Eating boldly and beautifully

**It was so great to read all of your comments about the article yesterday! You all had some great points, and it was fun to generate some discussion!!**

As far as Mondays go, this one turned out P.D.G.A.T.T.

Pretty darn good and tasty too!

When we were in high school, Bobby and I used to make up random acronyms for each other to figure out. And yes, we were just as cool then as we are now 🙂

BREAKFAST

I was in a bit of a rush this morning because I was making some final preparations for my mom’s visit, so no stove top oats for me! Instead, I had a packet of Quaker Maple & Brown Sugar instant oatmeal with 1/2 cup unsweetened vanilla almond milk.

To make the meal more substantial, I added 1/4 cup of Trader Joe’s High Fiber O’s and about 1 tbsp. of the Nutz Over Raspberries and Chocolate trail mix.

Unfortunately, I was in such a rush that I had no time for Coffee Cocoa 🙁 So to compensate, I had a cup of hot chocolate as soon as I got to the office!

MORNING SNACK

My stomach started growling at about 11:00 this morning, so I pulled out my little bag of David Pumpkin Seeds to hold me over until lunch.

LUNCH

I started out my lunch with foods I packed from home, and ended lunch eating boldly and beautifully (read on for more on that). First things first: a perfectly ripe banana.

Then I pulled out my sandwich: sliced turkey and honey mustard on Arnold Flax & Fiber bread. I love love love the heel of the bread – am I alone in this?

We had an hour-long meeting after I ate both of those, and by the time that was over I was still feeling a little hungry, so I took it as a sign to eat more! I’ve been meaning to try out a salad place near my office, so I decided to go ahead and take the plunge today. It’s called Ponte Fresco, and its slogan is “eat bold, eat beautiful!”

Basically, you pick your lettuce and pick the ingredients that go into your salad – 50 cents per ingredient. Then they take a huge chopping device (not sure exactly what it would be called) and chop all the ingredients into tiny pieces for your eating pleasure. Then they toss it in whatever dressing you desire – they have at least 20 varieties – and voila! A delicious, fresh salad for a reasonable price!

I ended up choosing a spinach salad with black beans, corn, black olives and green peppers, tossed in an Oriental Sesame dressing. It was amazing – and I can’t wait to go back!

DINNER

I couldn’t wait to get done with work and go home to see my mom! Hurray!! By the time I got back, we were pretty hungry, so my mom, Bobby and I headed to dinner. We ended up going to McCormick & Schmick’s, a really, really good seafood restaurant. If you like seafood, it is one of the best I have ever been to.

I started out with an Arnold Palmer to drink – a mix of iced tea and lemonade. This one was really good – not too sweet, and it even had some foam at the top for some reason 🙂

Speaking of bread baskets, I of course had a piece from ours! It was by no means the most gourmet bread, but we ended up getting mussels as an appetizer, and the bread was perfect for dipping in the sauce underneath the mussel platter.

Perfect for dipping in this sauce:

For dinner, I had cornmeal-crusted walleye. It came with a horseradish cream sauce, as well as a corn and sweet potato succotash.

Everything on this plate was fantastic. I’ve got to try making that succotash at home sometime. The bite-sized pieces were awesome!

As if that meal wasn’t complete in and of itself, we decided to order a small dessert 🙂 We ended up choosing the creme brulee, which was disappointing. It was so small that each of us probably got three bites – which I suppose is plenty for a dessert, but a bit more would have been nice – and those three bites weren’t very tasty.

I did get to eat the raspberry though, so at least I got in some fruit, haha 😉

So not much on the homemade front today, but definitely some good eats. I highly recommend this restaurant as a once-in-a-while treat because they literally change their menus twice a day to account for all the different kinds of fresh fish they bring in.

I’m SO glad to have my mom here! We’ve got some exciting things planned! It’s going to be a tiring week with work thrown into the mix, but a fun one to be sure. Thanks again for all of your great comments yesterday – I enjoy posting those links for that very reason!