Week in the lens of Instagram: 7/30/11

I really missed Week in the lens of Instagram last weekend! Thankfully, it’s back this week. Have a great weekend, all, and enjoy!

{I’ve become addicted to smoothies. And these aren’t even all my smoothie pictures}

{Snacks}

{Lunches by Erik have been fabulous!}

 

{A new-to-me cookie brand, so good, awesome ingredients!}

What are your weekend plans??

Share the Love & Coming up in Kansas City: 7/29/11

It’s Friday!! Last Friday I was out of town and wasn’t able to get a Share the Love post up, so I was very excited to be able to this week. Have a great Friday, everyone, and enjoy!

{Coming up in KC}

• BADSEED: It’s Friday, don’t forget to head out to BADSEED farmer’s market tonight for awesome produce! We were out of town last week, and didn’t make it the week before so we’re excited to be able to go tonight.
  
• Farm Aid 2011: Farm Aid is in Kansas City this year! It’s a yearly concert and fundraiser headed by board members Willie Nelson, Neil Young, John Mellencamp and Dave Matthews, all about keeping local farmers on their land, and teaching people about The Good Food Movement. It will be at the LIVESTRONG Sporting Park in Kansas City, Kansas on August 13. Not only that, but it features HOMEGROWN concessions, featuring local, organic or family farm-sourced ingredients. Doesn’t that sound awesome? Yes! I was invited to attend Farm Aid as media and cover it on Lesley Lifting Life, and I would so love to be there! Unfortunately, I think we may be out of town that weekend. But it sounds like an awesome event, and I highly suggest checking it out if you’re in the KC area.

{Share the Love}

• Meals & Moves: I had to include Janetha from Meals & Moves this week because of The Great Fundraising Act that occurred this past Monday. Most blog readers are probably familiar with it, but if you’re not, a live auction and bake sale was held on Monday, organized by Janetha, to raise money for fellow blogger, Susan, who was recently diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and hit with some hefty bills. This live one-day online auction raised over $26,000! Amazing! One reason I love being apart of this blogging community.

• Maria Makes Muffins: I love Maria’s blog! She’s always sharing delicious “clean” recipes with beautiful pictures. And isn’t her blog design just too cute? She shared a homemade vanilla extract a little while back, and I thought it was a perfect example of her wonderful blog.

• Choosing Raw: It’s no secret, I’m sure you’ve noticed we’ve been making a lot more raw foods lately. It’s a lot of fun! That’s where Gena’s blog comes in. She has a lot of good raw recipes that look delicious! Most recently, I love the looks for her Hemp Pesto Recipe in which she shares multiple recipes incorporating hemp seeds. Love it!

• Scandi Foodie: Most notably, I love Maria’s food photos. I always want to eat whatever she makes because her presentation is so beautiful! I suggest checking out her recipe page. Lentils with daikon and orange? Sweet roasted vegetables with dried fruit? Cashew cream cheese? Yes, please!!

Have a great weekend!!

Eating all day

Be forewarned … this may or may not be the most random blog post ever.

Normally this time in the week I would be sharing a delicious recipe, but I just don’t have a fun recipe to share! Thus, I thought I’d post some normal, boring, day to day things with you instead. My typical breakfasts, snacks, and meals generally vary depending on the season, and whatever I'm feeling like having. When it comes to food, I’m sorta the type of person that has something, loves it, and then has it all the time until I get tired of it and move onto the next thing. I like it this way. Here’s some current favorites:

Morning Beverage

Every morning I have some type of drink when I wake up.

It’s usually either raw vegan chocolate milk, a green smoothie, or a huge fresh juice courtesy of good old Jack LaLanne! I love getting some veggies in first thing, and I find it quite refreshing in the morning hours, ha.

Snacks

Sometimes I feel like I’m literally eating all day. Especially working from home. It’s so easy to just pop into the kitchen and grab something. I don’t mind. Snacks are my friend.

My snacks usually involve raw fruits and vegetables combined with nut butters, nuts and/or hummus. And when we have some on hand, raw pies!

