Nutty, Clustery Giveaway!

Happy Wednesday everyone!

I have a new giveaway for you all, but first let me catch up on some food quickly. Here's some of what I've been eating lately. Breakfast today was a lovely bowl of oat bran:


-oat bran
-ground flax
-raspberries
-Naturally More PB
-Almond Butter
-Cottage Cheese

With coffee:

I always seem to have plenty of breakfast pictures for you all and today is no exception. Here is yesterday's breakfast:

A mushroom and spinach omelet with salsa and a piece of ww toast with almond butter.

**I woke up craving mushrooms, so that's what I made. Who craves mushrooms other than me? Seriously! What's the strangest thing you crave regularly or have craved recently? Other than those mushrooms, my regular craves are broccoli, red peppers, chocolate, peanut butter, and oat bran.**

Yesterday I went back to my doctor because my finger infection is NOT going away!! I have started a third course of antibiotics (but a different kind this time--a nastier antibiotic!) and that's one of the reasons I've been eating a lot of yogurt. I've also been taking a probiotic supplement because three courses of antibiotics are really rough on your body! I m really hoping that this new antibiotic clears it up!

Back to breakfast from Monday morning, which was a bowl of cereal:


This was a base of frozen strawberries, with two kind of cereal, plain yogurt and peanut butter.

Later that day I snacked on a yogurt with more cereal and an apple with peanut butter.

And going back all the way to Sunday was another great bowl of oat bran:


-flax
-cottage cheese
-grapes
-almond butter :)

And for lunch I made a "real" meal of an Indian spiced sausage from Whole Foods (I have one more of these that will probably get eaten later today!) as well as sauteed veggies and spaghetti squash topped with hummus. And some red wine! Woo!


On Sunday morning I played with my church and in the afternoon I played an awesome show with a local rock band which was so much fun!

At some point for dinner I had some sauteed veggies with almond butter on them. Don't knock it 'til you try it! This is so good!


And another apple, yes with MORE almond butter.

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And now for the new giveaway of a product that I personally love!!

I am giving away two packages of Nature Valley Nut Clusters in Nut Lovers and Roasted Almond varieties, along with two coupons for $1.60 each off this product! Additionally, I will select a second winner to receive just two coupons also for $1.60 off the product! You can view the full product details and nutritional information here.


How to enter:

There are many ways to enter. Please leave a separate entry for each one you do! I will select the winner via random integer generation next Wednesday, Sept. 30th!

1. Leave a comment on this post telling why you would like to try this new product, or if you've already tried it, what your thoughts on it were.

2. Follow my blog and/or add me to your Google Reader or let me know if you already do.

3. Spread the word about this giveaway by linking back to it on your own blog.

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I'm off to work out then teach all afternoon! Happy hump day!

My big, fat, Greek wedding!

OK, in regards to the title. It's not mine, I just played a wedding today (cocktail hour only) and it was a Greek family with a large number of people in attendance. It was beautiful, but it definitely reminded me of the movie!! :) What's the coolest wedding you've ever been to? Were you in the wedding party or just a guest? What made it so memorable? Being a professional musician, I've probably played well over 100 weddings. I was the maid of honor at my sister's and that was definitely the most personal for me. But I always enjoy playing for weddings. It never gets boring for me, because I remind myself that even if I've played "Pachelbel's Canon" and "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" 926,459 times, the bride and groom want to have them played for their special day and I try to give every single bride and groom the respect that they deserve! And knowing that they are trusting me with the music for their wedding, makes every event unique and thrilling. I really do love interacting with people, and I try to make the bride feel super comfortable around me. Basically, I give every event 100% of my focus, my effort and my cheerful attitude!

Wow, that turned out to be pretty long. Well, onto my eats from the last few days.

Here's a weird, boring breakfast: (don't worry--that's the last of my Boca sausages and homemade banana bread for now. I hear you rejoicing and thinking "maybe she'll actually have something interesting for breakfast for a change!")

