collards or kale on the side (still lots in the garden). I recorded what I cooked for lunch earlier last week. Tomorrow will be my all-time favorite black bean hummus. That may have to be a weekly rotation.

Then on the weekend I get my treat, which is a really good smoothie without the spinach. This is like having a milkshake. Now, I'm still misbehaving on the weekends. Here's what I did yesterday. After eating my delicious smoothie, I then made next week's smoothies. This is a good idea so the weekday's are less hectic. However, there's usually some leftovers from each smoothie that I have to eat and then I get pretty full--it's probably equivalent to drinking another full smoothie--though I'm getting better at making them just the right size to fill the two glasses. Then yesterday I made a huge batch of a Fuhrman recipe which is a greek chickpea salad. I basically made 3 batches, one for a party yesterday, a party today, and for us to have at home. A bad habit of mine is eating while preparing, which I did in spades yesterday, so I got more full, and then ate more at the party and got still more full. Then I wanted one other treat, as I've been experimenting with what treats I want to have. I decided I get a treat or two on the weekend, see. So I tried to make a carob-cashew dip similar to this chocolate cashew dip with date sugar instead of dates, and with carob instead of chocolate. Well, it wasn't as good. And it's too sweet. I ate that with a banana. So I think my conclusion is that my favorite treats are the Saturday morning smoothie, and banana walnut ice cream. But yesterday, with all the cooking and experimenting I ate too many nuts and beans and got overfull. So I have to watch that. I think I get uncomfortable if I eat more than 3 oz of nuts and seeds, and 2 cups of beans, per day.

Today I had my usual smoothie, and the greek chickpea salad, some carrots, an apple and orange. I did eat too much of the salad again but it was sooo goood. And I feel okay, not tooooo full.