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Attune Breakfast Summit/Fitbloggin Local Part 2!

September 24, 2011 by 17 Comments
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I love blogger meetups. I love them even more when they involve food and fun people, which luckily, they absolutely always seem to do. Today was Fitbloggin’ Local Meetup #2, also known as the Breakfast Summit so graciously hosted by Annelies and Attune Foods. They welcomed ten lovely bloggers into their beautiful office for a morning of breakfast and chatting.

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There were two breakfast bars set up, each featuring a variety of Attune cereals (one collection was gluten-free), fresh fruit, different milks, and yogurt.

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We all helped ourselves to breakfast, and then sat down around the table to eat and chat.

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My bowl had vanilla Wallaby yogurt, two different kinds of gluten free cereals (I’m not gluten free, but ended up at that breakfast bar and the cereals were still great), blueberries, and strawberries.

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Supplemented generously by some cinnamon graham crackers and Justin’s honey peanut butter (or was it almond? Either way it was delicious). I LOVE graham crackers. I could eat those things all day.

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In attendance were a few familiar faces from Fitbloggin’ Local Part 1 back in late June…

As well as some new friends I was happy to meet!

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We had a chat led by an RD, Jae Berman, about the importance of breakfast. When I first heard we were talking about “the importance of breakfast” I thought it might be a “duh” type of moment (“breakfast is good for you!”) but it was way more than that! Jae was really informative and engaging and made me really want to continue to learn more about nutrition, and, more importantly, what kind of nutrition works best for ME. I really need to reconsider reintroducing animal protein again, but that’s another story for another blog.

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It was a great morning at Attune and well worth getting up at 6:30AM on a Saturday for. And check out the swag!

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A big things to Annelies and Attune, Justin’s Nut Butter, Wallaby Yogurt, Strauss Family Creamery, and Pacific Natural Foods for making it possible!

After breakfast, we headed out on an adventure to the Ferry Building Farmer’s Market. I just posted about this market recently because I was kind of just there, but it’s great every single time. And even better with bloggers because I don’t feel as lame taking photos of everything on my iPhone!

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I walked away with a bag of blue potatoes (random purchase) and, of course, a vegan donut from Pepples. Requirement.

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I had a great time today and am looking forward to getting to know some new people and that I keep meeting through blogging, which is just the coolest. It makes me really excited for the Bay Area Blogger Meetup I’m trying to put together for October 8th, too!

The rest of the day was an exhausting shopping spree that merits a whole post in itself.

Gotta get ready for a run in Half Moon Bay tomorrow… goodnight everyone!

What’s your go-to breakfast food?

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    #Fitbloggin local, norcal edition

    July 9, 2011 by 18 Comments
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    Saturday has been pretty awesome.

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    Today was #Fitbloggin Local hosted by the lovely Susan aka Foodie McBody in the Oakland hills. We met up for a lovely stroll and good conversation at Redwood regional park nearby. It was beautiful, and reminded me I should come to the East Bay more often! (It’s warmer and sunnier.)

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    (both group photos courtesy of FoodieMcBody)

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    When we returned home to Casa McBody, we had an absolutely amazing potluck lunch set out before us. Just check this stuff out!

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    I think this was my first experience being around a bunch of bloggers who were all taking pictures of the food. It was pretty funny and I can’t imagine what someone else would think who wasn’t familiar with this blog crowd!

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    Everything was delicious… Tracey made a fruit dip with cream cheese, marshmallow fluff (!), lemon juice, and one other thing that’s escaping me, and I was practically licking it off my plate. So good.

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    I brought the ugly banana bread bites from yesterday and my favorite Sweet & Sour Strawberries.

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    After lunch, Danica of Danica’s Daily gave us a presentation about taking our blog to the next level. It was really inspirational! I feel like I have offhand ideas about things I should be doing to improve P&P, but it also just kind of enters my mind and then leaves it right away because “I’m too busy.” But Danica gave me a bunch of ideas about things I could really do that are within my ability to improve my blogging—here’s one example. This is my first post via Windows Live Writer. (Gasp!) So exciting. I hope it actually publishes. Sometimes I’m not that confident with technology. Okay, I’m in a technical role at a technical company, so THAT stuff I can handle… this blogging thing is totally different!

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    I had a great time meeting everyone who was there and I hope I can continue to get to know them in the future! This event was really neat to me as it exemplifies the great things about the blogging world. It might seem pretty weird to get up early, miss out on other plans with people I know to drive across the bay to hang out with people I’ve never met before—but blogging is just like that, and it isn’t even the slightest bit scary! Connecting over common interests is really special, and I truly hope I can get more involved in this community as time goes on.

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    (Wish I could include names/blog addresses for everyone—I don’t have em yet, but I’ll update!)

    After my #fitbloggin day, I headed over to Berkeley to meet up with my sister, Caitlin. We had a fun afternoon together that started with one of my favorite places ever—Great Harvest.

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    We don’t have one in San Francisco so I make it a point to stop by when I’m in the area. I normally never buy bread because I don’t really make sandwiches, I often don’t eat breakfast OR dinner at home, and I live alone, so I just can’t get through it. But GH is so delicious I make an exception. Last time, a couple of weeks ago, I picked up the cinnamon chip bread and a cinnamon roll.

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    today I walked out with pecan swirl and a cinnamon roll. Yes, I’m aware that every slice equals dessert, but hey. The nice guy who was working there also hooked us up with two huge cookie chunks (“one for the road”). I believe calories don’t count if they are in cookies being handed to you for free. Am I right?

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    As if between #fitbloggin and GH I hadn’t done enough eating, Caitlin was hungry (and I kinda was too… shocking) so we stopped into Zachary’s Pizza to order something to eat. I was kind of in the mood for breadsticks and marinara, but the place ONLY served pizza and like one or two salads. I was thinking the place was pretentious and overpriced, until I realized it’d won best pizza in the bay area for several years and had 4.5 stars on Yelp over 1600+ reviews. must be legit!

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    We ordered a spinach and mushroom stuffed pizza and it was to die for. I still owe my sister for it. I’ll hit you back soon, Cait Smile

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    After that, the foodie day continued through a Trader Joe’s run… I need to do a TJ’s post ASAP, so much to say about that one.

    Then it took me an hour and a half to get the 15 miles home (which reminded me why I DON’T go to the East Bay more often…) and now I’m sitting here thinking about how I should be doing work work but how I think I’m going to go to sleep instead to prepare for the 6 hour distance classic (!!) tomorrow and leave the work for the afternoon.

    Have a great Saturday night, everybody!

    Have you ever met bloggers IRL (In Real Life)?

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    Don’t judge my banana bread bites by their beauty!

    July 8, 2011 by 9 Comments
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    Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday! Okay, that’s all I’ll allow myself.

    This weekend has TWO super exciting events! The first is a 6-hour “distance classic” I somehow ended up signing up for. It’s a mile loop around Crissy Field put on by Dolphin South End Runners (a running club in SF) and you run as many as you can or want. It’s really cheap and at each mile there’s an “aid station” with water, sports drink, and snacks. AND a bathroom. AND ten bloggers I just met are going! #win. I’m going to try to run 18 miles.

     

    Aaaand, the second, equally exciting, also involving a bunch of potential new friends, is #Fitbloggin Local!

    I’m really looking forward to meeting a bunch of Bay Area bloggers. Making new friends is one of the most exciting things about moving to a new city–especially new friends with common interests. I can’t wait.

    I decided to bake something. Despite that I love cooking and baking, today was only the second time I’ve used my oven since I’ve moved in.

    WTF?

    **silly story begins here**

    Let me explain. A couple weeks after I moved into my hobbit hole, I decided to cook a nice dinner. For me… and a dude I was seeing. I spent $30+ on ingredients, came home, prepared a veggie/rice dish, and marinated salmon which I was going to bake. I preheat the oven--which has no light to indicate if it’s on or off, weird–and then stick the salmon in, expecting it to be about twenty minutes.Three minutes later I open the oven door, just to make sure that the fish is cooking.

    The smoke monster from LOST flies out of the oven into my face. Then it dissipates, rapidly filling my very small partly-underground apartment with a dark haze, setting the smoke alarm wailing. I can’t turn it off, so I end up literally ripping the alarm out of the wall. I’m coughing and can barely see in my apartment, and my windows only open a few inches. Now I have two raw pieces of salmon on some charred wax paper. (There was crumbs etc. in the bottom of the oven that must have set on fire.)

    Being resourceful, I end up cooking the fish in the microwave (yes, the microwave) while doing my absolute best to air out my complete fire hazard of an apartment. With little success. My guest gets there, I’m sweating, heart still racing from almost burning down my building, and all I want to do is open a bottle of wine. But I don’t have a bottle opener! We try a knife. And then we try to just push it INTO the bottle. Nothing works. So we ate microwaved salmon, paired with water. Shockingly, it was actually quite good, and I got a funny story out of it.

    **silly story over!**

    But basically, I’ve been scared to use my oven ever since. I use the stovetop every day, but didn’t want to set another fire. But I realized it was time. I had some very, very brown bananas that called for banana bread muffins. And I hda a mini muffin pan begging to be used. Enter banana bread mini muffins!

    Banana Bread Bites with Nutella Topping (aka Banana Bread Mini-Muffins)

    I made adapted nutella banana bread while living in my hut in Africa (blog post here) and wanted to replicate something similar in mini-muffin form. I based my recipe off of this one for Nutella Swirled Banana Bread from RecipeGirl.


    Ingredients assembled.

    Orange bowl: four so-ripe-they-were-soggy bananas, 1/2 cup of plain yogurt, and a bunch of vanilla extract, plus a tiny bit of cinnamon. Blue blow: one half stick of butter plus one cup sugar. Yellow bowl: 2 cups flower, 1/2t of salt, 1t of baking powder, plus 1/2t of baking soda. I tend to never know which one of those two to use so I often use both. Awesome.

    Then I mixed them all together, with two eggs beat into the egg and sugar mixture.

    Separated some of the batter and stirred in about 1/3 jar of Nutella. (I ate the first 2/3 of the jar while watching Sex and the City and dipping popcorn and/or my finger into the jar. Don’t worry, it wasn’t on one night. It was over, like, two nights.)

    I busted out the “Made in USA!” Sur La Table mini muffin/cupcake tin that my daddy got me. I put 1T of batter in each one topped by about 1/2T of nutella batter. I thought they were cute and spotted when they went into the oven. Oh, and I realized why the fire happened. There’s a little oven gauge inside my oven, and when it was set to 350, it was actually 525!  This would explain the fire because if it was set to 400 on the dial it was probably pushing 600 degrees in there. Oops.

    LOOK HOW HIDEOUS THESE CAME OUT!!! I needed to swirl the batter around first. They had slightly different textures so they didn’t mix. #fail

    They were still totally delicious though. SO good. Like banana bread cupcakes almost. Really light and fluffy. I hope my #fitbloggin friends still eat them. Because they aren’t pretty. Oh well… worst thing that happens is more for me!

     

    I highly recommend this recipe though. Just swirl the batters better and they will be pretty. They are SO good.

    Happy Friday, everybody!

    Made anything lately that came out ugly? What do you eat that you’d never want to take a picture of? Any fun plans for the weekend? :)

     

     

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