Yes, that is, once again, broccoli with spinach and feta hummus, a Boca link, and banana bread with PB. In a moment of daring boldness I added some carob chips! Woo! Haha, I'm all about the adventure!

And here's the coffee I've been enjoying for almost all of my recent breakfast posts! There is something ridiculously comforting about it! In fact, I'm already looking forward to drinking it tomorrow morning!


My exciting purchase of the week (geez, I need to go shopping more often!) is a new sports bra from TJ Maxx. I love that store! And I promise that the color is a much prettier blue in real life than it is in this picture! The lighting in my room is weird.



Back to food...and drink!

I've been enjoying this bottle of goodness all week. (Resveratrol anyone?)

I went to Whole Foods, pretty much my favorite place ever, and bought a bunch of good things including crack, I mean almond butter!

There are technically 11 servings in this jar, but it's not going to last me anywhere near that long! :)

And then I got in a cooking mood (and no one else was home, so I had the whole kitchen to myself!) so I went on a cooking spree.

I cooked a huge pan of veggies, mainly an organic purple cabbage, tofu, a red pepper and 3/4 of a purple onion. In EVOO with soy sauce and added Sriracha.


So good and I have a HUGE tupperware now full of delicious cooked veggies!


I also cooked up a spaghetti squash that I bought.

When it's done, the inside will shred into "noodles", hence giving it its name. Like this:

(I have a huge tupperware of that in my fridge now, too!)

Just for fun I decided to cook up some brown rice...I need to eat up all this cooked food before it goes bad!

And then I topped some of the eggplant slices I made earlier with a new kind of vegan "lunch meat" that I found at Whole Foods. This is SOOO good, by the way! :)

(There were many more slices of eggplant and lunch meat eaten!)

Today I started off with a lovely omelet filled with the veggie mixture I made and a little provolone cheese, and topped with salsa. (Hallelujah! She actually ate something more interesting for breakfast!)

I was definitely still hungry so I had a piece of toast with almond butter.

I may have had a second piece as well! You'll be seeing a lot more almond butter in the next few days! This stuff is one of the best things I've ever eaten!

And I had a busy day today, so I packed this ridiculously delicious sandwich: AB and sliced peaches!

And yes, I spread a li'l AB on the other piece of bread, too. It's OK, you can be jealous. Yeah, I'm jealous that I got to eat something so delicious!

And I ate the rest of peach, too.


I also packed a Luna bar and some almonds, but I didn't need the almonds.

And after a very long day, I came home and made myself a delicious dinner to sit down to and read with:

It's more eggplant with two kinds of lunch meat, some spaghetti squash, some veggies and a glass of red wine! So very good! Good enough for seconds!


And don't forget about dessert:


That might or might not be topped with more almond butter! Augh--this stuff is so addicting. But trust me; it's a very happy addiction. :)

And I have two more random pictures on my camera. First, my breakfast yesterday was a delicious bowl of oat bran with AB, grapes and cottage cheese.

And what post of mine would be complete without some chocolate? Right, that's what I thought!

Gotta get those antioxidants in! :)

Here are some awesome giveaways!

-NiftyEats is giving away Dr. Kracker products!
-Prior Fat Girl is giving away some of her favorite things.
-Justine is giving away a coupon for a free Kombucha...that most delicious fizzy fermented drink! Yum!
-Missy is giving away Zevia diet sodas! I've wanted to try these for so long but I can't find them near me!

It's now after midnight here and I have to get up early to play violin at my church in the morning. And I have a big show tomorrow afternoon with a rock band, so I better get some sleep! Good night!

If you want to make God laugh tell Him your plans

Good morning! The show yesterday only went OK; it wasn't very well attended and it was our first show back after about three weeks so we had a few technical errors. But it makes me feel more confident about our show here in town tomorrow, so that's good! :) A few of you have asked about my new CD and I'll be e-mailing you privately about how you could get it. Again, I am just keeping relatively anonymous on this blog due to my work both in the classical music world and the non-classical world to which I am branching out. I think it would be weird for people to come across this food blog if they Google stalk us, which is starting to happen more and more as we play bigger shows and are starting to get a little press coverage with the release of our new CD. I will let you know that the CD (and my band's) genre is acoustic indie folk songwriter, and we perform all of our own original music. :)

I had an amazing HUGE sweet potato and black bean burrito at the show venue from a local Mexican food shop. I couldn't get a good picture unfortunately. I also had a few fun-size chocolates and I snacked on this in the car on the way home:


I got home around 1am and --ahem-- ended up hanging out with the boy just talking about everything until about 4am. Oops. The thing is, before I had a boyfriend I thought that whenever I was in a relationship that I'd still be more interested in my life (in an honestly pretty selfish way), but he's changing all that. In fact, I wasn't looking to be in a relationship for precisely that reason. (Neither was he, which I find ironic!) We were and are both super involved with our music and I didn't want anyone to get in the way of that. And he ISN'T, at all!! In fact, he's having a good effect on me as a musician, and as a person, which is always how I've heard it's supposed to work. We remind each other that we don't have to see each other everyday and we sort of bypassed the whole "awkward, going out on dates stage" altogether, which I don't mind at all. Anyway, quote of the day, since I wasn't planning on having a boyfriend:

"If you want to make God laugh tell Him your plans!"

So yesterday I stopped into Starbucks for a Venti unsweetened iced coffee, light ice, which is my summer coffee drink of choice! I thought this was funny:


For breakfast today I had a fairly un-colorful bowl of oats, but at least it tasted good! :)

1/2 C oats
(*out of pumpkin!*)
2 tsps ground flax
1 chopped fig
1 TB (?) soy nuts
1 TB (?) peak protein granola
strawberry yogurt


I wanted a little more protein, so I only ate half the yogurt and switched it up with cottage cheese and AB half way through. I feel like a half eaten picture of breakfast is weird, but that's (one reason) why I love the blog world so much. I don't think any of you will find this weird.

One more serving in this guy after today! I seriously have *4* opened jars of nut butter in my cupboard!

• PB from Trader Joes
• PB Loco, Jungle Banana flavored
• Sunflower Seed butter
• the jar of AB pictured above

Haha! It wouldn't hurt to finish one! :)

By the way, speaking of Sunflower Seed Butter, you can request a free sample of it here. Use authorization code 0428 on the form. :)

And while we're on the topic of free samples, you can also request ZingiberRx, topical joint and muscle cream with this form. I am SUPER excited for this free sample because I have some fairly bad overuse injuries with the violin and I have a fair amount of upper back/shoulder pain (in my right, bowing shoulder) that I'm always trying to be super careful with.

And apparently this is the day for free samples of overuse injury products because Curamin is offering a pill that they claim helps support the bodies' natural defense mechanism against overuse pain. I don't know if I believe them, but I'd like to try it, especially considering my work as a violinist, with chronically sore shoulders. You can also request it here.

Here are two giveaways happening in the blog world:

Lauren at Ginger is the New Pink is giving away some great raw foods.

AnAppleADay at Blue Sky World is having a gigantic giveaway in celebration of Mother's Day!

Lastly, the amazingly cool Jess at Have Faith gave me this blogger award:


The Renee Award is one of the most meaningful awards in blog world because it honors someone who is incredibly inspirational in her intelligent and witty writing. And by doing so, this award celebrates women’s smart, strong and inspirational spirit! It honors women who spread joy and love like an Acorn……a small package growing into a tall and sturdy oak tree which gives more acorns…………..

Thank you Jess!!

I'm passing it on to Emily, Mi, Emma, Mariposa and Sarah. You girls are so great and I also love reading your blogs! :)

Attack of the sweet tooth!

