WIAW

Happy birthday to Heidi, one of my best friends! I'm so glad we have experienced so much of life together, from cheering on the Bruins on the sidelines to living together in college to celebrating our weddings together, being pregnant together, and now sharing the joys of motherhood together! I hope you had a wonderful day!

Happy Thursday to you all! Hope the week has been treating you well. Today was an especially productive day, so I'm looking forward to a solid night of sleep before starting over again tomorrow. I can't believe Halloween is this Friday! There are actually a lot of local events around our area--a carnival, a "Halloween walk," and a festival of sorts. Terry and I are hoping to bring Marshall to one event for a little bit just so we can enjoy the festivities and get a picture of all three of us on Marshall's first Halloween.

I know it's WIAW, and I didn't eat this meal today, but I thought I'd share that I'm slowly finding fun ways to get out of my meal planning slump. Yesterday I thought all day about what to make for dinner. The challenge: I had a TON of greens about to go bad, so I knew we would need to cook them down for part of the meal. Usually I'll throw sauteed greens into a bowl of pasta and call it a day, but we ate pasta the night before. So I came up with the idea to make breakfast for dinner, and this happened:

First, I baked up some fresh biscuits using Lisa's recipe. I didn't have nearly enough milk, so I used about 1/4 cup milk and 3/4 cup Greek yogurt. They turned out great! Then I sauteed those greens in a little butter, sliced and heated up some sausage, and fried some eggs. I really wanted to try crispy eggs, but I got the pan hot and added butter and suddenly our apartment was filled with smoke. Terry and I rushed around turning on fans and opening doors to prevent the smoke alarm from beeping (success! Although with that amount of smoke, I kind of wish it had gone off because now I'm convinced it doesn't work), and I settled on regular ol' fried eggs instead. Still tasty. Oh, and we added some avocado, which was a great idea.

So here's what I actually ate today:

Breakfast: two pumpkin pancakes topped with maple syrup (devoured while running around getting Marshall and myself ready to meet up with a few other moms and babies). I used this recipe for the pancakes and added half a can of pumpkin instead of the bananas.

Our walk with the other moms was so fun! These are the ladies I met while walking on the Strand a few weeks back. Four of us met up today (the other three babies are two months old, so Marshall is ancient, but it's so fun to get to know some new people!). We met at Point Vicente and walked along the beautiful cliffs.

For lunch I assembled a turkey and cheese "toaster quesadilla" which is just a regular quesadilla but with no dishes. I topped it with the other half of the avocado from last night's dinner and had an apple on the side.

Later in the day I got to enjoy a little break. Marshall stayed home with family while I grabbed an almond croissant at a local bakery and ran a few errands.

I forgot to take a photo of dinner, but it was delicious! And best of all--I didn't make it. (Much as I love cooking, I also love getting a few other things done, sitting down to a homemade meal, and not even having to do dishes. I was totally spoiled today.) I had a salad with bell peppers and cucumbers, limoncello pasta (<--link to the recipe), toast with Parmesan on top, and Brussels sprouts. Delicious meal.

For dessert I ate a brownie with new-to-me coconut ice cream. I've been craving ice cream in a bad way lately, but I'm still avoiding it at night because it bothers Marshall's tummy. I've read good things about So Delicious ice cream, and then yesterday I saw that the brand is strongly anti-GMO, so I decided to support them and bought some tonight. It was pretty good. It's not ice cream, but it'll get me through. I topped it with some granola.

I'm really ready for the weekend over here. I hope you have a great day! Check out the other WIAWs!