Temptations

Wednesday

Breakfast: Whole wheat Bagel with peanut butter, apple
Lunch: Leftover quiche and perogies
Dinner: Bow-tie noodles with veggies

When you work for a church - an active church with people in and out all day; Bible studies and community dinners - there's always a lot of leftover food around. Most of it in that "sweets and baked goods" category.

We have this fabulous volunteer, H, who comes in all day every Wednesday and Thursday to answer the phones and do any other tasks that I have on hand which can be done without a computer. Every Wednesday, without fail, he brings in a box of Munchkins from Dunkin Donuts for the office. He typically sits them on the table in the workroom, right on a direct path from my office (behind the workroom) to the rest of the building. Don't you know I consume about a quarter of those things. It's like my former boss, J, and the M&M's... Yesterday, a coworker brought cookies to staff meeting and a bible study left cookies and pastries remaining from their session.

Don't get me wrong, I have an enormous sweet tooth - especially for baked goods. And this temporary vegetarianism isn't about weight loss. But it is a bit about health and a lot about paying attention to what I send to my stomach. There are a lot of cookies involved in that process right now. Especially since Nate baked ginger chocolate chip cookies this weekend...

A friend posted an article to Facebook about a Disney ride at Epcot that has been closed down. It was about healthy habits but clearly demonized overweight people by making them all into villains. I think it was foolish of them to do, especially, as the writer of the article points out, considering what they serve at the theme park's restaurants. If you want to support healthy habits, then exhibit, promote, and offer them above unhealthy ones. And don't make people "bad guys" for their weight and presumed health. Especially if you are contributing to the problem.

Anyway. Today was also the day that the church was hosting its first community supper of the season. They decided to cook chili for the occasion. And they were in the kitchen cooking most of the afternoon. I went in to see what that wonderful cooking smell was and realized that it was the ground beef for the meat chili. *sigh* The woman in charge, D, offered to be sure and save me some vegetarian chili for tomorrow.

Dinner tonight was supposed to be something else - I don't recall what - but Liam was requesting noodles. Nate asked what we should do. I said, "well, let's cook some noodles!" So, low and behold the pantry had a box of bow-tie noodles. I suggested we chop up and saute a bunch of veggies with garlic and then serve them over the pasta with olive oil and grated parmesean. It came out great. We used a lesser variety of veggies than I had imagined, but Nate was in a rush and I couldn't help much because I had to occupy Liam while he cooked. N got frustrated when I insisted we add mushrooms to the dish when he'd pretty much already finished cooking the onions, tomatoes, and peppers he'd chopped up. I had imagined squash and asparagus making it into the dish too, but we just didn't give ourselves the time to chop all that stuff up. Especially since we were figuring this out at 6:30 because after work and picking Liam up, we went to drive by a couple of houses we're considering in our home search.

Thankfully the meal turned out great. If you want to make it, it's really simple:
1 box pasta any shape- boiled to your taste
1 pepper diced
1/2 onion diced
handful or so grape tomatoes cut in half
handful or two of baby bella mushrooms - run through with a knife
about a teaspoon of minced garlic
olive oil and butter
Saute veggies in olive oil, a small pat of butter, and a teaspoon of minced garlic
Add veggies, a little extra olive oil, and a couple handfuls of grated parmesean to the warm, cooked noodles and stir to combine.
Yum.