Hello Monday! I hope that you all had wonderful a Mother’s Day and got to appreciate or be appreciated! We spent the day with my mom and went out to lunch. It was a special day for a very special person!

7 weeks is the countdown for summer vacation for me. It really doesn’t seem that far away at this point. Thank goodness!

Ya know how I was going on and on about spending and saving money last week? Well this week I spent almost $200 at the food store. My cart was jam packed with lots of stuff. Somehow last week I got away with only spending about $100 and I sure paid for it this week. Everything just looked good to me, plus it was a meat/fish buying week, which costs more $$ over just produce and beans.

After spending all of that money at the food store, we decided not to go out to dinner Saturday night, especially since we were going out to dinner yesterday. I SO didn’t feel like cooking Saturday, especially since we were going out last on, so I threw these salmon burgers together. I made a different version last week that was just ehhh…so I gave it another shot. These were awesome and super easy to make. I didn’t even take out the food processor.

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Give these salmon burgers a try. They rock and are a great change from a veggie or store made burger.

Have a great start to the week!

What did you do for Mother’s Day?

Yesterday I felt like having falafels for dinner. I have a small obsession with chickpeas. I like to find as many different ways to make them as humanly possible. There’s socca, hummus, and just having them on top of a big salad. I wanted something different, so I went with some falafels. I’ve made a couple different versions before, but this is my favorite to date.

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Yesterday I also tried BodyRockTV, which is a whole different post that needs to be written. It kicked my butt in 20 minutes! I was sweating and breathing REALLY hard. If you haven’t tried it, but want a short, intense workout, head over there! I am pretty sore today!

What is your favorite way to use chickpeas or beans?

Thank you SO much for those of you who have submitted my blog to Women’s Health Magazine Blog’s We Love round up! If you haven’t yet, I’d SO appreciate if you would! It’s very quick and pretty painless. Thank you!

I’m off to the gym to hit up the treadmill…but first I have to finish this cup of coffee!

Yesterday’s post started off so negative, I need to not do that today. I feel like all of the annoying things I had in my head all came true, which my sister and I refer to as “secreting” ourselves. (When everything you don’t want to happen so you think about it so much and then it actually happens…)

Like when I walked into school and one of my students just informed me he’d just puked in the cafeteria, which meant he wasn’t coming on our trip today, which later meant we didn’t have enough money for the trip.

Or when our bus for our trip came 30 minutes late, which meant we missed our group’s assigned time and our tour was only about 12 minutes long.

How about when the bus driver didn’t know how to get to the Queens Museum of Art and drove up to the Hall of Science and said, “we’re here”. Nope. Sorry, we’re not.

Last, was working until 5:30 and not being able to find a parking spot, so I had to “make up” one.

So, I am going to “secret” myself in the good way and say, today is going to be a great day (even if I do have to work till 8:30 pm.)

In my continuation of my  ”Let’s look back and see what I made a while ago” series…last night was sweet potato burgers. Very filling and satisfying. For some reason I was craving these..maybe because I didn’t want eggs for dinner again. I added some spinach this time and left out the carrots. I also added 2 tbsp of garbanzo bean flour and baked them in the oven.

I’m off to head to school for a great school day and 26 successful parent teacher conferences!

Do you ever “secret” yourself?

Yay it’s FRIDAYY!!! Well, it’s my Friday! I took the day off tomorrow for one of my best friend’s wedding, which is Saturday!! I had to take tomorrow off to go to the rehearsal and rehearsal dinner, since it’s in Rhode Island I would never get there in time if I left after work. Trust me, I’m not complaining!

Since I don’t know if/how far I will be able to run on Saturday morning Danny and I got up to do 5 miles this morning. We did our usual morning loop and I felt the best I had felt running in awhile. Tuesday I had an upset stomach, which started at the beginning of my run but I powered through and felt okay the rest of the morning. Today I felt great, no knee or stomach troubles and we ran a bit faster than usual too. Forest Hills still isn’t cleaned up from the tornado that touched down there. It’s still pretty messed up with all the trees all over.

I’ve really been trying to stride on the middle of my foot rather than slamming down heels first. It’s taken many runs to get used to it and I don’t think I really am totally comfortable yet, but it’s getting there. I’m going to try to wake up early on Saturday to get a couple of miles in, depending on what time I go to sleep Friday. I have to be at the hair place by 9, so I figure I have to be back from running by 8.

Rewinding, I’ve been wanting to make these amazing sweet potato falafels that I saw from Jessica awhile ago. Finally last night I got around to making a rendition of my own.

Sorry for the lame photos at the end. We ate most of them last night and I couldn’t take pictures after they were done because it was dark out. Boo.

Everything thrown in

Processed

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Not much left...

I’m off to do some baking then do some packing…. more packing. I’ve already been packing for a week for this. What item do you always worry you’ll forget??? For me it’s makeup, or my dress!