• Morningstar Farms Garden Veggie Patties
• Morningstar Farms Mediterranean Chickpea Patties 
• Morningstar Farms Sausage Patties
• Morningstar Farms Chik’n Patties
• Boca Chik’n Patties
• Smartdogs

Yes, I know that these are like the fast food of the package veggie burger world with an ingredient list a mile long with all sorts of weird crap, but I like them and they’re easy.  I will often put one on top of a salad for some extra protein at lunch.

So, when I saw some new flavor of Boca burgers that advertised that they only had 2 Weight Watchers points (normally the sort of veggie burgers I buy have 4), I grabbed them.  I should have known better.

This was quite possibly the worst veggie burger I’ve ever had or at least had in a long time.  Bleh.  No wonder they are only two points.  Two points of disgusting.

In order to remedy my bad veggie burger experience, I decided to go the homemade route and made Green Curry Veggie Burgers with Black Beans and Walnuts. Much more than two points each, but worth it.  I halved the recipe, which made four patties.  They were a little hard to cook because they were so soft and they broke apart very easily, but they were really tasty.

They’re not the prettiest thing, but neither is the pre-packaged kind.

What’s your favorite pre-packaged veggie burger?

Normally, I don’t like doing races where I don’t feel prepared but the Peachtree is different.  It’s one of the world’s biggest 10Ks with 60,000 participants.  I’m in Wave E, which starts 20 minutes after the first wave, but it goes all the way to like Wave X, which starts like two hours after the first wave.  So it’s crowded and if you’re in the back, it’s nearly impossible to run.  Since I’m closer to the front, there will likely be more runners than walkers (you can submit a qualifying time to get a better starting placement).  But I still feel like it’s a crowded race and PRing is not on my mind.

I’m not really feeling running lately, but I did want to do something new to switch up my routine.  Enter Best Body Bootcamp.

If you’re not familiar, it’s an online program that you do on your own that’s run by my friend Tina.  Today was the first day.  It was a 30 minute or so cardio workout that I did during my lunch hour at the gym.  I definitely worked up a sweat.  There was also an optional 20 minute cardio part.  I signed up for this tennis team at work (I suck at tennis, but there was an opportunity to join the “practice” team if you were a beginner so I did that) and I thought that would be my cardio, but it got rained out, so I just took Murphy for a walk to satisfy my cardio requirement.  And also because he demanded it.

We walked around the festival first, seeing what was there.   It was a mixture of some hippie art booths selling dresses and things like that and food trucks mostly.

After deciding that there was nothing that we wanted to buy, we set up our blanket by the stage.  We got there around 5:30 and it wasn’t too crowded yet.

Our friends Emily and Brian joined us a little while later and we hung out and listened to the bands, before heading to the food truck area to get something to eat.  I ended up getting something from Mix’D Up.

I had the Santa Fe, which was a black bean patty with avocado, pico de gallo and cheese.  It normally came with chipotle ranch dressing but I got it without.

It was pretty good.  What I really wanted was a tofu banh mi sandwich from a different truck, but they were out.  I also had a King of Pops strawberry lemonade popsicle.

As it started to get later, it definitely got more and more crowded.

The only band playing that I really knew (well knew one song) was Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeroes and they came on at 9.

Definitely more crowded then!  They were good and played a 2-hour set which is pretty long for a free festival, I thought.  I wonder what festival we’ll go to next weekend!

First up and this was probably from last weekend, but I’m getting behind in my blogging, a Thai Tofu Sandwich. Apparently Health magazine (where the recipe is from) is using some sort of stock image for this sandwich, because their picture clearly has tomatoes and mayo on it, neither of which are in the recipe.  Weird, but the sandwich was really good.  It tasted like a Banh Mi sandwich.  Yum.

And bonus, I made a bunch of them and Jason and I took them to work for lunches.  I’m actually not a big sandwich for lunch person, but I did enjoy this one.  And now I want a real Banh Mi.

Another day this week, we cut up a bunch of veggies for a chopped Mexican style salad.

I’m not linking to the recipe for the dressing because I didn’t think it was so great, but the salad is pretty, no?

Murphy’s been enjoying our outdoor meals too, in the shade of our hydrangea bush.

And that’s all I’ve got for now.  Happy Friday!

They handed us a map, when we entered the park and I tried to direct us to an area that look liked it had some good hikes.  Unfortunately, the road to that particular trailhead was closed, so we ended up somewhere else in the park.

Somewhere else had this log that we had to cross.  It was really scary.

When we got to the other side, we realized that there wasn’t much on the other side and we had to turn back.  This is my, “What do you mean I have to cross the log again?” face.

We ended up finding a big hill to hike up.  It looked small from the bottom, but it ended up taking us like an hour to get to the top.  The views were worth it.

After climbing back down (and freaking ourselves out from seeing some fresh animal poop), we started our drive back to Boulder and were hungry.  On the way back, we passed what we thought was Oskar Blues Brewery.  It turned out that it was an Oskar Blues restaurant and not the brewery, but they still had what we needed: beer and food.

Tastes and salad.  This salad was like the best thing I had during our entire trip.

Before heading back to our hotel to change, we stopped at Boulder Falls for a quick photo op.  It was literally right off the main road and very easy to get to.

After changing, we headed to Pearl Street to shop and eventually eat dinner.  I loved Pearl Street so much.  It reminded me a lot of Church Street in Burlington, Vermont, where I went to college.

We ended up at The Kitchen [next door] for dinner.  We weren’t that hungry, so we decided to split the kale chips and the mussels.

I was super excited to see kale chips on the menu, but they were really, really salty.  The mussels were good though – better than the ones that we had in Denver.

When we woke up the next morning, it was cold and rainy out and we felt ready to head back to Atlanta.

(I’m probably instagramming.)

First order of business after we checked into our hotel was to get some food and it just so happened that Native Foods Cafe, a totally vegan fast casual place, was like across the street from our hotel.

I had the Greek Gyro Earth Bowl.

Jason had the Oklahoma Bacon Cheeseburger, which was also totally vegan.

Though I’m sure he would have preferred a real cheeseburger, I thought everything was good and french fries are french fries, right?

After lunch, we met up with Lauren and Greg and they took us to Chatauqua Park to hike the Flatirons.

It was really great hiking with people that knew what they were doing and where they were going.  We made it about 3/4 of the way up before realizing that we were running late and heading back down.  Check out these views!

The hike itself wasn’t easy but it wasn’t hard either.  It was perfect and even though it was almost 90 degrees out, there was no humidity and we barely broke a sweat.  I’ll take it!

After our hike, we headed to Avery Brewing Company to taste some local beers.

Then it was off to Longmont, where we met Paige and her husband at a Food Truck park.

Also, just because i have a strange obsession with bloodhounds…

I felt like this was the perfect Colorado day.  So much fun.

It’s pretty crazy that things like this are just there in Colorado.  You certainly don’t see this sort of scenery in Georgia, that’s for sure.

We walked around for a while taking pictures.

And then we stopped for lunch in the nearby town of Manitou Springs.  Jason really wanted to try a true Colorado delicacy – Rocky Mountain Oysters – so we did.

Hint: those are not really oysters.

I actually broke like 15 years of not eating red meat to try a small bite of one.  Yup, a fried bull testicle was the first piece of meat I’ve intentionally eaten in in that long.  It just tasted like….fried.

Manitou Springs was a cute little town and we walked around, going in and out of different shops.

After we saw pretty much everything, we dropped Eva off and headed back to Denver.  Since we missed our first flight, we really hadn’t had a chance to explore Denver much and wanted to make sure we did so before leaving for Boulder the next morning.

We were staying right by the 16th Street Mall, which is like a pedestrian mall that’s closed to traffic.

