Restaurants – Page 19 – Fervent Foodie

Big Easy – Part 1

October 15, 2010 9 Comments

Here’s a recap of our first day in the Big Easy:

Jarrod almost fell down the escalator in the airport. Sadly, I did not capture this on video.

We hopped in a cab and headed to the hotel, which is right on the border of the business district and the French quarter.

Our hotel is super old and super charming:

After we cleaned up, we headed to the French Quarter and stopped in at the first restaurant that caught our eye: Jean Lafitte Bistro… though oddly that wasn’t the name on the front of the building… Peculiar…

View from restaurant balcony:

Dinner!

This pasta sauce was RIDICULOUSLY amazing (though both of us weren’t impressed with the sausage).

I love the old-world charm of all of the buildings here:

After dinner we headed to drinks and some live music at the Blues Club:

Then drinks at the Beach:

Hello Bourbon Street!

Next stop, the Bourbon Street Blues Company

Cheese!

Annnnnd then we went back to the hotel and passed out! Long day of fun in the Big Easy!!

Fitness, Restaurants

5 steps forward, 5 steps back

August 3, 2010 6 Comments

Over the past 4 months I’ve had on-again off-again knee problems. 🙁

I’ve played soccer since I was in elementary school, and never had any issues. This past spring, I decided to take up running. I was AMAZED by how much I enjoyed it! About a month into my newly found passion, I had a sharp pain in my right knee during my morning run. I didn’t twist the knee, or land funny, or make any other type of movement to cause the pain. It just sort of happened. I attributed the pain to weakness (i.e., “push yourself harder, Mary“) and ran about 1 more mile to my house. That genius move resulted in me limping around for about a week or so. I tried several times to pick up where I had left off, with no success. I even went to see an orthopedic doctor who told me “some knees just aren’t made for running.”

Unacceptable.

Then a couple months ago I developed a plan of attack in the form of my interval training plan. Basically, the plan was to start off with walking/running intervals and slowly increase the running time over a period of weeks until I was running the entire time.

Things were going super smooth, and I was up to 7 minutes running and 3 minutes walking…. that is until I hurt my knee again on vacation a couple weeks ago. I think this time it was due to overuse–we did a TON of walking and I was still doing my regular intervals on top of it.

It’s been 2 weeks since vacation, and I’ve tried several times to get my run on. This was not going well at all — I could only do 1/2 of my regular intervals before feeling the pain start. At least I have learned my lesson and now stop running at the first sign of knee pain!

So this morning I decided to start the interval all over again… yup… all the way back at 4 minutes walking, 2 minutes running. Slowly but surely, I am determined to get to running a 5K with no knee issues!

Breakfast #1

Leftovers from yesterday’s eggins–with one new addition:

Heinz reduced sugar ketchup. After my ketchup post last week, I started thinking about how much ketchup I actually consume in any given week. As much as I love ketchup, it’s really just a bunch of empty calories. So I decided to give this reduced sugar version a shot:

The ketchup was pretty good — though it oddly tasted sweeter than regular Heinz ketchup. I’m going to try and use the reduced sugar ketchup in place of the regular stuff as much as possible.

Stats on B#1: 161 calories, 9g carbs, 5g fat, 21g protein, 2g fiber

Breakfast #2

Overnight oats 🙂

Last night, I put the following into a bowl:

1/2 cup uncooked quick oats
1/2 cup almond breeze unsweetened vanilla almond milk
1 tsp brown sugar
sprinkling of cinnamon

I mixed everything up and left them in the fridge overnight. This morning I added about 6 sliced strawberries (thank you to my mom for hooking me up with these DELICIOUS strawberries) and a 1/3 cup fresh blueberries:

All mixed up:

These overnight oats never get old 🙂

Stats on B#2: 236 calories, 45g carbs, 5g fat, 6g protein, 7g fiber

Lunch

My all-time favorite hummus comes from Nate’s Deli in Cleveland. A close second would be Trader Joe’s hummus. Unfortunately, neither of my long distance relationships with Nate nor Trader Joe are able to satisfy my frequent hummus cravings, so I’ve been on the hunt for a tasty hummus that I can find locally.

I picked this up at the grocery store last night:

I especially liked the simple list of ingredients (chick peas, tahini, fresh spinach, lemon juice, garlic, and salt) and it is only 33 calories for a 2tbsp serving! The flavor was a little on the bland side, however.

For lunch, I made up a sandwich with a 3.5 ounce grilled chicken breast, 1 tbsp Amir Hummus, 1/2 a roma tomato, sliced red onion, and 1 cup spinach sandwiched between a Pepperidge Farm 7 grain Deli flat:

Notice that I used my tupperware lid as a plate instead of using a paper plate. “Kelsy” would be proud 😉

Now that’s what I’m talkin bout:

I could eat this every day:

I also had some cucumber salad on the side. This cucumber was straight from the BF’s mom’s garden!

Stats on lunch: 323 calories, 37g carbs, 3g fat, 40g protein, 10g fiber

Question: Have you ever had an injury that prevented you from doing an activity you really enjoy?

