A Good Day

Hi all!  Wanted to let you know a little more about the food ideas I shared yesterday.  First, wanted to mention the shredded carrots in the spaghetti sauce.  I got this idea from my Italian neighbor who told me that that is often a traditional ingredient in spaghetti sauce.  I did it to add a little healthy volume without adding so many calories.  All they did was to add a little oomph and texture.  I didn’t really taste them.

Second, the ‘ice cream sandwiches’ were a bust.  Not worthy, IMO.  I don’t know why I keep trying to make frozen yogurt without an ice cream maker.  It comes out too hard and icy.  And the cookies were okay, but not fantastic.  So I scrapped that dessert, and made a batch of my latest scone recipe, using some frozen blackberries, which are my friend’s favorite.

We had fun today.  We wanted to spend a little time together, and we wanted to see each other’s houses.  But time was getting short, and we live about 40 minutes from each other.  So we decided to do a ‘progressive lunch’ for two!  I drove over to her house, where we visited for a while and ate lunch.  And then got in our cars and drove back to my house, where we visited some more and had tea and scones.  Oh, yeah, side note:  I did find a really great use for that ‘strained yogurt.’  (Which remember is very similar to Fage greek yogurt.)  I added a little splenda, and it was FANTASTIC with the scones–kinda like clotted cream.  Yumm.  That could be addicting.  Anyways, that was a very pleasant way to spend a day with a good friend.

The dogs enjoyed my friend too.  Man, Sophie looks like a devil dog in this picture!

We were done soon enough that I finally made it outside and got a good run/walk for 3 miles, after having done NO exercise for the past two days…I am still sore from the Vicky workout last Friday.  And tomorrow is my regularly scheduled day with Vicky.  I know I should be doing a lot of stretching and that would help with the soreness…Oh yeah, I headed outside AFTER I had done my 50 jumping jacks a la Jill (Jill is posting a mini-challenge every day–very fun to try to keep up with her.)-

Had a delightful dinner–salmon, brussel sprouts with a bit of parmesan, and an asian pear.  The brussel sprouts  were particularly delicious.  I think they were fresher than usual.  Don’t you love the unusual shape of this plate?

And the ornament for the day.  A delicate glass peacock with a real peacock feather for his tail.  This brings back a great memory of a day I took all 4 of my nieces over to San Francisco on BART on Christmas Eve to get them out of the house and give my sister a break for a few hours.  When we got off the BART train, there was a beautiful Christmas shop right in front of us and I got the peacock there.  Gosh, that must have been about 16 years ago, because the girls were very young then.