Healthy

Healthy(er) Chocolate Chunk Banana Oat Cookies

~ atastytrip ~ 1 Comment

Hi! Happy Labor Day Weekend! I have had quite the interesting last few days….

Butter-sugar  Creamed banana and egg

I went to the gym on Thursday after work to run and had a big time treadmill accident 😦 Before you start laughing, it was only half my fault and apparently happens a lot more often than people realize. Or maybe people are just trying to make me feel better by sharing treadmill horror stories? If so, it’s working, keep ’em coming!

wet  mix

In a nutshell, I was waiting for a treadmill (all full of high school kids since one of our local school’s track teams practices there) and a boy jumped off the front of his and jogged away. The treadmills at my gym are all in a row so you can get on/off from either the front (a squeeze) or the back. I saw him hop off, thought “oh good, an open one!” and hopped onto it from the back. I didn’t look down (my mistake) and thus failed to notice that he hadn’t stopped the treadmill, and had instead left it running at a very high speed (his mistake). Needless to say I was immediately flung off the back of the treadmill and skinned both ankles and my knee in the process. The treadmills also back up to a wall with only about a foot of space in between wall/treadmill so once I was flung off, I basically became trapped in a sitting position between the wall and the still running treadmill until I was able to stand up. It was only for a few seconds but it managed to take a lot of skin off several areas of my back and leave some nasty treadmill burns. I would share a photo but it’s pretty yucky and no one really wants to see that. So the moral of the story is… working out is hazardous to your health!

Oat Mixture

Only kidding of course 🙂 The REAL moral of that story is always look down before you hop on a treadmill! And NEVER leave one running when you get off… SO dangerous!

Dark Chocolate  Finished Mix

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Slow Saturday Breakfast: Tropical Baked Oatmeal

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And just like that it’s Monday again. They always come back around so quickly don’t they? Robert and I had a great, full weekend. We went on a dinner date Friday night, spent Saturday on the boat with friends and spent Sunday at the beach celebrating the first birthday of a friend’s darling daughter.  It doesn’t get much cuter than a baby at the beach. Except maybe a baby Renly at the beach Smile

 Renly-First-Beach-Trip.jpg

On a serious note, I realized today that summer break is half way over Sad smile Four weeks down, four to go. Most of last summer was so full of wedding craziness that this one has seemed so much more laid back and relaxing. A girl could really get used to this! I am always ready and excited to start the new school year when it is time, but I will definitely miss all the sleeping in extra time in the kitchen.

Sliced bananas  Layered Fruit

During the school year I typically go to the gym in the morning on my way to work. This means waking up VERY early and packing my breakfast to eat at school. I relish weekend breakfasts during the school year because I actually get to take my time making something a little more laborious, and enjoy it with my husband!

Oat Pour  Egg Pour

Baked oatmeal is a great dish to enjoy slowly on the weekend, fresh out of the oven, BUT it is also perfect for the work week because it re-heats beautifully.  Mangoes can be tricky to cut, so if you are struggling (and haven’t youtube’d it yet) let me show you how I do it. The easiest way I have found to cut a mango is to basically slice it into thirds. The pit of a mango is flat and in the middle. You will want to place the mango upright on the cutting board and cut along the sides of the pit (from top to bottom)  so you are left with three pieces. The middle piece which contains the pit, and the two outside halves.

 How to slice a mango

These halves are where you will get your fruit. I then like to score the halves, vertically and horizontally, taking care not to cut all the way through the peel.

 Diced Mango

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Creamy Cucumber Soup

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I hope everyone had a great holiday weekend! I loved visiting with my parents and we all had a fabulous 4th!

 Family

After spending the day roaming around town with my parents on Friday, we grilled out at home for dinner and then took the boat to get ice cream with Robert’s whole family. On Saturday we had a fantastic cookout on his sister’s new porch and watched the annual neighborhood 4th of July golf cart parade. All the kids in the neighborhood decorate their bikes, scooters golf carts and then caravan around the neighborhood and throw out candy while everyone watches from their lawns. This was my first year experiencing it but I thought it was such a cute tradition!

GC Parade GC Parade 2

It rained Saturday evening which was kind of a bust and delayed a lot of the fireworks, but we did manage to catch a few and enjoyed our time together nonetheless.

Festive Family
My adorably festive Aunt & Mother in Law

On Sunday my parents and I took a day trip to Savannah to celebrate my dad’s birthday in one of his favorite cities. He used to travel to Savannah often for work so he toured us around the city and then we came home and met Robert for a casual dinner out. Happy 61st Dad!

 Dad's Bday

I am missing my parents already but I am happy to do a bit of detoxing after a weekend full of barbeque, birthday margaritas and red white and blue desserts. Fun, delicious and oh so worth it, but it IS nice to get back on track.

Remember those herb pots my mother was bringing down, aren’t they great looking?

 Herb Pots

She had my dad make these cute wine cork labels, which I thought were adorable and will probably be replicating in the future.

 Cork Markers

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Super Spinach Pesto

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Happy Wednesday! I’m back in toasty (and I do mean toasty, hello 90 degree heat and sweaty armpits, I did not miss you) South Carolina after our jaunt in the Windy City. We had such a fabulous trip and packed A LOT into our brief stay. I can’t wait to share it with you!

 IMG_1331

Since we’ve been back I have been catching up on laundry, and Renly cuddles.

Ren 2

Goodness I miss that sweet face when he’s not around.

I’ve also been getting back into my gym routine and buying lots of healthy groceries after an indulgent weekend away. Fancy dinners and deep dish pizza lunches call for zucchini noodle recovery.  Confession…. You know those annoying people who say things like “I would order a cheeseburger but I just LOVE salad” when you go out to eat? I might be one of them. I know.

 Finished Pesto

I actually do love salad, but not because I’m an annoying health nut (or at least I hope not) but rather because I eat salad a lot and I think they taste delicious. I have definitely discovered over the last few years of eating better, that I tend to crave whatever I’m in the habit of eating, be it healthy or less so. Humans are creatures of habit and if you are in a routine of eating whole, good for you things, you want to continue eating whole, good for you things and not just because you know they are good for you, but because they actually start to taste good to you. I think this is why the most successful diets are those that help you cultivate new habits that stick with you longer than the prescribed 21, 30, whatever number of days. Once you start enjoying the good for you stuff, you’re going to want to stick with it.

Now, that isn’t to say you shouldn’t enjoy the moment and indulge when it’s worth it, I certainly enjoyed my deep dish pizza, BUT it is nice to be back home and get back on track. So now we’ll get to the recipe Smile

 Ingredients

I adore pesto (and pretty much all things Italian) and have been making it from scratch ever since I realized how simple it was. Store bought pesto can be pricy (thanks pine nuts) and loaded with calories. You can make your own less expensive, equally as delicious and much better for you version at home. All you need is a food processor (or a good blender would probably work too).

 Ingredients plus Lemon

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Healthy Coconut Chocolate Chunk Oatmeal Cookies

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Happy Monday! I know most Mondays aren’t all that happy but a batch of cookies should improve it drastically. Cookies almost always improve things drastically right? Especially cookies that have the words healthy AND chocolate in their name.

 Finished Cookies

I first experimented with these cookies a few weeks ago when I had some leftover chocolate bars after some serious s’more making. I’m not typically a baker, but I was in the mood for something sweet and not terribly bad for you. I decided to try and make these as figure friendly as I could while still passing the Robert test. The Robert test means I can feed him a cookie (or a pancake) and he just says “yum, that’s really good” instead of “Yum that’s really good but I can tell it’s healthy because it’s not very sweet/got a weird texture/is really flat for a pancake/etc”. What can I say, health-ifying baked goods isn’t ALWAYS a great success. Luckily these passed the Robert test with flying colors and he immediately ate 4 of them.  I have since made them several times, including a batch to take to our dear friends and brand new parents Ben and Annie! We went to deliver casseroles and cookies and meet baby Cooper over the weekend once they were home from the hospital and my goodness, she was even tinier and more adorable than I ever could have imagined!

 Cooper

So sweet! Robert loves babies and it was pretty precious to watch him hold her, and even more precious to see how excited he was for our friends. SOMEDAY we will be ready for one of our own and I know he will be a fantastic father. For now he will have to settle for Renly… and cookies Smile

Renly 2
Robert and his big baby

So what exactly makes these cookies so healthy you may wonder? Well for starters, there is NO refined sugar, they are sweetened with just a little honey and whatever you choose to mix in. I chose chopped dark chocolate and coconut, but you could use nuts, raisins, dried cranberries, even M and M’s, whatever your heart desires! There is also no dairy in these cookies, no eggs or butter and no oil! I replaced all of the above with unsweetened applesauce and it worked! Hooray!

 Ingredients

Confession: Often Sometimes when I bake I don’t read the recipe all the way through. I know this is the cardinal sin of baking, hence why I am not the best baker and don’t do it often. Cooking is a lot more forgiving, baking, well, let’s just say that if I had a dollar for every time I have started mixing ingredients only to realize that whoops, should have separated the wet from the dry first…well, yeah, I’d have a lot of dollars.

Honey Honey drizzle

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