Disney Channel Despair

Sundays are always bittersweet: 1) it’s another weekend day and 2) it’s the end of the weekend and tomorrow is Monday, a class day.  Oh well, the most you can do is get up and make the best of it.

I woke up a few minutes before my alarm and read another chapter in The Hunger Games.  I’ll be honest, I am 100% completely hooked.  It took a great feat of willpower to put down the book and get myself out of bed to be productive.  Once I was upright, I grabbed a chocolate hazelnut ball to hold me over while I worked parish breakfast.

I was assigned to the eggs and boy did we get swamped with people.  Perhaps it’s just because I haven’t worked one in a while but it seemed like way more people than normal.  Today’s special was a hashbrown dish made by Carl.  Every time we opened the pan cover to dish some up for a congregation member it smelled up the whole kitchen with the scent of Thanksgiving stuffing.  In the end there were leftovers and I considered having some and the last dregs of eggs but when I looked in the dish the whole bottom glistened with oil and butter remnants.  I decided against it and went with a peach fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt instead with some bran flakes on top.

While I ate, I listened to the Dean’s forum.  There was a guest speaker today: a young high school graduate who protested the new immigration laws at the state capitol and got arrested because of it.  He was 19 years old.  I can’t even imagine protesting something on that level, let alone getting arrested and spending time in jail!  I think this reminded me of just how blessed my life has been.  I have never had reason to protest on the steps of the state capital.  Being honest, I have never been involved enough in politics to even know when I SHOULD be protesting.  Basically the only time I am committed to politics is during the presidential cycle.  I feel like that is a sad thing to admit but hey, at least I do that much, right?

When I got back from serving up breakfast food I grabbed my wallet and went out grocery shopping for a few things to get me through till Thanksgiving break.  I picked up some wheat bran and steel cut oats as a few new things to try.  Apparently steel cut oats will give some crunchy texture to my normal bowl of oatmeal and/or oatbran.

And then I caved and got the generic version of Girl Scout Peanut Butter Patties (or perhaps you know them as Tagalongs if you’re of a more recent generation).

These used to be my favorite cookies in the world so with that in combination with my creeping hunger the longer the shopping trip drew on coupled with a wrong turn down the not-cereal aisle, I ended up with them in my basket.  When I arrived home I snacked on an apple as I put things away.

Then I dressed for my workout.  I walked to the fitness center and did 50 minutes on the stationary reclined bike while studying more metabolic disorders.  Cutest part of the session: Joshua asked me how many calories I thought I would burn in total when I finished and I told him “probably around 400.”

BAM! What do you know?

Sweaty and such, I returned home and skipped a shower immediately in exchange for a nice bowl of ranch macaroni and cheese.  I followed this microwaved one bowl recipe and had mixed emotions about it.

1) Much too salty!  I will reduce the salt content greatly when I do this again. 2) Loved being able to choose my own pasta for the dish.  I used a whole wheat elbow noodle. 3) The cheese sauce was too thin due to the 1/4 cup of milk so I would halve that next time.  This time I used a few grams of flour to tighten it up which worked just fine. 4) Adding in ranch dressing was the best decision ever. 5) The whole one bowl thing is a great idea though I found the microwaving to cook the pasta was a bit messy with some overflow of water.  Oh well, nothing a sponge couldn’t wipe up.

With it only being 3p when I downed my last bit I decided to shower and do some more studying.  Well, at least that is what I told myself.  I did shower but I didn’t study.  I wasted time watching Gossip Girl on Netflix and chatting online.  Finally, I felt bad enough about it by 5:15p that I moved myself to my couch to actually study.  13 pages of information later, I was fighting off tummy grumbles so I set the oven to 400 degrees and made myself a pizza with a BBQ base, some turkey pepperoni and red onion, all complimented by goat cheese.

I think this may be the most perfectly round pizza I have ever made.  =D  Cool.  It tasted great though it could have used more cheese in retrospect or more BBQ sauce.  Perhaps both actually. 

I dug into my DVR after dinner.  I must say that they just don’t make Disney Channel movies like they used to!  What happened to the likes of Motocrossed or Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century??  I recorded a Disney Channel movie called My Babysitter’s a Vampire just for the heck of it and I couldn’t even swallow 20 minutes of it.  Awful!  The acting was crappy, the lines were stilted dialogue that I can’t imagine any real teenagers ever saying, and there was a point where a girl was flung over twenty feet in the air, landed on a roof, fell to the ground and walked away unscathed.  Yea right!  Give me a break.  Also, their blatant use but avoidance of Twilight was sorry.  In the movie the obsession was called Dusk.  Honestly, you couldn’t come up with anything a little more original/not-so-rip-off-ish??  Oh well, you win some, you lose some.

Once I couldn’t stand it any longer, I deleted the movie and moved on to a figure skating competition from earlier this afternoon.  I used to love watching skating on TV but now that I have no idea who these young women are and I’ve been out of the sport for so long (I last skated competitively before high school) that it isn’t as much fun to watch anymore.  Oh well, the skaters still put on beautiful programs though I think I’d rather watch synchronized skating (what I used to do).

Dessert came later in the evening.  I decided to try some of the cookies I got today.  I normally would have just eaten them out of the box but I saw this before I put them away:

Who am I to argue?  I ate one straight from the freezer and the other I chopped up and topped my ice cream/brownie with it.  It was basically all happiness, all the time.

For now though I am going to tuck into bed and read a few more chapters in The Hunger Games before I drift off.  Tomorrow is the metabolic exam at 1p so we’ll see how things go.  I’ll let you know!  Before I go though, I wanted to inspire your Monday (or any other day) breakfast.  Check it out –>

Baked French Toast
Adapted and combined from this recipe and this recipe.

The great thing about this recipe is its versatility!  You can make a full 8”x8” pan (4 servings) or you can cut it in half and use a bread loaf pan instead (2 servings).  You can also sub out the banana for a chopped apple depending on your taste that particular morning or leave out the fruit all together if you don’t have any on hand.

Ingredients:
8 slices of bread, cubed
4 eggs
3/4 cup of milk (dairy or otherwise!)
1/2 tbsp vanilla
1 ripe banana, mashed
1-2 tbsp maple syrup
Cinnamon for sprinkling

How to:
1. Preheat the oven to 375F.
2. Mix the eggs, milk, vanilla, syrup, and the mashed banana.
3. Add the cubed bread to the wet mix and toss to coat.
4. Pour the mixture into a greased 8”x8” pan.
5. Sprinkle with cinnamon and bake for 30 minutes.

Questions: Are there any sports you once competed in but have since lost touch with? What is your favorite Disney Channel movie?