I’m Okay With a Little Stray

Good morning blog world! Happy Thursday – yay it’s almost Friday. What fun things do you have planned for the weekend?

I have a few things going on this weekend. Friday night I’ll be laying low because I have a 5-mile race bright and early on Saturday morning in Central Park! Then Saturday evening the Hubby and I are having our first 2010 date night (sticking to those resolutions). We’re going out to dinner and then going to see God of Carnage on Broadway. It’s supposed to be really funny – don’t mind the name. I bought these tickets for Hubby’s birthday and when I originally bought them months ago James Gandolfini (Tony Soprano) was the lead male. Bill loved the Sopranos, so I was kind of disappointed when they changed the cast. But I still happen to recognize two of the actors in this cast: Jimmy Smits and Christine Lahti. Sunday we are contemplating going to see Avatar. Everyone is raving about it, but neither one of us is too pumped to go see it. Have you seen it – feedback? 

Before I get into yesterday’s eats, I wanted to share this link with you from Foodfit.com – it’s their Winter Guide to Fruits and Vegetables. I get their newsletter and thought this list was pretty useful. There were definitely some fruits on the fruit list that I’d never heard of before, but sounded tasty.

Now onto eats:  I remembered to photograph my breakfast yesterday – it was oatmeal with banana and pumpkin butter. I hadn’t used my pumpkin butter in a while and it’s starting to get low. I also had a side of light cranberry juice.

For lunch I might have had a piece of pizza during our Marketing and Communications celebratory lunch. Some of our publications recently won awards, so we were celebrating. I can’t pass up celebratory pizza! Sorry – no pic. And then a little later I got my fill of veggies with cucumbers, carrots and grape tomatoes drizzled with balsamic vinegar.

A little later I had a few chippers…

And even later in afternoon I had two clementines for a snack.

I left work right at 5 p.m. because I was soo excited to go have dinner with my friend Katie! I looked for a restaurant near Union Square, but didn’t want to go to big place or a chain place – I wanted something smaller and cozy. I found some good reviews about Vintage Irving on the NY Magazine website, so I decided we should give it a try. It did not disappoint. Our food was so good. Here’s the rundown – I had to use flash because it was very dark and my photos were not coming out at all:

Truffle Chicken Mini Meatballs, thyme-scented sherry wine sauce

This was a Spinach and Artichoke dip, which is not shown on their online menu:

We also had an amazing cheese and meat place from the Chef’s plate portion of the menu. The Manchego cheese was amazing – if you ever make it to this place, that is a must. We both loved this plate a lot (half of it has already been eaten – we dove in before I could get the camera out).

We had a lovely mesclun salad as well, but it definitely fell behind the Chef’s plate.

And finally, we topped the meal off with some cheesecake. It was amazing!!

We also had a few glasses of wine with our many mini meals, of course 🙂 As you can see, I did not limit myself on this outing at all. But I agree with Katherine and Meg’s recent posts that healthy does not have to equal perfect and we should learn to live a little! Plus, I don’t see Katie all the time, so when we are able to get together we kind of go all out. Here we are (I turned it black and white to hide the our wine-stained red lips and mouths):

Don’t you hate when that happens? Or does it only happen to me? Katie’s red stains were not nearly as bad as mine.

So it was a delightful dinner and then I headed right to bed when I got home. How about you – are there times when you stray a bit from your healthy ways? I certainly did last night, but I am proud to say I don’t feel guilty about it at all! 🙂