Town bagel – The Cookie ChRUNicles

So Many Recent Meals To Share Today (Including Red Mango Parfait!)

I missed last Wednesday’s post about food so for this week, I made sure to capture a few extra meals to share with you.

There’s only one slice of pizza in today’s post. The amount of vegetables that they pile on this whole wheat pizza from Monte is beyond believable. You can barely find the whole wheat crust under all of those vegetables but trust me, it’s there!

Mung bean noodles?

I don’t really know what a mung bean is but they make a good noodle. While all beans are excellent for health, here are 10 health benefits of mung beans if you are interested.

On the topic of beans, I’m still eating Banza chickpea pasta regularly.

If you ask me, Banza pasta, which is made from chickpeas, tastes like regular pasta in terms of texture and taste. Although, I don’t eat regular pasta all that often so don’t go by me if you are a regular pasta connoisseur.

I used to make the below sweet potato stir fry all of the time for dinner. Somehow I not only fell out of the habit of making the sweet potato stir fry but forgot all about how often it was a part of my dinner rotation.

This stir fry is really just vegetables stir-fried in the pan with Island Soyaki sauce from Trader Joe’s with the addition of chickpeas, roasted sweet potatoes, and then topped with avocado. The sweet potatoes are used instead of rice but go ahead and add rice too! I’ve done that and the texture combo is great. It’s a great dinner actually to have the night before a long run (if you can handle vegetables, which I can).

Recent Salads

Greek salad is always the answer when hungry.

I had this chopped salad from Town Bagel with honey mustard dressing on the side.

I’m pretty sure that I selected the following salad ingredients:

Romaine
Tomatoes
Cucumbers
Mushrooms
Hearts of Palm
Roasted Cauliflower
Roasted Red Peppers
Chickpeas
Avocado

It was nice to eat inside Chopt for the first time since last year! I chose a different ingredient combination this time too and loved it so much that I went back again the next day for lunch!

Romaine
Spinach
Roasted Chickpeas
Cauliflower Tabouli
Spicy Peppers
Avocado
Beets
Hearts of Palm
Pickled Onions
Tzaziki Dressing

It was equally as nice to dine out at The Cheesecake Factory for the first time in a while for dinner. I went with my favorite bbq ranch salad (no chicken). Those onion strings are everything.

It’s so weird that dining out is what makes me feel so normal.

I saved the best for last…

Oh Red Mango, how I’ve missed you!

I hadn’t had a Red Mango parfait since before the pandemic! There aren’t many Red Mango locations left anymore but the one in Roosevelt Field is still open!

I was so happy to order my parfait for lunch. In case you forget what is in a Red Mango parfait, I order the mixed berry parfait and replace the bananas with dark chocolate chips so it’s strawberries, blueberries, chocolate chips, and granola. The granola is Nature’s Path Pumpkin Flax Granola. I know this because I did my research in the past to figure it out. 🙂

Who remembers my weekly obsession with Red Mango parfaits for lunch? Or when Red Mango asked me to write a review of their smoothies?

I hope to get back to eating Red Mango again now, especially as we get further into Spring and the warmer weather.

Mandarin Oranges vs. Clementines + Plus A Few Recent Meals

Well, suddenly it’s Wednesday and I’m here to talk food yet I don’t have much food to show you today.

Oops.

I haven’t taken a picture of the salads I’ve been eating daily at home because they look the same as every other week.

I’ve been eating a lot of the cutie clementines, or so I thought, as they are actually Halo mandarin oranges. Anyone else confusing the little oranges they are eating? Like I keep peeling cuties to only now realize that the mesh bag says Halo and that they are in fact mandarin oranges. Does that mean my mandarin oranges aren’t clementines or are mandarins and clementines the same thing? Of course, I had to google the differences between clementines and mandarin oranges because I just assumed you would like to know too. Here’s the answer.

And then I got caught up with work plus already trying to figure out how I would like to design my son’s dorm room that I fell behind on considering today’s post. Boys are so easy. My son asked what I was doing the other morning and I told him I was doing my research on what he will need for his dorm room while picking out his bedding and his reply was, “oh ok, cool.”

I did choose these two slices of Sicilian pizza from La Piazza over the weekend. They just looked so irresistible! The sauce from La Piazza is definitely a favorite of mine.

And I did have a chopped salad from Town Bagel.

In the salad was:

romaine
tomatoes
cucumbers
roasted red peppers
mushrooms
beets
roasted cauliflower
chickpeas
avocado

This chopped salad was so big that I had half of it for lunch and the other half for dinner. I don’t even know how it was as big as it was and still fit inside the usual container.