Almond Butter Failure

Well, baby slept even longer last night – 11 hours straight! I put her to bed, had 2 hours to myself, and still got to sleep for 9 hours. Needless to say, I’m feeling amazing!

Breakfast this morning was an oat bran/oatmeal mix due to the fact that I didn’t have enough oat bran for a whole bowl. Unfortunately I’m not going to buy any more oat bran before we move. We have tons of oatmeal and we’re trying to use up as much of our fridge/pantry items as possible before we leave. Nevertheless, breakfast was delicious!

~1/3 cup of oat bran, ~1/4 cup of oatmeal, 1 overripe banana, 2 tbs ground flaxseed, vanilla, cinnamon, ~1 tbs raisins, ~1 tbs chopped walnuts

The star of this bowl was definitely the banana! I love overripe bananas in a nice hot bowl of oats. They have so much flavor!

I also had the usual egg mixture, of course.

1/2 cup of egg whites + 1 whole egg

My mornings are pretty much all the same these days – play with/feed/change baby, eat, pack, eat some more…

My morning snack was a small apple and a few almonds.

Lunch was another chicken sandwich on sprouted grain bread with hot pepper hummus. I used lettuce today though because I was all out of spinach.

This was also the last of my sprouted grain bread. No sense in buying more of that before we go either. It takes us 2 or more weeks to use it all up. Plus we have a zillion english muffins in the freezer that need to be eaten otherwise they’ll just get thrown out. So expect to see some english muffin sammies over the next 2 weeks!

After lunch, baby and I went to see the hubby at work and we all went for a 1-hour walk. The Colorado sunshine was pretty intense today, so despite my slathering of sunscreen, I still burned my shoulders a bit. I’m pretty pasty so I burn easily!

By the time I got home, it was already 2:30 – andI was STARVING! I whipped up a smoothie in the blender.

1 medium banana, 3/4 cup of unsweetened vanilla almond milk, 1 tbs of cocoa powder, 5 ice cubes

In addition to my smoothie, I ate a couple handfuls of Fiber One right out of the box.

I decided to use some of our stockpile of almonds to make some almond butter. I started by roasting 1 cup of almonds in the oven at 350 for 10 minutes. They smelled amazing!! Once they cooled, I threw them in the food processor and watched in amazement as the almonds turned to dust, and the dust started to turn to paste. I want to make maple almond butter so I drizzled in some pure maple syrup. I don’t know if I put too much in, or if I put it in too soon, or what… My almond butter just got all clumpy. I definitely processed it long enough. I was bummed. It ended up looking like this:

It’s extremely tasty, just not very spreadable. It would probably be good stirred into oatmeal, or mixed with some almond milk to make a nice dip for my morning apple. Hmmm….

After my nut butter catastrophe, it was time to work out with Bob Harper. I did Levels 1 & 2 of Biggest Loser Bootcamp. It’s no wonder those contestants drop so much weight in such a short period of time. Damn! My hammies have been sore since the first day I did the work out!

For dinner, I baked some chicken sprinkled with salt and pepper and served it along with some green beans. I used some Annie’s Tuscany Italian Dressing as a dipping sauce for my chicken. YUMMY!

Unfortunately my dinner picture didn’t come out so you’ll have to use your imagination…BIG piece of chicken with a HEAP of green beans on my standard stark white plate.

After dinner, I had some home-brewed iced coffee. I also cut up the rest of the ginormous cantaloupe from yesterday. I cut it into cubes – and ate several of the cubes before they could make it into the tupperware container!

Already thinking of breakfast…