vicious sweet tooth

Hey y’all! Happy Monday! I hope your Weekend/Sunday was good! Mine was very productive.

Before church I grabbed some breakfast so my tummy wouldn’t growl during the service.

Breakfast: Strawberries + a spoonful of cashew butter

Strawberries

After church, I had planned on heading home and cooking us up a meal for lunch, but the hubby was craving some Indian food…so, we made a mad dash for the Indian restaurant.

Lunch: Indian Buffet.  This is the 2nd time the hubby and I have hit up the newly found Indian restaurant – Angithi Indian Restaurant up on E. Fowler.  We LOVE Indian food and missed it a lot when we moved from Atlanta to Florida back in 2007.  We did find a good one in West Palm, but had to move away from it last May.  We’ve been on a search and then on Easter, decided to give this restaurant a try.  It is very good and offers a good variety of both vegetarian and non-vegetarian dishes.  My only complaint is on the Indian desserts.  We really like the Gulab Jamun which look like mini doughnut holes soaking in a delicious warm honey syrup.  The first time it was just in a cold syrup and this past time they weren’t even on the buffet.  I was sad, dessert is may FAV of course!  Oh well, maybe next time.

This is my second helping.  The first contained these same items, eggplant and Biryani rice.  I just wanted the rice with all of the spices and didn’t really get the meat in the dish.  But I had Biryani rice, Eggplant, Spinach, a little bit of Dal, a Vegetable pakora (fried fritter w/ veggies in it).  So good, I tried not to eat so much this time.

Indian Food

Chocolate Cream Cake: After we got home and settled for a bit, I decided not to get back to packing, but to try this Chocolate Cream Cake that I saw on Pure2Raw’s website.  The only ingredient I lacked was raw cacao powder and I looked at Whole Foods and couldn’t find any, so I just used Green & Blacks cocoa powder, which I think gave it a different consistency.  That and I think I overheated my blender.  I had to scrape everything out of that and put it into my food processor.

I put the crust ingredients into the food processor and processed until fluffy.

Raw crust

Once packed into the springform pan, I added some vegan chocolate chips for a little extra surprise.

Chocolate Chips Scattered

Then I started on the filling.  Here’s where I really wished we had a Vitamix! Those things are amazing!  This dessert is based on a generous helping of Cashew butter, which I really really like!

Cashew butter

After I tossed in the Cashew Butter, I threw in the remaining ingredients except for the cocoa powder. I actually only added about 1/2 cup of that powder because it looked really strong.  I could’ve probably only used 1/3 cup, but we’ll see next time.

Ingredients ready to blend

The photo of the regular recipe looked more like mousse and mine was a little sticky.  And I think my pan was wider, because it’s pretty thin. But after making sure everything was combined nicely, I poured it into the pan, and popped it into the freezer to set.

Raw Chocolate Cream Pie

Side View

Top View

About an hour or so later, I took it out of the freezer and released it from the springform pan.  And cut me and the hubby a slice to taste.  Just a little one because it looked amazingly rich and it was.  It tasted amazing.  Like a very decadent chocolate torte.  Really good.  I definitely want to try this again with ALL of the right ingredients to see if I can achieve that mousse – like consistency that looks so yummy.  The hubby really liked it too!

Then later on in the evening, I moved onto a new favorite of mine – Kale Chips.

“Cheesy” Kale Chips – I used this recipe from Love Veggies and Yoga.  Man I wish I had a dehydrator to get the full effect.  But these are delicious nonetheless.  The hubby even likes them!!

Cashew Cheese Sauce

Ready to Bake

Kale After Baking

Dinner: I felt like I kind of snacked a lot today, so for dinner, I just wanted a little taste of our leftovers from Saturday night. I’m really liking how this curry tastes over the nutty Quinoa!

Coconut Curry Chickpea + Quinoa

For the better part of  Sunday, the hubby and I hung out watching some TV.

We watched 2 interesting documentaries last night – Go Further and No Impact Man.  Both of these were very thought-provoking on how we can make changes in our own personal lives that can have a greater or lesser impact, depending on how you look at it, on the environment.

Go Further – The film follows actor Woody Harrelson as he takes a small group of friends on a bio-fueled bus-ride down the Pacific Coast Highway. The goal is to show the people they encounter that there are viable alternatives to our habitual, environmentally destructive behaviors

No Impact Man – The Manhattan-based Beavan family abandon their high consumption 5th Avenue lifestyle and try to live a year while making no net environmental impact.

I did manage to hit the gym today and get some needed exercise into my day since I missed Friday.  Saturday we got in a bike ride, which was awesome, but yesterday, I really felt the need to move.

Workouts: In the morning, I got up and hit the treadmill.  I’m trying to get back into running so, I printed off the Couch-to-5K Running Plan I found on Cool Running to ease back into running.

• Brisk 5-min warm-up walk. Then alternate 60 secs of jogging and 90 secs of walking for a total of 20 mins.  Then I did a 5 min walking cool down/stretching
• In the afternoon I did 5 min elliptical – 35 mins on the stationary bike doing intervals again!  1 min lvl 3, 1 min lvl 7 for 30 mins and then I did 5 min on lvl 3.  Back on the elliptical for 5 mins and then onto the treadmill for 5 mins.
• Then I did Level 1 of the 30 Day Shred.

It felt really good to run again.  I have been so scared and anxious to try it out in fear that my hip will start to hurt again.  I’m really trying to take it slow and follow this plan in hopes of getting me back to running