It combines the raw fruit and nuts but in a much more exciting way. In fact, I’ve been known to have raw pie for breakfast, snack, or dessert. Or all three.

Lunch

Lunch lately is a gigantic salad full of avocado goodness, leftovers from the night before, or some type of tasty quinoa dish.

Afternoon Treat

Okay, this is technically a snack, but it feels much more like a treat, I promise. I’m all about afternoon smoothie time!

This consists of whatever fruit I feel like throwing in the blender, a little agave, frozen banana, and a little ice. Always delicious, and so perfect for hot summer afternoons!

Dinner

If you’re a regular reader, you’ve seen plenty of our dinners! They include lots of veggies, some type of bean/legume/quinoa, pasta and copious amount of cashew cheese.

Dessert

We love dessert! My favorite “meal”, I’m quite sure. Dessert is usually cashew ice cream, raw pies, raw peanut butter cup, or fresh fruit.

And that’s about it!

What’s your favorite meal??

Weekend in St. Louis: PuraVegan

Next up in our weekend in St. Louis, we ate at PuraVegan.

PuraVegan

PuraVegan is a 100% raw vegan and gluten-free restaurant located 1 block away from Forest Park on 307 Belt Avenue in St. Louis. We’ve never been to an all raw restaurant before, so we were pretty excited. It’s fun for us to try new places and when it’s all raw, it’s that much more fun for us, ha.

While ordering we bought a bag of BBQ kale chips for “later” but we couldn’t resist opening them right away.

We couldn’t resist a fresh juice either! Our combo included kale, carrots, apple, and ginger. Sometimes kale in juices is a bit much for me, but there was a perfect amount of ginger to give this juice a great flavor. Delicious.

We had a heck of a time deciding on two things to order because everything sounded so good. Erik ended up getting the BBQ pizza:

And I got the burger, which was served with kale chips. Love it!

Just like Local Harvest, if we lived in St. Louis, Puravegan would be a place we would definitely frequent!

Touristy Time

Since neither of us had really ever been to St. Louis, we figured we had to do the touristy thing and see the arch. So after filling our bellies full of delicious food, we headed to the arch.

We would have even gone up to the top but we were just a little late and missed the last trip up for the night. Oh, well!

It was fun being in St. Louis for the weekend, almost a mini vacation, even though we were in a workshop all day every day, ha! But by the time it was all over, we were glad to come home.

It also gave me a bit of the travel bug … can I go to New York now?

Weekend in St. Louis: Local Harvest Cafe

Hi everyone!

I’m back! My Share the Love and Week in the Lens of Instagram posts were MIA this weekend because Erik and I were in St. Louis at an ACSM (American College of Sports Medicine) workshop. Erik needed to get his personal training certifications up to date with a nationally recognized organization and I decided to join him!

Thus, if the test goes well … I’m going to be an ACSM certified personal trainer soon! It’s something I’ve wanted to do for awhile, but just kind of needed a push to go for it … and what better push than going to a workshop with your husband? Yep, that’s what I thought, too.

Local Harvest Café

While in the Lou, we got to eat at a couple of fun new {to us} places. Our Friday workshop got over at 8 p.m. and we headed to Local Harvest.

We decided the KC equivalent {but a little different} would be Blue Bird. Definitely our kind of place with a big focus on local and seasonal ingredients. At least 50% of their ingredients comes from within 150 miles of St. Louis.

Their menu is awesome … it was hard to decide what to get!
{It wasn’t very hard to pick some kombucha though!}

Some interior pictures:

Not just the menu, but we loved the décor and overall ambiance too.

For dinner, we shared the vegan enchiladas:

Some hummus:

And the veggie burger:

Everything was delicious! After eating random little snacks in the car all day and trying to find decent food near our workshop location on breaks {there weren’t many}, it was really nice to eat a good, local meal.

If we lived in St. Louis, we would be regulars

Stay tuned for the rest of our weekend adventures!

What did you do this weekend??