Last Thursday, the 8th, was my birthday! It was pretty low key. The previous Sunday we hosted a birthday brunch at home and had a bunch of friends and some family over too. It was lovely, but my younger brothers “forgot” and didn’t show up, which was a bit disappointing. Oh well, I should have know I was asking for too much when I set brunch for 10:30ish AM, about 90 minutes before I should expect anything from them on the weekend.
Anyhow, I’ve been on a big salad kick and made a HUGE salad (I had to split it into two bowls) for the brunch, along with a lemon poppy seed bundt cake, coffee cake, and we also served watermelon, fresh feta, and aged manchego (Costco has some amazing cheeses). Ben made a big batch of creamy scrambled eggs with herbs, and he also spent a chunk of time the previous day ironing out crackers in the pasta roller!
Sadly we forgot to take any photos. Doh. Here’s a photo a the “major salad” that I made for the same pre-wedding potluck that I made the curried popcorn for. It’s the same as the salad I’d made for my birthday brunch, but the tiny grapes were a birthday present and thus not present in the birthday salad (they did sit quite handsomely in a tupperware on the table of food for eating.
Home grown basil and home made balsamic vinigrette are the “secret” ingredients (along with cracked buckwheat cooked with a spoonful of vegan broth powder). I love big salads because I feel like they’re OK to keep snacking on when the social context calls for continued eating but in terms of more filling foods (like cake or pasta) and WW points I’ve met my limit for the meal. You can even stretch out major salads like this by adding more spinach as you empty the bowl, there’s usually a little pool of over dressed toppings on the bottom of the bowl anyway.
Oh, so you want to hear about my real birthday? Like I said, it was pretty low key. I thought I was going to have a temp job, I got a call right at 9 AM, but then the computer system at the staffing agency went down and they actually lost the client to another agency because of the lack of communication and they couldn’t call me back to let me know because they couldn’t look up my number! That was a bit frustrating, but by noon I knew that it wasn’t going to work out and called a girlfriend who was savoring her last week of maternity leave to see if she wanted to meet up for lunch. We ended up at Tara Thai in Bethesda after wandering around a bit and then wandered some more. I’d brought my gym bag with me in the car and begrudgingly went (my ankle is still a bit weak from a fall 3 weeks ago) and I walked 3 miles on the treadmill while watching Ellen. Dinner was equally low-key, a progressive meal of frozen yogurt and hot food and salad from the local up-scale/healthy grocery with a friend from WW and his wife and Ben too.
Ducksandbooks: A Newly Mawwied Lady's Blog 
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