French Toast Win

There is a reason why I love breakfast.

IT’S AWESOME!

I’ve had French toast made in a skillet.  I’ve had French toast that’s been baked.  However, I have never had French toast in oatmeal form.  Boy have I been missing out!

This lovely bowl of oats was made according to this recipe.  It had two kinds of oatmeal, wheat germ (which I subbed for the flax meal in the original ingredient list), banana, and a whole egg!  Talk about decadent.  The maple syrup on top got all warm and seeped into the holes that I opened up with my spoon as I chowed down walking to class.  All in all, this was a major breakfast win.  I can’t wait to make it again!!

Communications class today dealt with our Master’s thesis research projects.  We discussed how to go about choosing a question, getting IRB approvals, picking out the best method to obtain our data, and ways to assess the data.  I hadn’t necessarily figured out before class what sort of thing I wanted to do with my project but by the time we finished I knew that transcribing interviews was not something that I wanted to undertake.  I gravitated more toward the survey route with both quantitative questions and open-ended questions.  This would be a “combined” approach and one that I thought would best deal with my chosen field of research: infertility.  I’m still not sure at this very moment where in that field I want to go but I certainly enjoyed writing my other Master’s project on genetic orphans in the realm of infertility so we’ll see where I take it from here.

After class the whole group of first and second years hunkered down to study for the Metabolism exam.  I felt fairly confident so I did some studying but also just listened to other people talk and watched some ladies draw diagrams.  By 12:30 I decided that I should eat even though I wasn’t really hungry (thanks to my awesome breakfast!) because I wanted to make sure that hunger didn’t distract me from my one o’clock exam.  For lunch I ate my tuna salad and mozzarella cheese sandwich with some honey twist pretzels, sesame sticks, and Special K crackers on the side.

Sadly, the tuna salad was a bit more moist than I remembered and it made the bottom slice of bread a bit soggy but overall the taste was still yummy and once I took a bite I realized I really did want to eat.  Honestly though, when do I ever not want to eat?  I’ll admit eating when I’m not necessarily hungry sometimes makes me anxious because I feel like I’m cheating my body.  Like I’m not listening.  Like I’m “wasting” calories when I’m not actually craving them.  I hate thoughts like those so most of the time I just push them aside and tell myself that my body needs fuel and that it’s okay to eat.

The Metabolic exam when well.  We started at 1 o’clock and I was walking out of the room by 1:15.  I felt good about 18 out of the 20 questions.  When I got back to the student room I checked and saw that I got one question wrong for sure and I was questionable on another.  Either way though, it should be a >90% grade whenever we get them back.

Speaking of tests, we got our Human Genetics exam back after sitting through an excruciating lecture on diagnostic methods like allele specific oligonucleotides, ligation arrays, and chip assays.  Ugh.  We were supposed to start another lecture after checking out our tests but we didn’t even get close.  By the time 3:30 rolled around we were just finishing up talking about the last question that most of the class had trouble on as a whole.  I will say though that I really appreciate professors we do partial credit for questions where the answer, which is a result of a ton of calculations (perhaps done by hand), is based on one singular original assumption.  For instance, we had a short answer question which required Bayesian analysis.  I determined my original assumption and proceeded to do Bayesian math which took up the whole page.  I was wrong in my answer but he only took off a half point because under my assumption the whole thing worked.  So really, it wasn’t like I could do Bayesian analysis but rather that I misplaced my initial step.  Yay partial credit!

I walked home after class.  Thankfully it was dry.  I was worried for a bit there because the weather channel kept saying that rain was coming at 3.  I managed to make it all the way without a dark cloud in the sky.  When I arrived I changed into workout clothes and when to the fitness center where I hopped on my usual treadmill and did 3.63 miles with a 5 minute cooldown.  It was a harder run than normal, I’ll say.  I had some weird reflux-y stuff going on in my throat while running.  I’m not sure what it stemmed from but I hope it doesn’t happen again.  I don’t like feeling like my throat is being burned up. 

I returned super sweaty, I swear more than normal (don’t you love the sports bra lines!), and jumped in the shower quickly.  When I was all clean I dug into a bowl of tangerine slices, yogurt, Stevia, chia seeds, and a crumbled wheat germ power muffin (recipe below).

I whipped up the muffin both off the top of my head and before going to the gym.  I was fairly pleased with the results. Check it out –>

I used a 4 oz ramekin that was oiled to cook the batter.  Now, not only was the muffin pretty tasty but mine had roughly 90 calories and 12g of protein!  You can’t beat that with a stick.

At this point it was already rolling onto 6 o’clock.  I decided not to have dinner at this point, rather only the above snack, since I wanted to push back my eating tonight.  I have to have a fasting blood drawn done at 9:10am tomorrow so I can’t eat after midnight.  Unless I overeat the night before I am ALWAYS hungry for breakfast when I wake up so the fact that I won’t be able to eat right away made me want to eat later in the evening tonight in an attempt to not be sooo ravenous tomorrow.  Here’s hoping it works!

Since the most recent exam was finally over I decided a night of doing nothing was called for.  So after my snack I called my mom and talked for a while, chatted online with some people, went through my Google Reader, and watched some DVRed shows.  Eventually I got hungry again so I made myself another bowl of microwaved macaroni and cheese like yesterday and thanks to my adjustments it tasted great.  I also used a mix of cheddar and goat cheese.  Can you say extra creamy?

To pump up the dish I added in some fire roasted peppers & caramelized onion chicken sausage.  The whole thing was nice, hot, comforting, and a wonderful late dinner.

This was followed by more DVRed shows and reading of The Hunger Games and of course, dessert!  You didn’t think I would forget did you?!?  Oh no, I actually stepped outside of my box tonight too.  On Joshua’s recommendation, I made a baked apple with some wheat germ and butter in the cored middle.  This baby was then topped with some peanut butter, cinnamon, and caramel sauce.

But, while I respect fruit sweets, in my opinion, dessert isn’t dessert without chocolate.  So, with this in mind, I had a block of Trader Joe’s dark chocolate with caramel and sea salt as well as a peanut butter patty.

Some German chocolate marshmallows may have snuck their way in there as well.  Just being honest now.  =P

Tonight, I leave you with some beautiful words:

Questions: Have you ever experimented with wheat germ?
What is your favorite flavor of oatmeal?