Beef and Zucchini Meatball Sub

The weather was only 32 degrees when I started my walk yesterday morning, but we had I high of 73 yesterday and it was glorious!  Sadly, it didn’t last long as today, is cool and rainy, but just feeling a glimpse of spring is hopeful!  I only got 20 minutes in, but that was better than being on Facebook for 20 minutes!

I ended up having another breakfast parfait – this time with 1/4 cup apple, 1/4 cup banana, 1/4 cup granola and plain Chobani. 

I ended up not taking a lunch yesterday, well, I took a lunch but went across the street from my office and had my MRI done on my knee.  I won’t know the results until next Tuesday, so we’ll just have to wait and see.  I got to have headphones on and she asked what kind of music I liked.  Well, I like just about everything (except Country really) but I said “how about something accoustic?”  It was Pandora, so not sure what was playing but I nearly took a nap on the table the 30 minutes I was on it!

So the Protein Challenge that I am involved in, while taking a bit of planning, it really isn’t that hard to get 30 grams of protein each meal.  Well, mainly because I like beef.  Tony never really liked meatballs at all.  The only kind he would eat were when I sliced them thin and put them on pizza.  So I decided to see if I could make a healthier ball to make a meatball sub for my lunch. I am putting the nutrition label for each meatball – I thought I could have fit six meatballs on a sandwich, turns out four was plenty!  This batch made 36 meatballs.

• 1 pound 95% lean ground sirloin
• 1.5 teaspoons minced garlic
• 1 cup finely chopped baby spinach
• 1/2 cup oat flour (just pulse 1/2 cup of oats in food processor)
• 1 large egg, beaten
• 1/4 cup Parmesan cheese
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon pepper
• 1 teaspoon crushed red pepper
• 1 teaspoon Italian seasoning

Mix everything together, making sure the egg is incorporated.  Heat a skillet over medium high heat.  Since I am using my Green skillet, I didn’t use anything other than Pam.  You want to brown all sides of the meatball, but not cook it all the way through.  I had homemade marinara sauce (no recipe really!) in a pot over medium low heat on the side.  Once the meatballs browned, I just threw them into the sauce pot and covered them and let them simmer about 10 minutes.

Once at work I took a light hot dog bun and put 3/4 of an ounce (1 slice) of mozzarella cheese in the bun, put that under the toaster oven to melt while I heated up the balls in the microwave.  Then just added the balls, some sauce and had carrots and cucumber on the side.  Not shown is 1/2 a cup of 2% cottage cheese, so my lunch protein came in at 35 grams.

I think the ground oats gave the meatballs just the right amount of texture – the balls weren’t soft at all like the last time I made them.  I mean, come on, soft balls have their time and place, but not on a meatball sub!

Driving home the first thing I did was open the sun roof.  It was glorious!  I had planned on hitting up the nature trail that is literally a 2 minute drive from my house and a place I don’t take advantage of often enough!  I texted Hannah if she wanted to go with me, she said yes! but when I got home she and Jacob just decided to hang out in the gazebo. 

I wore my White Sox shirt for their season opener – their home opener isn’t until April 10.

But the sun was amazing!  Perfect weather!

Since I didn’t workout out at lunch I had to get my steps in and added another 4500 before dinner.   I had to show you this picture though – it’s representative of April in Chicagoland – only here can you have temps in the 70s and still have snow on the ground!

I ended up making a super quick dinner.  It came together really quickly because I made the naan bread on Sunday morning.  And I marinated the chicken overnight – simply used 1 teaspoon olive oil, 1 teaspoon Greek seasoning and one squeezed lemon and I kept the lemon in the bag overnight.  Hannah chopped up the tomato and cucumber and the chicken only needed to be cooked about six minutes because they were cut pretty thin.  Hannah doesn’t like chicken, so I cut it thin, but in the end she chopped hers up anyway.

I had sweet potato fries on the side – this was so delicious, although I overcooked the chicken just a tad – oh well!  Hannah and Jacob both gave these two big thumbs up.  I think the homemade naan bread makes it though!

I have a huge shout out to my friend Skippy Mom – she sent me the cutest snowmen – um, you see, we both have a pretty big passion for snowmen and let’s just say we feel its appropriate to leave some of them around all year long.  These will be added to my desk where I have a small collection, one of them being a Halloween snowman blog reader Kym sent me – I see it every day Kym and smile when I see it!

Thank you so much Janine! 

So I did pretty good without my lunch time workout and ended up with:

Alright, Hannah’s working this morning so I need to stop by her work on my way in.  I still have 25 minutes before I have to leave though, pretty sure I could make pancakes again if I wanted!

Make it a great day!