Alternate titles:  The Kale Fest That Never Was or Nice Little Weekend

Hello all! 

Yesterday morning began with me interrupting Eric and my coffee drinking, reading/ video game playing morning to inform him that I was suddenly very upset and sick of spending our leisure time relaxing and doing frivolous things and that I thought we needed to start spending our weekends doing difficult and focused work on our relationship and more role playing/ planning for how we will manage children in the future. 

He looked stricken and like he had no idea how to respond. 

Happy April Fool’s day Eric!  For the record he thought it was a pretty good prank. 

This weekend was pretty relaxing. We woke up early yesterday and went for a mini walk in our neighborhood.

Sign #67867 that we are getting old and lame:  We now walk around and talk about the houses we walk by.  “I like that blue door”, “I like that fence, actually, but not in that color”.  Sigh. 

Once home, I enjoyed a satisfying breakfast of two eggs and two Trader Joe’s chicken breakfast sausages (1 point each!).

Followed by a smoothie made from grapefruit flavored sparkling water, 2 cups of spinach, lemon juice, and frozen pineapple and mango chunks.

A little grassy but not too bad. 

I am pleased with how much spinach I am getting into my diet this way.  I’m eating about two cups most days and I’m starting to crave it so that’s sort of exciting.

After breakfast I suddenly decided that I could not live without a bedside table lamp for even one more second.  Ours started to become a bit of a fire hazard and I have been forced to enjoy my Tudor fiction by iPhone flashlight.  Not cool. 

Eric and I headed to a furniture store we both like and I came home with this little beauty.  I love it so much. 

P.S. I love my little hands jewelry holder but my dad says it’s creepy, like something Hannibal Lecter would keep by his bed. 

After my little morning lamp fest, Anna and I had planned to go to the first annual Kale Festival at the Homeless Garden Project.

We weren’t quite sure what a kale fest would entail but heard there would be cooking demonstrations, samples, a “kale kingdom” and beer.

Count me in.

I did invite Eric to go the the Kale Fest with me.  His response: “Uh, I don’t know…maybe if it was something more appealing, like, um, an onion festival or a …not kale festival?”. 

Oh well, Anna totally wanted to go.

 

The farm was beautiful but seemed pretty empty so we walked around for a few minutes trying to figure out what was going on.

And then we saw it:

Bummer.  We recovered quickly, however, when we realized we could head right over to Swift Street Courtyard for a little wine tasting.

Cheers!

We started at Silver Mountain and then took a break to head over to New Leaf for lunch from the hot bar.

I had a bed of steamed kale with a couple of veggie curries on top.  Hit the spot and satisfied the kale craving. 

After lunch we headed over to the Bonny Doon tasting room.  My favorite!

Best Kale Fest ever!

I headed home to make dinner.  I had a delicious piece of halibut and knew I wanted to top it with some sort of lemon cream sauce.  Yum.

Halibut with Lemon Cilantro Cream

Serves 2

• 2 teaspoons olive oil
• 2 halibut filets
• Juice of 1/2 lemon
• 1/3 cup heavy cream
• Salt and pepper
• 2 chopped scallions
• handful fresh cilantro

Salt and pepper fish liberally.  Heat oil in a pan over medium-high heat until hot.  Sear halibut for five minutes per side.  I cover with foil on the second side.  In a separate pan begin to reduce lemon juice, add cream and stir to combine.  Reduce by half.  Salt and pepper to taste.  Add green onions and cilantro and cook for another 2 or so minutes.  Pour sauce over fish, garnish with more cilantro.

This turned out really well!  Fresh and satisfying.  Eric’s take: “I really don’t want you to forget about this one, it feels good in my stomach.”

This was served with steamed green beans tossed with sesame oil, toasted sesame seeds and garlic salt.  Yum.

After a lazy Sunday morning and a good sweaty workout I had to go grocery shopping but was pretty hungry and knew I would regret going hungry so I picked up this bad boy from Starbucks. 

I have always been put off by the high caloric price tag (like three hundred something) but just ate the egg, cheese and fruit, saved the peanut butter packet for later and tossed the gross little bread thing.  Perfect little 4 point protein snack!

I spent the afternoon at the movies (For someone who doesn’t like movies that much I sure have been going to a lot of them). 

My dates were Leah and her two daughters who I’ve known since they were really little and don’t get to see as much anymore now that they are grown up and cool.

We saw Mirror Mirror which I totally didn’t like and thought was, like, the weirdest movie I’d ever seen.  That was ok though because I had awesome snacks. 

Tarragon Dijon Kale Chips (not my favorite flavor but pretty good), a huge Diet Coke and a Reese’s Egg that Leah brought me.  So good. 

Dinner was a bit of a disappointing one, made worse by the fact that I was so excited about it. 

I made Angela’s 15 Minute Creamy Avocado Pasta.

Avocado is blended with lemon, garlic and olive oil and tossed with warm pasta and then topped with black pepper and lemon zest. 

I absolutely love Angela’s blog (Oh She Glows) and have loved everything I’ve ever made from it.  This is one of her most popular recipes and I’ve been wanting to make it for ages. 

It came together really quickly, but unfortunately, neither of us really cared for it. 

I didn’t have the optional basil, so that might have changed the flavor some.  Most people seemed to like this recipe, so I’m willing to bet that it might have just been us, or I did something wrong that I can’t figure out. 

Oh well, we’ll file it in the ‘win some, lose some’ category. 

In final news, I ate too much candy yesterday.  I ate that Reese’s egg, a pack of Cadbury mini Easter eggs and two caramels.  That’s 13 points for anyone counting.  Whoops.

That is all.

Happy Monday!