I'm off to the NYC!

Good evening! It's late on Wednesday night and my boyfriend and I are leaving for New York City early tomorrow morning! I wanted to get one more blog post up and then I'll be out for three days, so bear with me. No need to send out the missing persons search team just yet. ;-) I'll try to take some cool pictures to share with you when I'm home on Sunday!

But I'll have to leave you with my yummy eats from the past couple days to make up for a 3 day hiatus. I'm also the tiniest bit tipsy from drinking two Blue Moons with my boyfriend. Shhh, don't tell anyone. :) Yay for "drogging" = drunk blogging. (I'm not really all that drunk!)

Today was a great day. It started off with a similar breakfast as yesterday's. The only difference was that I filled the omelet with some sauteed veggies that I made on Tuesday night. (Scroll down for more pictures). Yes, I had an adorable muffin again! Thanks for your comments. They are delicious and adorable and I actually had two with breakfast, even though only one got its picture taken! :)



Then I played racquetball for about an hour, probably burning around 400 calories. And way more importantly, it was fun! On my way home, I stopped by the Apple Store to buy my iPod!! I desperately needed one, as I've been rocking my 512MB 1st generation iPod Shuffle for the past 6 years! So I bought myself a 120GB iPod Classic, plus an armband for workouts! I'm in awe of it! I'll cringe when I get my credit card statement, but it's something I've really wanted for a long time, and it's a tax deduction for next year, seeing as I'm a full time, professional musician. How convenient. :) Here it is, in all its beauty!



It will also provide me and my boyfriend with way more exciting music to listen to on the way to NYC! :) By the way, I'm currently in love with the band Okkervil River and I'd highly recommend checking them out! They are a perfect blend of folk rock and a tiny bit of experimental! Great use of instrumentation, good lyrics, very catchy!

I have always been a Mac and Apple products user! I grew up with them, and will continue to use them exclusively! :) I love the layout, the usability, the reliability, and pretty much everything about their products. What about you? Are you a Mac or PC user?

I came home and wasn't too starving, so I pushed lunch back. I ate around 2pm when I had to get ready to teach. I had a simple lunch of 1/2 C ww pasta, LF feta cheese and some more sauteed veggies. Simple, fast, healthy. Yay. I also had an Oikos 0% Greek Yogurt with some cereal.


Then I taught and play for 4 hours and after the church service that I play they had free brownies and cookies for us. I grabbed these.


Honestly the cookie wasn't that good and I only ate two small bites of it. But I devoured the whole brownie, as it was DELICIOUS!

And I had some bar snacks (= pretzels, cheese puffs and Doritos snack mix) at the bar right next to my house, while drinking the beer. I am of the opinion that treating oneself, even multiple times every single day, is PERFECTLY acceptable and that you shouldn't spend ANY life energy on hating yourself over what you ate! I felt this way for long enough as a younger girl and now I appreciate food for its life giving qualities, and let's face it: it's delicious and pleasurable. There's NOTHING wrong with that.

Anyway, I had some healthy eats yesterday and some not so healthy eats. Here you go:

Peanut butter, carob and agave nectar sandwich.

With an apple.
A large half of a Cranberry Orange Zone Perfect bar. Not my favorite, but they had been discontinued when I bought them and they were cheap. And they're not bad, just not my favorite.



Some broccoli and other veggies that my roommate made and said I was welcome to have some of.

A pecan-raisin roll from Whole Foods. It had some whole grains in it, but the first ingredient was enriched flour. Oh well, not my first choice, but so delicious!

Some decadent chocolate cake! (Only ate half yesterday, and just polished off the remaining bit!)



I packed this bar yesterday, but didn't end up eating it until today, and even then I only ate half of it.

A couple giveaways going on in blogland:

Aimee at The Healthy Lawyer is giving away Stoneyfield Farms coupons and products!

AnAppleADay is giving away some of her favorite products.

Jaime at Fearless, Fabulous, Full of Life is giving away a yoga DVD.

Emily at Curly Top is giving away lots of Newman's Own products!

I'm giving away the most delicious bars I've ever eaten!

Ok, I'm heading off to bed for a lovely 4 hours of sleep. But NYC will be exciting and I'll let you know all about it when I'm home!

Monster post!

Thanks for your patience with my lack of posting over most weekends. I'm BACK and I have a monster post for you! It's amazing how much food I eat in 4 days! Haha, and that's not even including all the stuff that went unphotographed because it was eaten with friends. But I do have pictures of almost everything I ate when I could take pictures.

I think I should start with breakfast today but then go back to Friday night and work my way forwards. So this morning I woke up wanting protein, so I made scrambled eggs (1 egg, 1/4 C egg whites) with a little milk in the eggs (makes a better consistency) and stirred in some frozen spinach. I topped it with a little LF feta cheese and some salsa (hellooo, lycopene!)


I also had a cute star-shaped muffin-type thing that my roommate made. It was coconut citrus flavored and really good! It was also reasonably healthy with applesauce and some whole grains. I had coffee on the side and was going to have the banana, but I didn't end up needing it. (I ate it two hours later, while blogging!)





Before I drove 2 hours north for a show on Friday night I had a great workout. (30 minutes on the Expresso bike --check out their website! These are seriously the most amazingly fun form of exercise!) Afterwards I made a quick tuna sandwich before a student arrived for her lesson.

I mixed this dressing into the tuna and ended up finishing the bottle. (There was less than 1 TBSP left).

Plus a few leftover veggies on the side.

A word about fat free dressings. I know that you need fat, especially with some veggies in order to better absorb the fat-soluble nutrients. I think you all know from my blog that I eat quite a bit of fat, mostly healthy sources, and some less healthy choices. I do however buy low- and non-fat dressings because I don't taste a difference and I'd MUCH rather eat more PB, cashews, olive oil, avocado, CHOCOLATE (hehe!), and the like. It is definitely not an attempt to eat low fat because 1) I'd be failing miserably (haha, that's my lame attempt at humor SkinnyRunner style), and 2) On a serious note, I do NOT believe in low fat eating AT ALL! In fact, I personally feel WAAYYYY better on quite a lot of fat. This might sound strange, but it's true. I've long stopped counting how many grams of fat I eat each day, but I'm guessing it's up around 80. That being said, I need to start looking for dressings with fewer chemicals in them and I might need to find ones with more fat instead. I don't know and I'm not too worried about it. Wow, that was a long paragraph about salad dressing.

Back to Friday evening. I ended up eating 3 nutrition bars in the car! (One Clif Z, one FiberPlus Antioxidants, one Smores Luna). Wow, guess I was hungry.

(Sorry about the shadow).

I obviously relied way too heavily on bars on Friday, but they were there and easy to grab and reasonably healthy. This one was eaten right after the gym, before I started driving north.

When I got up there the guys were eating pizza, so I had two smallish slices. I felt just fine after them. Full, but not too full and it was good to play a show not hungry. We played well to a pretty full house! :) And I ended up driving home late (10pm-12:330am) and had another Apple Cinnamon Clif Z bar. Yes, I realize I ate 5 bars on Friday. This is NOT a normal habit, but it happens once in a while with my lifestyle. I also ate this apple on the way home.


Saturday morning I woke up nice and early and made a delicious omelet. It was pretty simple with feta and spinach and topped with avocado and low-sugar ketchup.


On my drive to my students' recital I ate this PB and banana sandwich I packed.

Plus a Chocolate Chip Clif Z bar. This is why I love summer:

Woo! Yay for melted chocolate!! The chocolate chip flavor is BY FAR my favorite. Like hands down, absolutely no questions. It has TONS of chocolate in it for only 130 calories and it's whole grain with quite a few vitamins and minerals. If Clif wants to send me any more products of theirs, I'd be happy to review them! :)

Here's the top of my students' program. I can't show you more for privacy reasons. But the whole recital went really well, and I am so proud of my students!

At home I snacked on some yogurt and cereal. The current open box in my cupboard is this:

With yogurt.


I did another 25 minutes on the Expresso bike on Saturday (think racing the whole time, trying to break my previous best time, which I did!) and then went to the boyfriend's house for 2 slices of pizza (cheese stuffed crust! OMG, holy yum and the blog phrase goes! :) And then we went to a social event (his friend's going away party). There were snack foods there and I had 4 bite sized cookies, some black coffee, a blondie type thing, and half a very large, dense and delicious PB/chocolate rice krispie bar! Again, holy yum!

Onward. Sunday morning's breakfast was pretty non-descript. I barely even remember what it was. I think it was cereal with a peach cut up and skim milk. I came home to teach just one lesson and headed to my local food co-op for their member appreciation day, where they take 10% off your whole order. I was going straight to play a rock band show, so I couldn't buy anything cold/perishable. I spent around $18 on the following:

(Up close of some whole grain spelt sticks and carob chips).

I've been snacking on these a little bit here and there. For example, dipped in hummus:


Plus this incredible lentil salad for $3, which I ate in the car on the way to the rock show.



I also had a few of the Food Should Taste Good chips. I hadn't tried the Jalapeño chips before and they are EXCELLENT. They are not TOO spicy, but do have a good zing to them. I'm sure I had at least 2 servings because they're pretty addictive. I would be MORE than happy to review other flavors if they wanted to send them to me. :)


I need to finish up reasonably quickly here, so I'll just give you a few pictures from yesterday's food. I ate this banana and PB for breakfast and had a second breakfast of scrambled eggs with cheddar cheese at my boyfriend's house where we were rehearsing.



I was craving protein, so I ate half of this.


I am a fan of the fruit + PB combination! :)

I love biting into mild peppers like you eat an apple. No need to cut them up. Just enjoy the flavor and the crunch! :)

For some musical inspiration. I borrowed this from a friend and am going to listen to it to try and become amore familiar with jazz! I'm excited about the jazz rehearsals and THANK YOU for your sweet comments about my branching out on yesterday's blog post. :)

This was on my camera from a few day ago. Don't remember, but it was delicious.

I taught 3 lessons yesterday and got 2 contracts for wedding gigs ready to be mailed. I also packed a box of the giveaway winnings to mail out today. Which means it's time for another giveaway VERY soon! Stay tuned! :)

OK, way too long of a post, but I hope you enjoyed it! I'll try to leave comments on all of your lovely blogs soon! Have a great Tuesday! :)