fat tuesday

Guess what – I’m back again for another What I Ate Wednesday post!

I was super excited to share with you a Fat Tuesday post, complete with King Cake, jambalaya, these cupcakes and lots of food. Because – why not? It’s Fat Tuesday? But I have a confession – my Fat Tuesday was really pretty normal.

Per usual, my day started with egg whites and veggies, made by B. I was too lazy to make spinach or Brussels sprouts for breakfast so I had some frozen organic veggies from Whole Foods and tomatoes from the West Side Market to fill me up.

breakfast

Our office celebrated Fat Tuesday with paczkis! Don’t know what a paczki is? Don’t worry, I didn’t either until I moved to Cleveland where apparently they’re a BIG deal. (Note – they’re Polish so also a big deal in Poland. And according to Wikipedia, also in “Philadelphia, the Boston area, the Greater Detroit and Mid Michigan areas, Central Connecticut, Northern and Central New Jersey, Chicago and Northern Illinois, Northwest Indiana and Southeastern Wisconsin”). Some people even call Fat Tuesday Paczki Day!

Paczkis are basically powdered donuts with a filling. And honestly, the only donut I really enjoy is an apple fritter so I passed. But I took a picture anyway – pretty, huh?

paczki

Lunch was a ginormous salad! I had made some roasted chicken over the weekend (I know! B typically roasts it but this week I did it with his help when I did some meal prep) and paired half a breast with roasted Brussels sprouts, butternut squash and cauliflower – but this morning I decided to add some extra salad mix to the container and it was a good decision! For an unintended salad, it was pretty! I didn’t need any dressing because I’m picky about dressings and the roasted veggies had enough oil/flavor for me.

Yup, a HUGE salad that wasn’t supposed to be a salad.

Snacks during the day included:

Bag of celery

celery

A red pepper, sliced. Yup, that’s one entire red pepper. #Notashamed

red pepper snack

Chewy ginger candy. Yes, again. And I’ve run out so I don’t know what I’m going to do!

wiaw ginger chews

One of many cups of tea!

And dinner! I know – you’re like “wait those are the only snacks today? You usually snack so much more! Where are the granola bars? Where are the nuts? And carrots?!” but I had a dentist appointment in the afternoon which prevented me from snacking so much – snack time became dentist time. And good news – no cavities! Anyway, I digress. Dinner.

I was planning on making dinner but after the dentist I had some work to do, so B ~~tried to convince me to pick up McDonald’s~~ graciously made the meal. And it was SO good! We had bought sushi-grade tuna at the West Side Market, along with tons of veggies, so we at them for dinner. Seared ahi tuna, roasted cauliflower, roasted asparagus and 1/3 a sweet potato. Because what day wouldn’t be complete without a sweet potato? (I only had 1/3 of it because I reallllly wanted leftovers for today. It took a lot of restraint. And I didn’t take a picture it because I ate it after my meal)

When B makes me dinner it looks a lot better

After dinner I enjoyed that 1/3 of sweet potato and tea with lots of honey. Yes, I have an herbal tea problem.

tea and honey after dinner!

AND here is an update of my Fitbit for the day! I decided to take it easy this week and not run every day (big deal for me!) because next week starts my Cleveland half marathon training. So today’s workout included a really slow and easy 60 minutes on the elliptical followed by some ab and weights. As usual, you’ll see practically no flights of stairs on my end. I don’t have any stairs in my life!

Screenshot_2015-02-17-21-30-45

Some questions for you:

Well, how did I do?
How was your day? Which of these foods would you eat? Any you wouldn’t enjoy?
Did you have a REAL Fat Tuesday? Please let me know and I can live vicariously through your indulgences.

My office is celebrating Mardi Gras this week with a Fat Tuesday luncheon and potluck. I thought about preparing some Crock Pot Jambalaya, but really wanted to bring dessert. My cousins are from Louisiana and each year they used to send us a King Cake in New York via mail. I looooved the King Cake – it was cinnamony, flaky colorful and had creamy frosting. I looked up a few King Cake recipes and thought about making one – but with a relatively small office, it seemed like it’d be too big to prepare. Then I realized – I could make Mardi Gras cupcakes! Of course! These aren’t quite King Cake – they’re not flaky or bread-like – but they are fun colors, have creamy frosting and cinnamon. And B (a chocoholic) more than approved of them – he even asked if I could leave him some at home!

Mardi Gras Cupcakes for Fat Tuesday

Mardi Gras Cupcakes

Inspired by Hoosier Homemade

For the cupcakes:

Here’s what you need:

1 box yellow cake mix
1 cup buttermilk (instead of water indicated on box)
1/3 cup vegetable oil (per cake mix directions)
3 eggs (I used ¾ c Egg Beaters)
2 tablespoons cinnamon
Purple, yellow and green food coloring (I used yellow, green and blue+red for the purple)

Here’s what you do:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Line muffin tins with cupcake liners. Mine made about 17 cupcakes.
Use an electric mixer to beat together all the cake mix, buttermilk, vegetable oil, eggs and cinnamon on high speed. Mix well so batter isn’t lumpy – especially if you use powdered buttermilk like I did.
Divide the batter equally into three parts in three separate bowls. I had probably about a cup of batter in each bowl. Using food coloring, create one batter bowl green, one batter bowl yellow, and the third batter bowl purple (I mixed blue and red food coloring).
Get a tablespoon for each color batter.
Start with one color and take a spoonful of batter. Push batter up against one side of cupcake wrapper.
Fill in with the other colors, using the same technique, pushing batter up against other sides of cupcake wrapper until you have the green, purple and yellow batter in thirds in the cupcake wrapper. Don’t worry about making these perfect, they will still taste great!
Bake for 18 to 20 minutes (or what the box says), until toothpick comes out clean. Frost when cool.

Cinnamon Buttercream Frosting

Here’s what you need: