Our day on a plate

I was making our breakfast yesterday, and thought it might be fun to document the food we eat on a typical day. Perhaps I'll do this periodically. Either that, or I'm running out of post ideas.

Breakfast: avocado on whole-wheat toast, eggs scrambled in a bit of extra virgin olive oil with baby spinach. Water for mama and unsweetened soy milk for baby (tried-and-true beverages during all our meals).

Avocado toast is my favorite go-to breakfast. It's fast, easy, and so insanely tasty. I'm pretty biased as an avocado aficionado. I love them in almost everything. I will always ask Alex if I can add avocado to my order at a restaurant. Serene loves avocado too, which we call avo around here. She could eat avo toast and eggs with spinach every day. Thankful for that, because this is an easy, nutritious breakfast that we eat often.

Lunch: mini hand rolls, sides of edamame and Clementine oranges. Mama's rolls are stuffed with Japanese white rice, tilapia poke, avocado, and baby spinach. Baby's rolls are stuffed with any combination of Japanese white rice, avocado, egg, corn, and spinach.

I usually look for a quick and easy-to-prep lunch most days, like steamed chicken and veggie dumplings from Trader Joe's, or cheese and veggie quesadillas, or more often, leftovers from dinner the night before. On this day, I found frozen tilapia sashimi in the freezer that I forgot we had. It was a jackpot moment because I had been craving sushi (my favorite food). I knew we had leftover rice in the fridge, avocado, and snack-sized roasted seaweed, among other things with which we could make impromptu hand rolls. I cut up the tilapia sashimi and dressed it to make poke (I will probably share the recipe soon). I prepped the other ingredients, which just meant cutting up avocado, putting spinach in a bowl, heating up the edamame, corn, and rice, and frying an egg. We typically eat brown rice around here, but when I'm pregnant, I want white rice all the way. Serene loves bits and pieces of everything in a roll. Mama gets her poke, and baby gets food in a fun roll. We're both happy, and Alex was thrilled for our budget's sake when he found out my sushi craving had been satisfied for free when I had been asking him to take us to my favorite local all-you-can-eat sushi joint.

Mid-afternoon snack: multigrain and seed crackers spread with Brie cheese, semi-defrosted frozen wild blueberries.

Serene always wants a snack after she wakes up from her afternoon nap. Dinner is still at least an hour and half away, and she gets hangry (hungry + angry) waiting - very much like her mama. She loves crackers, especially since she's currently teething (her top two front teeth are emerging!). Usually she'll have a graham cracker and some fruit, but we had some cheese left over from our quiet New Year's Eve celebration, so we're all too happy to down some fancy cheese and crackers. Blueberries, or berries in general, are some of Serene's favorite fruit. I just bought frozen blueberries at the grocery store this week since fresh blueberries aren't in season, and are therefore pretty expensive.

Dinner: whole-wheat spaghetti in marinara sauce topped with baked garlic and herb-stuffed turkey meatballs, garlic roasted broccoli topped with parmesan.

Dinner is always special, because Alex is home to eat dinner with us. We're a pasta-loving family, and spaghetti and meatballs is a favorite, specifically when the meatballs are homemade. I use dear Ruby's recipe as a template, and we are all fans. Alex, as an unabashed meat lover, loves these meatballs because he says they taste like they're bad for you. I love them because they're not bad for you at all since they're made of lean ground turkey, some fresh Parmesan, and tons of herbs. I'll usually make a big batch of whatever we're having for dinner so that we have leftovers for the following day, which is partly how we survive around here with a fifteen-month-old and another babe on the way.

See other foods we eat on a typical day here.