Hiiiiiyas friends!
After sleeping in for a looong time, I woke up pretty ravenous. It must have been the zumbathon yesterday!
I couldn’t wait to dig into the new treat we picked up at the farmer’s market yesterday – whipped cinnamon honey!
We got this from Cloister Honey, and it’s available online in case you want to try some yourself.
I had some on market challah with breakfast. It was divine!
I’ve always been a fan of carbs. Growing up, I often had two pieces of bread of 2 halves of a bagel for breakfast. My signature take was to do one savory and one sweet piece. I’m sure many of you balance-loving fools like me do the same. I’d always have one piece buttered and one with jelly, jam, apple butter, or some other sweet topping. Today I was extra excited to slater on some of that whipped cinnamon honey for my sweet piece of challah toast. Nom!
With breakfast, we also had scrambled eggs with cheese and some Morningstar “sausage.” It totally hit the spot!
How was the weather where you live? We had lots of rain!
One thing I like about rain is seeing all the puddles.
Do you see what I see in these puddles?
Take another look.
The birds have been going crazy around our yard for some reason. There appeared to be dozens in the trees behind our house today. They were just chirping away!
The rainy day called for hot soup – Italian style cannellini and kale.
Slight obsessed…I know.
***
I spent the afternoon trying to both relax and be productive. I rarely get rest days, so I tried to take today to just chill for a bit, while taking breaks to get some to-dos done.
I think I balanced things out fairly well:
- I did a load of my athletic wear laundry
- Watched a couple movies
- Lounged on my couch
- Created a flyer to promote my new Zumba class
- Sipped hot tea
- Blogged
- And get this…I even painted my toe nails and fingernails!
I know it seems silly to be excited about painting my nails, but if you read about my hectic schedule, you’d know that I have been running around so crazy that nail-painting is quite the luxury for me. 
Hubby and I ended up getting Thai take out for dinner – a brothy soup with tofu…
…and Pud See Ew with chicken.
What is your favorite thing to do on a rainy day off from work?
I don’t know about you, but I love having people over…even if I’m not the one organizing. Last night, hubby invited a bunch of his guy friends over for a night of playing poker and watching basketball. ACC fans around may have been tuned into the same game – Duke vs Carolina.
Hubby is a huge Duke fan, but most of his friends are Carolina fans. Differences set aside, they all gathered at the Chic house for a fun night.
Hubby kindly asked me to help out with the food, and since I love cooking, I happily agreed. I missed the poker playing since I was busy in the kitchen, but I’m not a big poker person anyways.
We had a nice veggie tray with organic veggies – cauliflower, celery, baby carrots, red bell pepper, and cucumbers. We even had local broccoli, which we picked up at the market earlier in the day.
We also had baked spinach ricotta dip.
And I made more of those delicious and super easy crock pot meatballs – the same ones we had at our Halloween party. (We had a lot of people comment that they liked these alot better than the ones typically made with jelly. Btw, ever since I found out those cute cocktail meatballs at most parties are made with jelly…they just don’t quite taste the same. *sad face*)
We also made 2 flatbreads with Earthfare pizza dough, a corn meal dusting on the bottom, spicy tomato oil from the market, mozzarella cheese, bell peppers, and pizza seasonings. The flatbread is becoming a TCL staple for entertaining. They are so simple, tasty, and can easily be made vegan/vegetarian for your non-meat-eating friends.
I was worried about having enough food with roughly 12 adult men in the house (they eat a lot!), but we seemed to have just enough with some leftovers.
I managed to get a nice plate of food, even after the boys had made their first sweep of the eats table.
After…it looks like locusts attacked the food! lol
Luckily, I had one more trick up my sleeve.
Homemade (not from the box) cupcakes. I used a combination of this recipe and this recipe for the cake part of the cupcakes. I used the latter recipe by the famous Magnolia bakery in NYC for the frosting. I was going to post my adapted recipe, but I’m not happy with it. Though I didn’t increase the flour or other ingredients (save increasing for the purpose of having 24 cupcakes instead of 12), the recipe yielded way too much batter. I’m going to play with it to see if I can get it to fit 24 cupcakes. I will say, the flavors and textures were totally amazing. Everyone loved them. So, as long as you don’t mind filling an extra ramekin with batter, these recipes are great to use!
I made vanilla cupcakes with vanilla icing and colored the icing blue in honor of the basketball game. The color fell somewhere between Carolina and Duke blue. No one complained. In fact some of the guys were so thrilled with the cupcakes, they ate them in one BIG bite! Ok, they didn’t do that because they were so thrilled. They probably just did that because they were hanging out with a bunch of dudes and trying to be funny. But either way, it was entertaining to watch.
Sadly, Duke lost the game. But everyone seemed to have a good time regardless.
Reader question: Are you into sports? Which team is your favorite and why?
PS Did anyone get the Hyperbole and a Half joke made in this post?
