A whole week in Charlotte and what to do… what to do?
How bout trying as many restaurants as humanly possible? Don’t mind if I do!
Ain’t that the truth?
Italian take #2
Yesterday afternoon, we arrived in Charleston. In an effort to save $$$, I booked us a studio apartment rather than staying in a hotel in the historic district. This saved us about $400, but we are about 1-2 miles out from most of the restaurants and sightseeing we want to do. I think the savings offsets the distance, plus with all the eating we’re doing the more walking the better!
We have a full kitchen, washer dryer, and nice dining area too:
While Jarrod was in Belgium he said all he wanted was some decent Italian food, and there was none to be found near his worksite. So, I grudgingly complied with his request to get Italian for the second night in a row…. 😉 Just kidding–Italian is my fav too!
After some googling, we decided to go to Bocci’s in Historic Charleston because their menu had a lot of different dishes we had never tried.
Typically, when I go to the store to buy wine I end up with Cabernet about 90% of the time. So in an effort to keep trying new things we went with Bocci’s special wine of the night:
This wine was FANTASTIC! I’m so glad the waitress recommended it. It was full bodied and had a great spice to it.
For the appetizer, we really REALLY wanted to order the bruschetta…. But we decided to push ourselves outside our tomato-basil-cheesy-bread-goodness comfort zone and instead ordered the Arancini. The arancini is an arborio rice ball made with sausage, parmesan, ricotta and roasted red peppers, fried to golden brown and served with marinara sauce:
And it was absolutely delicious!
The ambiance of the restaurant was fantastic. It was low lit, and had a series of small rooms with sporadic tables of all shapes and sizes. It reminded me of restaurants I visited in Europe back in college, especially with the huge doors that opened up to the outdoors.
For our main entre, we went with the Chicken Conchiglia: Large pasta shells stuffed with chicken, three cheese mix, and herbs, topped with tomato basil sauce and baked:
These were so tasty — and super filling! We ended up brining 3 of the 5 shells home with us. I think we might make them into sandwiches later today 😀
Charleston has so much character (and so much humidity 😉 ).
Since I’ve been gone, two of my friends from home have decided to try out overnight oats (and send me pictures)! I think they miss me 🙂
Tim tried oats + almond milk + cinnamon + brown sugar + banana + peanut butter:
In his words they were: “mmmm OMG perfect!”
Jessie decided to try oats + almond milk + peanut butter + cinnamon + brown sugar + strawberries + blueberries:
In her words: “OMGGGGG. These rocks my socksssss”
😀 So if you haven’t tried them based on my raving, now you have two additional ravers to back up my love for overnight oats! I think that’s the first thing I’m going to eat when I get home!
Pita Pizza & a Green Monster
Some nights I am really amped to try out a new recipe…. And some nights, I just want pizza. Tonight was one of THOSE nights.
I decided to use a Joseph’s Middle East Bakery Low Carb pita as my base. I topped that off with:
- 1/4 cup Classico Fire Roasted/Tomato Garlic spaghetti sauce
- Sprinkling of garlic powder, onion powder, dried parsley, dried oregano, black pepper, and red pepper flakes
- 1 ounce thinly sliced grilled chicken (leftover from the batch I grilled up sunday night)
- 1 light babybel cheese sliced into four super thin discs
- 1 tbsp fat free ricotta
- thinly sliced red onion
- a couple thinly sliced cherry tomatoes
Popped it into a 400 degree oven for 15 minutes. Then, I topped it with some chopped basil from the back yard garden:
I served the pizza up with a side salad that consisted of romaine, cherry tomatoes, red onion, banana peppers, and 2 tbsp Ken’s Steakhouse Lite Northern Italian dressing with Basil and Romano:
The salad was delicious. That Ken sure does know a thing or two about dressings 😉
And the pizza was.. in a word… Umm…. YUM. Ok, that’s two words, but regardless this pizza really hit the spot:
Soooo goood!!! Why don’t I make pizza more often?!
Check out this huge banana pepper I’ve got growing in the back yard:
He might have to go on my next salad 🙂
Stats on the pizza: 197 calories, 20g carbs, 6g fat, 20g protein, 5g fiber
Stats on the salad: 97 calories, 13g carbs, 5g fat, 3g protein, 4g fiber
All together now: 294 calories, 33g carbs, 11g fat, 23g protein, 9g fiber
I’ve previously eluded to the fact that I’m a messy cook. Given the simplicity of my dinner tonight, you’d probably assume that my kitchen would be in pretty good shape. Whelp, you’d be wrong!
Take a look at this monstrosity:
I wish I were kidding. Can you imagine the disasters I could create if I had a big kitchen?
After dinner, I couldn’t wait for late-night snack time to roll around. I decided earlier in the day that I’d make up a green monster smoothie for my snack to give me lots of energy for my run in the morning.
Threw the following into the blender:
- 1/2 cup Almond Breeze Unsweetened Almond Milk
- 1/4 cup Oikos plain Greek Yogurt
- 1 packet Truvia (stevia) all natural sweetener
- 1/2 cup fresh frozen strawberries
- 1/4 cup fresh blueberries
- 1 cup fresh SPINACH
- 3 ice cubes
It’s green. It’s delicious.
Mmmmm…
Thankfully, the green monster gave me the energy I needed to clean up that disaster kitchen:
Stats on the green monster: 105 calories, 18g carbs, 2g fat, 9g protein, 5g fiber
Blog Updates
I recently updated my About Me page to incorporate some comments I had posted on the blog. I also added a Foodie Q&A page where I plan to keep a running list of questions readers ask. And as always, I am continuously linking all my recipe posts to the Recipe Page. This page is actually getting pretty long, so I think I’ll be reformatting it in the near future.