Drowning in Pasta Salad

I think I made enough Pasta Salad tonight to feed an army, but I’ll get back to that later.

This morning I had a yummy breakfast, some Special K protein with Kashi H2H! I’ve never tried Kashi cereal before but I picked it up yesterday the store because I’m trying to steer away from heavily processed foods. I’m pretty sure Special K has a long list of ingredients but I love it because it is low calorie and high in protein and fiber, and that’s why I eat it. But anyway, I really liked the Kashi cereal! I think its going to be one of my staple cereals now. It has 130 calories for 3/4 a cup, which is pretty much the same as Special K strawberry, but it has protein and fiber in it. I like that!

I had a quick and boring lunch today so I’ll skip over that. But I did go to the gym this afternoon for a speed workout. I did five miles in 49:24. I pretty much made it up as I went along, doing a 1 mile warm up, a couple of repeats of 800 @ 8:54 with 400 jogs in between, and a 1 mile cool down. I feel like it was a pretty effective work out! I was definitely sweating! I wolfed down a banana in the car on the way home because I was starving…

Dinner was good. I wanted to try my new veggie dogs!

I would suggest these to anyone who is looking to loose weight and looking for healthy substitutes of things they like! They’re only 45 calories a link! They are a pretty good substitute for hot dogs, if you don’t ‘t mind the flavor of fake hot dogs, that is. 😉  But its no juicy Nathan’s hot dog. (I used to love those back in the day.) I actually didn’t taste much of the veggie dog itself because I slathered a bunch of mustard and relish on it! Too much, I think. I used the top half of a whole wheat sandwich thin as a bun, and that worked out perfect! I would love to try these on the grill because the thing I miss about real hot dogs are the grill marks!  I also had a side of my quinoa salad (its finally gone!), and a tiny slice of home made pizza my mom made.

Dessert was a small bowl of soy ice cream, one too many almonds and a few pieces of dark chocolate.

Now, onto the pasta salad. Chris and I are having dinner tomorrow night, and he said he was craving some tasty pasta salad, so I did some searching to find a nice and easy recipe. Little did I realize that the one I found could serve a party of 20. Ha! It has everything we were looking for in a healthy pasta salad!

However, I didn’t include photos of the cheese! I threw in some cubed cheddar cheese as well…because what’s a pasta salad without cubed cheese?

Here’s whats in it:

• 1 bag of all natural whole wheat veggie flavored rotini
• 1 pint of cherry tomatoes
• 1 chopped zucchini
• 2 chopped peppers; one red and one green
• 1 sliced red onion
• sliced olives
• 1 can organic chickpeas
• cubed cheddar cheese
• 1/4 cup of grated Parmesan cheese
• 8 oz of all natural Italian dressing

The initial recipe I used can be found here. Apparently I didn’t read the “serves 16” on the bottom! Tomorrow night we’ll see if my pasta salad passes the test. 😉 I think it will!

Oh yeah, I’m running the Freihofer’s on Saturday morning! I’m going to the fitness expo tomorrow at lunch to get my race packet. I’m super excited!!! I hope it doesn’t rain in the morning, because that would be a bummer. My next post will probably be after the race at some point.