Since it's the last day of the year I thought it'd be a good time to reflect on the past year and post the photos from the gratitude challenge I did back in November. I've done this 30-day gratitude photo challenge past years from positivelypresent.com and I always love having this small challenge to remind me daily everything I have to be thankful for. Here is the recap from when I did it last year: 2014 Gratitude photo challenge. a few faves: RESTAURANTS
There is no shortage of amazing food in the Northern VA and DC region and I would love to say I try new places all the time but the truth is I have a few favorites that I go back to over and over. So I've compiled a list of just a few of them that I've been to multiple times and would happily go back to over and over and over.....The list is a mix of fast casual to fancy/ish (truth is I'm not super fancy so none of these are insanely fancy!) 1. Cava Mezze and Cava Grill: This place rocks because they have a sit down restaurant that serves Greek tapas style and they also have a fast casual spot with the best "make your own salad bowls" ever. If there was one near me I'd have trouble not stopping everyday to get dinner. Also the "fancy" version has an amazing happy hour with fun creative and spicy drinks along with my favorite dip: crazy feta! 2. Founding Farmers: Go to brunch spot! Especially when visitors are in town, it never disappoints. Their lunch and dinner menus are also good and perfect when I'm needing comfort food. 3. Sweet Green Healthy and tasty makes this salad shop the perfect combo. I have my fave salad the kale caesar but I also love trying out the seasonal salads they put out like the roasted turkey, brussel sprouts, and sweet potato salad. The amount of times I get free salads from the rewards program says enough about how much I love this place 4. Green Pig Bistro: A little more fancy and I've been here only a few times but it's too good to leave off my list. They have a small unique menu focused on meats and some pretty awesome desserts. 5. Good Stuff Eatery: Best. Burger. Ever. (or maybe I just love the sauces?) regardless this has become my favorite place for a burger and fries anywhere and their sauce bar is #1 especially the chipotle mayo! They also have amazing shakes and monthly specials. It's been awhile since I had a girls weekend with my sisters & mom, the last one was 2 years ago and I wrote about it here. We had one planned earlier this year but weather/being sick got in the way and then life just got busy. Luckily we were able to plan a short weekend in August where we could all get together out in Maryland & Virginia (hopefully next time Sonya can make it!) We packed quite a bit of stuff into the weekend without it being too rushed, it was a good amount of trying new restaurants and exploring new areas. We started Friday with pedicures and dinner at Cava in Baltimore. I've been to Cava a few times and it's one of my favorite restaurants around here, both the upscale restaurant and the fast casual version. They serve mediterranean small plates which meant we could order a bunch of different items and try a little bit of everything. That's pretty much the perfect type of meal for my family since we love to share food and try it all. They also had fantastic cocktails. We spent the rest of the evening hanging out at Brittany and Dustin's apartment relaxing. The next morning we eased into the day with a nice walk around Columbia before getting around and heading to Navy Yard in DC. We found good lunch and dessert options here plus pretty views just walking around. The next stop for our day was in VA. We made a quick pit stop at my apartment then off to Arrowine where we did some wine and beer tasting before driving to Mosaic at Merrifield. We spend the rest of the afternoon indulging in treats and shopping here. We shared affogatos from Dolcezza, shopped at Papersource, Anthropologie, and Target. We ended the evening with dinner at Matchbox, I had only had brunch there so having dinner was a treat and we tried out the pizza which was spot on! We wound down back at my apartment the rest of the evening. Mom and Danielle headed back to Ohio on Sunday but we couldn't send them off without having brunch first. And no trip to this area is complete without Founding Farmers. This time we checked out the breakfast buffet at the Tyson's Corner location and WOW! It was soooo dang good. There were so many options and treats and food and just anything you could want. The amount of food was almost overwhelming but that just means I need to go back some other time to try the food that just would not fit in my stomach! Overall it was a fun weekend with the girls and already looking forward to another one!
I love to start the week off on a good note by prepping my food, and today I prepped like it was my job so I just wanted to share the few things I did today. I'm definitely not this organized every Sunday but I have a pretty crazy work schedule this week and if I don't have good, healthy food ready I know I will make lots of super unhealthy decisions this week! First off I started with some food I already had at home and built some of my meal prep around that. I had some amazing home grown chickens from my parents neighbor/friend Mary Jo that I've been wanting to cook, plus some fun Trader Joe's spice rub, and veggies that needed to be cooked so that was meal # one. Here are the steps I followed: 1) Coated the chicken in olive oil and the spice rub, let it marinade for a few hours 2) Placed quartered red skin potatoes and carrots in the bottom of a foil lined pan and tossed with olive oil and salt & pepper 3) Placed chicken on top of veggies 4) Baked at 375 degrees for a little over an hour until the chicken was fully cooked and veggies roasted and voila! Perfect meal of meat & veggies which should last me a few lunch or dinner meals. I still had potatoes left and some good quality cheddar sausage from Whole Foods so I made up a few breakfast bowls by chopping the potatoes into small squares and sautéing them and the sausage in ghee and then adding a fried dippy egg on top. Lastly I prepped a few other random ingredients to have ready to eat/transform later and the week and to snack on:
1) Cut up lemons and made a pitcher of lemon water 2) Washed figs that will be used in smoothies and to snack on 3) Chopped up and riced a whole cauliflower for future use - I ended up getting 4 bags of 2 cups of the "rice" that I'm freezing 4) Washed cherry tomatoes from the farmer's market to snack on all week 5) Hard boiled eggs to make egg salad. I recently traveled to Philadelphia for a design conference called PePcon, since I had never been to Philly before I did a little bit of sightseeing, even though the conference took up the majority of my time. It was also super cold/rainy for June which equaled me not wanted to walk around the city too much, but I did clock a few miles of walking around the city. A few months ago my younger brother Eric moved to Philly so I was also able to meet up with him and surprisingly meet up with my older brother Chris since he was in the area for work. I fit a lot in over the week there and it was a nice change of pace, plus getting to see family away from home is awesome. I will most likely do another separate post on my sketchnotes from the conference so this will be more of a touristy collection of photos!
I have not cooked as much in the kitchen the past few weeks, but trying to get back into the meal prepping habit and do more cooking so I wanted to share some of my recent eats, including one very delicious brunch out with some friends (pictured above an amazing egg, prosciutto, and risotto cake with tomato sauce from Ghibellina in DC). I also ordered another Blue Apron box, which I have mentioned before on the blog! I was hoping to use these meals as a jumping off point of getting back to experimenting with new recipes in the kitchen. This box was so delicious, you can't really go wrong with burgers on pretzel buns plus I haven't had a salmon dish from them with unique flavors that I haven't liked. I'm definitely going to keep these boxes on rotation whenever I feel like I'm in a food slump!
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