WIAW #2: Chilly October Day

My second What I Ate Wednesday post!

Yesterday, a chilly October day, was a recovery day. I worked 4 days this weekend, the first day was a half day and the other 3 were full days. Back when I worked full time, I often worked 5 or 6 full days, followed by 1 or 2 half days, and it was no big deal. However, working in a lab means scurrying about like mad for a little while, the sitting down and waiting for your experiment. It's not exactly relaxing... but compared to retail, it really is. So my 4 day work weekend was brutal.

Enjoyable, though. I really do continue to love my job, and I feel very, very lucky. Even if it doesn't pay enough to cover my bills and isn't a career, it's something and I look forward to going in every day- so much so that I'm usually a few minutes early! Gasp! I know!

Anyway, yesterday I was beat. I did the bare minimum of what I absolutely had to do all day, no sewing, no cleaning beyond cleaning up after cooking. Just reading, eating and catching up on emails. And shivering... I swear, our house is colder inside than outside! Clint turned the heat on the day before, but it's on a timer so the afternoon is just frigid. It was really a warm food kind of day, the days of yogurt for lunch are over! (except for work, since I need something quick then)

I had my normal breakfast. I'm currently working on a loaf of La Panciata cinnamon raisin bread, which I always have Clint buy when he's in NH. This is one of the only store-brought breads I will eat (Pittsfield and Berkshire bakeries are the other exception, as well as anything from the bread lady at the farmer's market or anything from Mrs. Putnam's/Blossoming Acres in Southwick, MA, since they're all homemade). I love my raisin bread with salted butter and cinnamon sugar, a throwback to when I was a little kid and my mom would make this for me. White bread with cinnamon sugar is still my meal of choice when recovering from an illness. Right now I'm using a cinnamon sugar from Penzey's- normally I'd never buy cinnamon sugar, I just mix it myself, but I had a coupon. BTW, if you live near a Penzey's, you MUST sign up for their catalogue. They send you coupons every other month for free stuff, and I'm talking like a $8 jar of spices for free, no purchase necessary!

 For lunch I had pumpkin tomatillo soup, which might be a new favorite- I just need to figure out how to find tomatillos in the dead of winter, because I do love hot, spicy soups when it's cold out. Maybe canned would work? This soup is a delicious blend of pumpkin (the original recipe called for roasted acorn squash but I used pumpkin puree), tomatillos, coconut milk and spices. It has such an unusual flavor and, even though I added far too many peppers and made it super spicy, is really, really delicious. And the best part: it's super fast. Puree a bunch of stuff and then heat it. I think even with  roasting my peppers, it was about 25 minutes from starting to serving. Wonderful! I wanted to serve it with a swirl of my chipotle lime sour cream, but that's spicy and the soup didn't need any extra spice, so I used plain low fat sour cream.

I had my soup with 1.25 oz of whole wheat ciabatta (also store bought, it's Clint's sandwich bread), each topped with a wedge of laughing cow. Next time I'll split one wedge in half to spread. The Laughing Cow didn't really go with the soup, but it was still tasty.

After lunch my willpower failed and I dove into the bowl of candy corn. I'd had trouble finding Brach's candy corn, and I was sad but not too sad (since it's really hard to stop myself with candy corn), but then my husband went to the store and came back with both Brach's and some Big Y brand candy corn for $1 a bag. Surprisingly, we prefered the cheap stuff.

Dinner was our new favorite chicken with honey-beer sauce recipe, with chipotle lime sweet potatoes. I think this was like the 5th night in a row of this meal? It's just too delicious. Yesterday I did not have a glass of beer though, I just forgot to take a new picture, so this is from the first time we made this recipe, last week. Last night's version also had mushrooms with the chicken.

Part of why I wanted to make this recipe was to give me a good excuse to get a growler of our new Oaktoberfest beer. This is our pretty growler. We got 4 almost-pints of beer out of this and enough beer to make 2.5 recipes of the beer honey chicken, and have 12 oz left. Unfortunately, I didn't tell Clint to drink it, so he was leaving it for me, so now it's flat. I think I need to make beer cookies again (and maybe find a way to add some pumpkin to that recipe...)

After dinner, I had to run to a choir rehearsal, where I drank water to stay hydrated. My voice was a little scratchy last night, which worries me, since our concert is on Saturday. I'm just glad I'm not in the solo chorus this time! Auditions happened when I was still recovering from my cold in September, so I decided to pass.

When I got home from rehearsal, dessert was leftover apple crisp. I need a new apple crisp recipe, this one has a topping of 1 cup oats, 2/3 cup flour, 3/4 cup brown sugar, 6T butter and some spices. It doesn't crisp up nicely, it just stays kind of mushy. I baked it for 1.5hrs, the last 15 minutes covered because the apples were drying out too much. I didn't sweeten the apples at all, which I think I should have, so this is served with a little (about 1/2T) drizzle of maple syrup.

 I started in on my usual Soder Te at lunchtime and drank it throughout the day.

I did go over my calories for the day, thanks to the candy corn and apple crisp, but.... oh well. The candy corn is 100% worth it. I've also maintained this weight for 6 days now, which suggests that my candy corn consumption is not as out-of-control as I might think, and also that I'm doing well on my reduced-salt diet. And I feel great! Maybe my job is making up for not increasing my exercise since I started trying to lose weight.