I didn’t need to see that.

Another gorgeous summer day in the books.  I am happy to say that I got out before work for a run/walk.  This time I ended up walking a song, and then running a song.  The best part was that I never really knew when the running would end, but I knew most songs couldn’t be more than four minutes or so, so I stuck with it.  Sometimes it’s mind over matter when running – you can feel fine but talk yourself out of continuing. I ended up doing 3 miles in just under 40 minutes.

Since it was a work day, another staggered eats day.  I ended up making my 1 point fruit sauce, but ended up making it into a waffle topping.  1 cup mixed frozen fruit (mine was mixed berry) 1/2 cup water mixed with 1 teaspoon corn starch.  Cook that over medium heat for 5 minutes until the sauce gets thick.  This time I ditched the added 1 teaspoon sugar if I were making this into a parfait, and instead added 1 tablespoon Smuckers sugar free pancake syrup.  My waffles were 4 points, the fruit topping 1, then an egg for 2, and two pieces of uncured bacon for 2.  9 points for breakfast that I ate around 10:45.

In case you are wondering, that’s my living room floor – the light seemed to be okay there, but within 10 seconds of me putting that on the floor, both dogs thought my plate was theirs for the taking!  Luckily I scooped it up in time.  I love, love this fruit topping.  Lori, you would love this!   It’s tart and just slightly sweet.  And my twin sister made waffles for breakfast too – #twinpowersactivate!

The market I do on Thursday’s is in Lincoln Square in Chicago.  It’s hit or miss on the traffic, so we give ourselves a lot of wiggle room, and ended up getting there nearly an hour and a half early!  It was okay, because we weren’t rushed to unpack and the weather was nice.  It wasn’t until we finished unpacking that I realized we were missing one thing.  A knife!  Pretty sure it would be hard to cut a flour tortilla wrap with just a plastic spoon.  As luck would have it, The Chopping Block was right down the street.   I puffy heart that store.  That’s where we had one of our beef events back in 2013.   And when I was doing a photo shoot for a diabetes magazine a mere three weeks after being at The Chopping Block, and the photographer was looking for a place to shoot, I called The Chopping Block downtown, and they more than accommodated us – gave us one of their test kitchens for 1/2 a day for free!  I really can’t believe this picture is almost 3 years old already!

For the record, I still don’t own anything red, even though I think it’s a good color on me, no?  Anywho, I bought an $11.95 knife to get us through the market and I am keeping it and bringing it with me just in case.  And with that new knife I was able to cut my wrap for lunch in half.  I brought a ham, cheese, greens and added our house made giardinera with buffalo pretzel thins and cherries for dessert.  Lunch came in at 8 smart points.

I actually slept in this morning, and when I checked my phone, I saw that The Chopping Block left me a comment and is now following me – cool beans!  I would love to work in their store – how fun would that be?!

So the kid I worked with is TOTALLY into this new Pokemon Go.   He recently bought his first car – a 1995 Astro van with wood paneling on the inside.  In case you are wondering, that’s the same year this kid was born.  Anywho, he had all these sayings written on all the windows of his van “This van makes frequent stops – go Team Yellow!” and stuff like that.  The problem was that he had this Pokemon Go thing on his phone THE ENTIRE TIME we were driving to the market.  Let me clarify that.  The entire time HE was driving.  He kept looking down at his phone – I don’t know what he was looking for because the screen always looked like this:

I finally had to tell him to turn the phone around because it was driving me insane.  This kid also doesn’t believe in belts, and more than once I’ve had to make him a belt out of saran wrap to keep his pants up.  As he was helping unload the van, he bent down, and his pants went so far down that I saw that he had a tattoo smack dab in the middle of his left butt cheek.  Um, I didn’t need to see that!   The market went by fast – we sold a ton of wraps, even ran out of spinach tortillas and greens by 6:30 – a full hour before we normally would shut down.  Again, the owner wanted the kid to cook – kind of drives me nuts because I am a multi-tasker, and this kid definitely is not and was in the weeds pretty much the whole time.  No matter how many times I asked him to pre-make burgers so people wouldn’t have to wait 10 minutes for a wrap, he never did so he was always behind.  For some people it didn’t matter to wait, they could just walk around the market.  But I had a couple people cancel their order because it was taking too long.

I ended up not getting home until nearly 10:15 last night.  Again, doing the low carb thing on the nights I work late, I ended up making steak.  Jewel had t-bone steak on sale for $5.99 a pound.  The steak I picked up came in at exactly $5.  The points are higher on t-bone steak because of the higher fat content, but totally worth it in my opinion.   I ended up eating 4 ounces of this beef for dinner for 8 points.  I added sautéed mushrooms and sliced peach on top – and actually really loved the sweet/salty/beefy combo.

The perfect bite:

I used the Hardcore Carnivore black rub again, and cooked it in my cast iron skillet over medium high heat for 3 minutes a side exactly for medium rare.   So good!

And with the leftovers I am going to be making a beef and egg breakfast burrito this morning, and probably have a beef stir fry of some sort for lunch today.  I am off today – our high today is only 70 degrees and I have all the windows open and it’s glorious!  We may have some rain this afternoon, which is fine with me.  I’ll still have time to get my run/walk in and do Day 4 of 30 of my Betty Rocker 30 day challenge.  I actually love this girls enthusiasm!  Each workout is hard, but only 15 minutes, although today is a type of yoga workout, which I am looking forward to.  I don’t think I’ve been stretching as much as I should be.

Quote of the Day:  “Don’t waste time looking back on what you’ve lost.  Move on, for life is not meant to be traveled backwards.”

Make it a great day – and have a great weekend!