Good morning and happy Friday everyone! Does anyone have any fun weekend plans? Mine include:

-two hour rehearsal with a friend today (he's a guitarist, and I'm practicing my jazz violin improv skills! woohoo!)
-dinner with friends tonight
-small local art festival tonight with other friends. :)
-quick grocery shop for fresh produce (and chocolate covered ginger for my boyfriend--he's never had it so I'm buying him the TJs kind and also some spicy ginger chews!)
-mail a contract for a festival I'm playing at this summer
-teach tomorrow morning
-play with a string trio for a wedding tomorrow afternoon
-teach a couple lessons on Sunday
-hang out with the boyfriend :)
-a couple workouts thrown in there somewhere

Breakfast today was a change of pace. I had two slices of whole grain bread with PB, cottage cheese, a drizzle of agave nectar (in the cottage cheese--this is delicious!) and an extremely overripe (but yummy) banana.


With coffee:


Yesterday my sweet tooth attacked hard. I'm not sure why, and it's really OK, but I ended up eating quite a bit more than I planned. Afternoon recap here. I had some leftover Chinese food for lunch. I actually broke open the egg roll and mostly ate the inside. I don't do this often (too ED-ish) but the egg roll wrapping isn't exactly healthy and I didn't see anything wrong with it.


After lunch I wanted something sweet so I had a Vitatop.


and I ended up also having a Vitabrownie (no picture), a lemon bar, a leftover bite of a cornflake chewy


and a coconut blondie.


In the afternoon I got my free sample of Barney Butter in the mail!!


I immediately had to try one, of course, so I ate a banana with the AB on it.

And a glass of milk on the side.


My workout was a 30 minute run (just under 3 miles) and 14 minutes on the Expresso bike (at a racing pace the whole time! I ended up beating my ghost ride [Ghost rider = previous personal best time] by over 90 seconds!)

My boyfriend and I had dinner together yesterday at a Middle Eastern food restaurant. It's one of my favorites in town because it's healthy, fresh, cheap and absolutely delicious! We split hummus and pitas for an appetizer and then each got the same thing (not planned!) of a charbroiled chicken pita wrap with turnips, tomatoes and some kind of yummy sauce. We also talked for a long time over a drink (singular!); I had a cranberry and vodka. And then we walked for about 20 minutes and talked while eating two squares of Lindt 85% dark chocolate.

During one of my lessons yesterday, the girl I was teaching (who has been studying with me for 3 years) mentioned something about not getting enough calcium and somehow we got on the topics of nutrition and then weight. And she told me (confided in me?) that she is scared to gain weight, despite being (at least up to this point) naturally thin. She is vegetarian (probably because it's the popular thing to do among her friends, which is fine; it's much less fine if she's doing it to restrict more kinds of food to eat) and she is very active. But a HUGE red flag went up for me when she said that. I have had one student in the past who was also a young girl, around 13 years old, who struggled with anorexia. I noticed almost immediately as I had those same struggles in the past. It's fairly easy for me to tell the difference between when someone is naturally thin (or even, God forbid, has an illness like cancer or something) and when someone has an ED. I don't mean to sound flippant at all but you can just tell by the look in their eyes; anorexia steals the sparkle and joy from them. Their vivacity and spirit are just gone, or very close to gone. I'm not talking so much about the physical appearance; I almost think the lifelessness is sadder to see. I remember in my recovery that people made comments all the time about how pretty my smile was, and how much happier seemed, etc. I realized the meant that, ESPECIALLY now looking back at pictures from that time. *Shudders* Anyway, the whole point of this is to say that I got a little worried about my one student from yesterday and I will DEFINITELY be keeping my eye on her. I talked to her (in a joking, non-lecturing way) about why it is GOOD to gain some weight while growing up, especially since her doctor is almost yelling at her now because she is a bit too thin, and I reassured her that ALL the guys I talk to (I have MANY male friends!) unanimously agree that they like women that look healthy, curvy and full of life! It's a good thing, and it's beautiful!

In giveaway news, Daily Dulcie is giving away Holey Donuts!

Have an awesome day and weekend! Hopefully I'll be back before Monday morning, but I'm never really sure of how my weekend will unfold!