Wow, today’s lunch made it worth the hour and a half I spent in the kitchen last night! During that hour and a half I did the following:

Made Mark Bittman’s pasta fagioli soup (one of my favorite winter meals!)

(This includes chopping onions [and crying of course], a couple of cloves of garlic, parsley, cooking a box of whole wheat pasta, cooking beans, tomatoes, and said onions, garlic and parsley, along with a stock. All of the steps are easy – but it does take a little bit of time.)

Chopped vegetables and made a salad for lunch

Sliced a baguette, packed one small piece for lunch

Packed a snack bag of carrots and hummus for my afternoon snack

Shaved some fresh parm-reg into a little container to put a top the soup at lunch tomorrow

Packed breakfast

Tried a little sample of the soup

Cleaned up

Looking back at all of this it certainly does not seem like a whole lot of work. But I guess it all adds up..? [Shakes head in disbelief]

Anyhow. Breakfast this morning was a bowl of oatmeal. More discussion on this to come at some point.

When it was lunch time I went out for a walk with Katherine. But the wind was literally howling down the point this afternoon, and neither of us were in the mood to get blown away. We walked for 15 minutes and then sort of gave up. 15 minutes of sun and fresh air is better than nothing I guess.

I was mostly just excited to go upstairs to the staff lunch room and heat up my soup and get my salad. This stuff was good!!

The soup was warm and flavorful – it really hit the spot, as it always does.

The salad was the old stand by:

The only difference with the salad today was the dressing. I could not find Annie’s Goddess light dressing last night at WF [I was totally disappointed in this since it was the only reason I actually went to WF in the first place.] But instead I found Annie’s light honey mustard dressing. I was trying it for the first time today and it was pretty good.

At three this afternoon I had my carrots and humms. A great afternoon snack. But it sort of worked against me, and possibly made me more hungry than I was to begin with. This usually happens to me when I eat a banana for some reason – but not usually carrots. I was a bit miffed.

But thankfully I had a fun snack with me, too. OK, let me level with you: this is one reason [and possibly the only reason] I love Halloween. I can pick up “Fun Size” peanut M&Ms. If you are going to have a small snack of peanut M&Ms, the fun size is sort of the way to go in my book. One of these containers is only 90 calories and 5 grams of fat. I do not remember the rest of the information, but there is at least a gram or two of protein in the mix. 🙂

These babies were good!

Well, that about wraps up the afternoon. See you soon, bloggies – have a great Tuesday evening!