It was cute, but we agreed that it was a really touristy section of town and we wished that we’d had time to check out some different neighborhoods.  They did have these random pianos that you could play, and that was cool.

For dinner, we decided to go to City O’ City.  Jason is really awesome about going to vegetarian restaurants when I want to.  Maybe he was done with meat for the day after the Rocky Mountain oysters!

I read some Yelp reviews and they all basically said it was a really hipster place with great food and bad service.  Well, it was hipster but I thought the service was fine.  And the food was really good, they got that part right.  I had the Kimchee Stew.

Jason had the Udon Noodle bowl.

Both were good, but I liked mine better.  After dinner, we went back to our hotel to figure out where we were staying the next night, in Boulder.

When we got to the airport, however, our luck turned around.  The only seats that they had available on our flight were first class so we got to sit there for free.  Score.

We finally got to our hotel around 6.  There was some sort of comic book convention going on, so the hotel was packed with people dressed in costume.  It was interesting.

My friend Eva, who I have been friends with since I was 9, moved to Colorado about a year ago.  She lives in Monument, about an hour south of Denver and drove up to our hotel to meet us for dinner.

We went to The Cheeky Monk for dinner, which was a Belgian bar.  I was enticed by the mussels and Jason liked the big beer list.

Unfortunately, neither one of us was too impressed with the mussels.  The beer was good though.  And it was fun to see Eva.

We hung out there for a while, before calling it a night and heading back to the hotel.  We were both pretty wiped from traveling all day.

More to come!

We still need to do the top rail and the balusters (the up and down post things that go in between those two rails that you see) and stain it after a while, but it was definitely good enough that we could eat outside all weekend long.  And we got to put up our cool sign that we got in Greenville. Matter of fact, I do use the side door.

(Side note:  Anyone have any suggestions of where to get inexpensive outdoor furniture?  That little table is an old hand me down from someone that I worked with in like 2004 and it’s way too small.)

What better weekend to start up the grill than Memorial Day weekend, right?  Hello totally overexposed picture.

Those kabobs were pre-packaged from Kroger and in hindsight, not a very good idea.  The mushrooms dried out and looked like brains.  I guess maybe I should have marinated them in olive oil or something?

While I went the veggie kabob route, Jason opted for chili dogs.  Did you know that Texas Pete canned chili is actually vegetarian?  I happened to look at the label (even though I wasn’t eating it) and noticed that it was made of soy crumbles.  I told Jason and he was like, “No, it’s beef” but upon further inspection, he realized it wasn’t.  Funny thing is that they don’t market it as a vegetarian product but it is!

We also had corn and potato salad.

This is totally my new go-to potato salad recipe.  I don’t like mayo, so I’m really, really picky about potato salad and normally feel that it’s too heavy on the mayo.  But this recipe only had 1 tbsp for 6 servings which made it creamy, but not too much so.

The next night, we went back on the deck for dinner 2.0.  Only problem is that, after three years, we ran out of propane for the grill.    I’m not sure how it lasted that long. I had some Smartdogs (I am aware that I am like the only person on earth who likes them and thinks they taste like hot dogs.  I haven’t had a really hot dog in literally 20 years, so what do I know?) and we also made a strawberry avocado honey lime salad, which screams summer.  You know, if salads screamed.

That picture is pre-dressing.

I foresee many more meals out on our back deck.  If only I could not come inside from dinner with about 5000 mosquito bites afterward.

I’d been to Mason Mill a few years ago but Jason went recently with a friend and told me that they’d totally redone it and added a paved trail that was about a mile long.

There were parts of the trail that were concrete and other parts that were made of wood.

There were also a bunch of woodsy trails going off the main trail that you could hike or ride a bike on.

I made an unwise footwear decision so we didn’t go off the main trail.  Whoops.

It was only a mile out and another back, but with a dog that likes to smell (and mark) everything, it took a while.

It was a great end to the long weekend.  And now it’s only a 4-day week.  Can’t every weekend/week be like this?