Restaurants, Travel

End of Vaca

July 20, 2010 3 Comments

Monday morning we left Charleston and headed to Botany Bay Plantation on Edisto Island. We got a ton of great pics. Here are just a few:

We munched on the remnants of food we brought from home while driving through the plantation. For more information on Edisto Island, check out www.edistobeach.com.

Then we headed back to Charlotte. This time, Priceline got us a room at the Double-Tree in Uptown Charlotte for only $45 a night 😀

We really liked this hotel (especially because you get free chocolate chip cookies when you check in)…

The bed was lot more comfortable than Aloft’s bed, however you really just cannot beat the Aloft location!

Here are some shots of Charlotte:

Monday night we headed to Rockbottom for some cheesy jalapeno dip (hello $5 appetizers!) and drinks:

Then to Aria for dinner.

Aria was a lot fancier/swankier than I expected, but I thought the bartenders were pretty rude :-/

We ordered a Super Tuscan Wine to start:

We’ve never tried this type of wine before and we both really liked it!

We ordered the bruschetta for the appetizer:

This was actually served cold, which I thought was odd. Then we got the vodka penne for dinner and added grilled chicken. The pasta was super tasty, which made up for the appetizer. Didn’t capture a photo unfortunately.

Tuesday morning, we went to the Holiday Inn’s Cafe Siena for our favorite breakfast buffet. Walked around the city, then hit up Fuel on our way back to Ohio.

Jarrod is obsessed with Fuel’s chicken parm calzone. I got an Italian sub which was also quite tasty:

And that brings us back to lovely Ohio. First thing I did was head to Acme and buy an ABUNDANCE of produce. My body is just craving healthy eating after a week-long restaurant binge!

Restaurants, Travel

Last day in Charleston

July 19, 2010 6 Comments

Sunday was our last day in Charleston. For breakfast, we nibbled on some of the goods we had brought from home, then headed to the Folly Beach Pier.

We layed out on the beach for a while, then headed to Locklear’s for lunch.

Jarrod got a chicken wrap and I ordered the shrimp burger wrap:

I’m still not entirely sure what a shrimp burger is made of, and I don’t think my belly was very fond of it! That’s ok, that left more room for hushpuppies 🙂 The food wasn’t stellar, but we were really there for the view anyway:

After lunch, we strolled along the pier.

Then back to the beach so Jarrod could catch some rays:

And I could lay under the pier in the shade: Haha…

And then I got pooped on… Second time time that has happened to me. It’s supposed to be good luck, but I don’t know about that. Getting pooped on is pretty crappy in my opinion 😉

Lucky for you, I didn’t take a picture!

For dinner, we hit up the Mellow Mushroom.

This place was, well, trippy, for lack of a better word:

I orderd the field green salad and Jarrod got the ceaser salad and some tortilla soup:

Of course we also got some bruschetta to share:

All of this was delicious, but the Gourmet White pizza we ordered was AMAZING:

Jarrod said he could “eat this for nine days.” Thankfully, we don’t have a Mellow Mushroom near home… though there is one in Columbus….

After dinner, we went to the Vendue Inn Roooftop bar for a drink:

Love this bar. It was really nice and breezy and they had some great live music. We also saw Nick Lachey which was funny.

Today we are headed home. Strike that. Change of plans! Today we are headed to Edisto Beach, then back to Charlotte 😀 Home will have to wait!

Restaurants, Travel

10-Mile-Saturday

July 18, 2010 5 Comments

Saturday morning I woke up around 7am to get my run in. It was already 80+ degrees and 85%+ humidity. Perfect running weather, right? Even though the air was so thick feeling, I was excited to get out and explore some of Charleston on my run. I’m still on week #5 of the interval training, which means I’m doing 3 intervals of 3 minutes walking and 7 minutes running.

Here’s the route I ran:

My time per mile was a lot slower than my Charlotte run earlier in the week — but I’ll crack that up to the crazy humidity!

We were planning to have a late breakfast, and were in search of bottomless mimosas, so we headed to Toast.

Bottomless mimosas:

I took this picture several times, and somehow a bulging bicep kept appearing in the background… 😉

We split the Deluxe French Toast stuffed with apples and apple syrup:

And the all garden omelet (which I added sausage, zucchini, and pepper jack cheese to):

Both of these were delicious, and the mimosa made for a very relaxing brunch 🙂

(Unintentional foreshadowing: we are headed to the Folly Beach Pier today!)

After brunch, we set out to walk along the river banks. We walked, and walked, and wallllkkkeeeedddd…..

On our way back towards the studio, we stopped at the Buccaneer restaurant for some margaritas and snacks. The Buccaneer has a ton of authentic pirate artifacts, which was pretty neat.

I ordered the crab cake:

This was pretty good, but I don’t think my belly is sold on crab meat yet. I could only eat half of this (may have been do to the exhaustion from walking though).

Here’s the route we walked during our Saturday afternoon excursions: