Breaded Goat Cheese, Gelato and Toga

I need to start coming up with more interesting blog titles! Anyway, this weekend was pretty good! The weather was nice on Saturday, and that was a major plus! I started out Friday night with a delicious dinner with some lovely ladies. After work I headed to the Midtown Tap & Tea Room, one of my favorite places in albany for after work dinner and drinks. The girls and I shared a bottle of delicious Riesling! I started with the Breaded Goat Cheese with Honey and Carmelized Onions. The best. thing. ever. I am IN LOVE with anything goat cheese, and this was the most creamy, delicious goat cheees I’ve had. Yum. And the honey really added to it.

For my main meal I got a salad: Pan-Fried Eggplant with Mixed Greens, Tomato, Red Onions, Cucumber, Roasted Red Peppers, Olives, Feta, Homemade Croutons & Lemon Vinaigrette. It was perfect, since after the goat cheese app, I didn’t want to over do it with a bigger meal. I’ve never had eggplant on a salad before, so this was excited to try this. Since eggplant doesn’t have much of taste, it was pretty good fried, nice and crispy, but a little too greasy for my liking. Otherwise, it was a great salad.

I was actually pretty full by the end of dinner, but we decided that going down to Lark for some gelato at Crisan would be a must for dessert. I got two $2 scoops of gelato: chocolate and chocolate oreo. I swear, I could live off of this gelato. I ate it too fast and didn’t take a picture. My friend and I also shared some flourless chocolate cake with chocolate ganache icing. Baked goods are my downfall. I parked in Washington Park on my way to Crisan, and all the flowers were blooming, so I snapped this picture as I walked through:

The weather forcast for Saturday was looking great, so my sister and one of my friends decided to go to Saratoga for the day to get lunch and visit the 2010 Adirondack Summer Sports & Fitness Expo. First, we had lunch at Bailey’s Cafe. I started with some tea: coconut mango oolong.

And then ordered the soup and panini combo. A cup of Lobster Bisque Soup, and I probably ate about 3/4 of it. It was SO rich and creamy.

And then The Congress: Fresh Mozzarella, Roasted Peppers, Spouts, Lettuce& Tomato with Pesto Herb Mayo. A delicious toasted sandwich filled with so many great veggies! And the bread was super tasty and crisped just right. So good! It came with chips and I was pretty full so I didn’t eat them.

I really enjoyed eating at this little cafe, and we got to sit outside in the sunshine. For some reason, eating outside when the sun is shining makes everything better!

After lunch, we headed down to the Expo, which I was looking forward to. But after wandering around for about 30 minutes, and stopping at the booths, I realized it was kind of a let down. I was hoping to see more demos and workout gear. There was only 1 station with hiking supplies, a couple of stations with bikes, and a few for canoes/kayaks. The only running stations were the ones advertising running groups and upcoming races. Mostly people just wanted to sell you things, rather than inform you about the upcoming events. It was rather disappointing. Needless to say, I didn’t buy anything. But we did attend a seminar! The coach of the Saratoga’s running club gave an hour presentation on “how to get faster” and it was pretty fascinating.

Some of his tips included:

Make sure you start with a basic mileage of 20 miles a week (I just got to this mileage this past week)
Include one long distance slow run into your workout routine, anywhere between 1 hour to 1 hour and 30 minute long run.
Work in hill workouts and tempo runs into your routine
Speedwork (the most confusing of all to me), and the most important if you want to be a faster runner.
RUN FAST!

The weather was wonderful when we left Saratoga, so when I got home I headed straight for my bike! I biked my good old loop 8 miles around my house. AND I made up the monster hill without getting off! Yes!! The ride is so scenic. And there are lots of trees.