WIAW: Summer Weekend Eats

Phew! It’s been a very writing-intensive couple of days for me. Between banking articles for work and banking posts for the blog while I’m on vacation, my fingers have been getting quite the typing workout!

So thank goodness What I Ate Wednesday is photo-diary format! (Not that I WON’T write cause, hey, I’m a writer, but at least I get a little bit of a break!)

Now, this month’s WIAW theme is “Summer staples.” (Thanks Jen!) I think a couple of my eats below (see mango, ice cream and shandy) DEFINITELY qualify as summer staples!

I will let you know, though: these are technically weekend eats from two weekends ago, not this past weekend. I got so busy last week (Wednesday in particular) with vacation errands, work and details (like making centerpieces) for my dad’s wedding that I didn’t get a chance to post my summer weekend eats, so I’m sharing them with you all this week!

Saturday:

Breakfast:  McCann’s Irish oatmeal with a teaspoonful of strawberry Chobani and a chopped peach, topped with ground cinnamon and ginger. Mmmm. It was actually kind of a late breakfast, and I ate while watching this really cool guy place second in his prelim heat with Nikki. She was significantly less interested than I was.

[side note]: Is everyone else as sad as I am that the Olympics are over??

Lunch/snack: A cut-up mango and the rest of the strawberry Chobani from breakfast.

Dinner: This one’s got a little bit of story. Kevin and I had decided to cook a good dinner that night, since we were both off and had the time. Then, about 10 minutes after I watched Pistorius race, my power went out for, like, 4-5 hours. So that sort of killed the cooking dinner plan–neither of us wanted to cook in a place with no AC, plus it’s much harder to ignite the stove and we were trying to keep the fridge closed as much as possible. So we decided to go out to dinner.

A few days earlier, I had been cleaning out my room and came across an Olive Garden gift card I got for Christmas. It seemed like a good a time as any to use it.

Is Olive Garden the pinnacle of Italian cuisine? Not in the least. Is it particularly healthy? Not really. Is it fairly quick and cheap and relatively tasty? Yup, especially with a gift card.

So, to Olive Garden we went. We split salad, bread sticks and bruschetta and then I got the shrimp mezzaluna: sautéed shrimp with half-moon shaped cheese ravioli. What you see above are the leftovers, since I didn’t take pictures in the restaurant. And you know what? It was actually pretty good. (I’m soooo gonna get flamed for that.)

Sunday:

Breakfast: Blueberry Chobani with the last of my Bear Naked Fit Triple Berry Crunch granola and a Rook iced coffee at my desk. (Yeah, sometimes I have to work weekends…the life of a Web admin.)

Lunch: Vanilla ice cream at the beach. Seriously. I popped over to the boardwalk after work (I know you’re jealous, it’s ok). I planned on stopping at this Korean taco stand that opened there this summer and is supposed to be really tasty, but it was 90 bajillion degrees and there was a “new” ice cream shop. I say “new” because it was really just a new location for a shop the next town down the boardwalk that’s pretty famous for its ice cream. So of course I had to stop in. And I was feeling like some simple, good, pure ice cream, so I got vanilla, which is pretty uncharacteristic for me. (My usual orders typically involve cookie dough, gummy bears and/or chocolate.) And it was damn tasty ice cream.

Dinner: Possibly my new favorite summer beer, Saranac Shandy (seriously, this stuff’s possibly even better than Leinenkugel’s Shandy, my long-time summer favorite) with some suspiciously brown Pad See Yu.

I felt really sick from the stuff a few hours later, so it doesn’t deserve a picture. (I sometimes react negatively to large amounts of MSG.)

Well, that’s it! I’m focusing my energy on vacation now, because when I leave my office in the next five minutes, I’m officially on vacation! And I’m going to DISNEY WORLD tomorrow! I’m entirely too excited.

OH…before I go–Happy 100th birthday to the one and only Julia Child! Bon apetit!

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