So, my attempts at waiting to get ALLTHEPUMPKIN until October failed and I gave in. We headed to Trader Joe’s. I proceeded to spend much too much time looking for the perfect pumpkin.

(But he is perfect, isn’t he?)

Then, I proceeded to clear the shelves pick out several items. My noteworthy purchases were pumpkin butter, pumpkin cream cheese (my favorite!), pumpkin spiced pumpkin seeds, and cinnamon apple chèvre (goat cheese). Also noteworthy finds that I restrained myself from purchasing were pumpkin mochi, pumpkin cranberry granola, pumpkin pop tarts, and some really, really delicious pumpkin cranberry crackers (they were the free sample with honey chèvre).

It was so fabulous. In terms of other non-pumpkin life events, Wednesday morning I went to an insanely early spin class which was awesome, and then proceeded to over caffeinate myself with this latte:

Thursday morning I did the Crossfit workout that was posted just in the gym at school, which was pretty quick. I did 10 minutes of 3 snatches at 65% on the minute, and then 9 sets of 250m sprints on the rowing machine.

Friday morning I spun a little on my own, and then went to Crossfit in the evening, which I am already sore from. The strength was back squats with a pause at the bottom, which gets me every time! My legs were already done before the conditioning portion, which was a 15 minute amrap of 20 front lunges (65#), 15 burpees (blech), and 20 single arm dumbbell snatches.

In terms of food, I haven’t broken into the pumpkin THAT much. The pumpkin seeds are delicious, but my current favorite way to eat pumpkin is crackers with pumpkin cream cheese and pumpkin butter. I also tried the pumpkin Chobani-it’s good! I would recommend it.

For breakfast, yogurt bowls are nothing new. Sometimes in my room, sometimes in the dining hall. Always with sun butter.

Here are a couple more meals:

The last of my packed lunches.

Spinach salad with pasta from the dining hall, plus cabbage and chicken masala.

A non-yogurt breakfast of egg whites, spinach, and cheese.

And a perfect nectarine from the Farmer’s Market, eaten before brunch opens here.

And just for fun, let’s end with a little progress picture.

There’s a garden right outside my window and this little guy is making some progress right before my eyes!

What pumpkin product are you most excited for? What’s something I must try?

To be perfectly honest, I have not been super inspired with my blogging lately. I may be having a mid-life blog crisis. What is the purpose really of my blog? Should I make my writing voice more formal? Is this really a “healthy living blog”? What does that even mean? What valuable content can I contribute to the vastness that is the Internet? I’m also starting to think about myself and how to be a better person. I think that’s something we can all work on! It’s interesting because I have a post from sometime around this time last year talking about a similar thing. Although of course it sounds silly looking back on it now just in the way I worded everything!

I suppose my current contribution to the Internet is my food as a college student. Which means easy and microwave friendly, more often than not! And many times lazy-I am not ashamed of ziplock bag pictures! (Ok, maybe I am.)

This is an easy breakfast that never gets old. An orange and scrambled eggs with interesting cheese. Microwave scrambled eggs are SO easy, and are indistinguishable from stove scrambled eggs. And a quality cheese completely makes the dish.

Brunch of a whole wheat waffle and a little bit of yogurt+fruit. 

Dining hall dinner-Indian food! I admit, I ate virtually zero vegetables this day, and normally I would have a bed of spinach in there, but some days I’m just really not feeling it.

A ziplock bag lunch which is always a winner, and so, so easy. Simply microwave (or bake if you’re fancier than I am and have an oven) a sweet potato, season, and top with salsa! I have little guacamole packets which I put on at lunch time. I also packed some hardboiled eggs for protein. To season, I used this amazing salt blend:

This is SO GOOD. It has a very smoky flavor, and reminds me a bit of barbecue sauce.

This dining hall dinner was a complete WIN. I seriously lucked out. Salsa baked chicken, cilantro brown rice, salad, and the star of the show-roasted cauliflower and carrots! I don’t know why the dining hall always insists on steaming cauliflower, so this was quite the treat! I definitely brought back some to pack in my lunch for the next day.

My yogurt mess really is quite the mess in this picture because it rode around with me all day. It is reduced berries with sunflower seed butter and plain yogurt-my favorite!

If you haven’t tried dried persimmons, this should be a priority in your life. We all know I was a tad obsessed with fresh persimmons this fall, and while these definitely aren’t the same, they seem to disappear quite quickly!

In other things that you should go out and buy: this. Now. Run. It’s delicious! Everything I could have hoped for and more. Creamy goat cheese, sweet and fruity blueberries. Amazing.

An unexpected treat-dinner in the form of a care package from home! Vegetable soup and a corn and cheese cake. There was another cake as well but it seemed to disappear before the picture was taken! Yum!

I guess one contribution I have to the healthy living world right now is my attempt at a microwave St. Patrick’s Day cookie. Which may actually be made in the oven if I can get the microwave version to turn out first (it’s lower commitment!) 

I did make one major mistake though. Check out the results:

Pre-“baking.” (Wouldn’t it be awesome to have an Easy Bake Oven in a dorm room??)

Post-“baking.”

These don’t really look like St. Patrick’s Day cookies, do they? Let me explain. 

We already know about the Mystery Bread I’m obsessed with. (Which is now solved, by the way!)

See the green things? Those are sunflower seeds. Sunflower seeds react to turn green under certain baking conditions. I wanted to make green sunflower seed butter cookies. I SWEAR I thought it was baking powder that caused the reaction, but I failed to check before producing marvelously un-green cookies. It’s actually baking soda. So attempt #2 will come soon! The good news is, they tasted great!

On the fitness front, today I did one of the “girls” at Crossfit-Helen. This is 3 rounds of a 400m run, 21 kettle bell swings, and 12 pull ups. This one is harder than it sounds! I’m happy to report that I beat my last time by about 20 seconds, but I used much less assistance (a thinner band) on the pull ups! 

Tomorrow, I’m supposed to run 6 miles but I’m considering cutting it to 5. Today is my heaviest week of running on my training plan (4,6,4,12 miles), and despite following the training plan twice already, I’ve never actually fit in all the runs for the heaviest week! My calves are feeling a bit tight so I might cut it to 5 and then play it by ear. Lots of rolling out will be happening tonight between studying though!

Have a great week!

Any fun St. Patrick’s Day Traditions?