Sick of eating cereal and ramen for lunch and dinner? Want to spend less money eating out and finally start cooking for yourself? Put down that frozen pizza, because HC’s Health Editor, Sammie Levin, is here to share her daily eats so you can get ideas for healthy, satisfying meals that are easy enough for any time-strapped collegiette to make. After you read Collegiette Eats, your taste buds, wallet and waistline will thank you.
Every year, I—like pretty much everyone else—make drastic New Year’s resolutions to transform my life. This will be the year I achieve all my goals and become a perfect human! But about a week or two later, maybe a month or so if it’s an especially good year, I throw my middle finger up in the face of my resolutions and forget I ever made them in the first place.
I’ve come to realize that when it comes to New Year’s resolutions, going from zero to 100 is setting you up for failure. If you didn't make it to the gym once last semester, committing to go every single day this semester may be setting the bar too high. It’s daunting to wake up on the morning of January 1st with the pressure to suddenly adopt huge changes to your lifestyle.
So this year, I’m going to make a few resolutions that are small, reasonable, realistic and sustainable. That way, I can start small, see how that works, and adjust my goals from there. Below are three that I’ve come up with so far.
- Make a cooking bucket list with recipes I want to make from the healthy eating blogs that I follow. I always come across recipes that I want to try but then don’t mark them down, so I want to start keeping track so I can expand my repertoire!
- Waste less food. Last semester (my first semester with access to a kitchen), I was still getting used to buying my own groceries and cooking for myself. I ended up wasting a fair amount of food because I would buy lots of fresh produce in one grocery store haul, and then a portion would always go bad before I was able to eat it. So, my goal for this semester is to waste less by meal planning in advance. This will hopefully help me grocery shop with a plan so that I only buy what I can reasonably consume within a week or so.
- Go to the gym at least twice a week. I was awful about fitting exercise into my schedule last semester (and every other semester of college…). I always exercised throughout high school and i really love it, though, so I’m going to try to make this semester the one that I finally get on some sort of workout schedule. I’m hoping that setting the low bar of two days a week will be a good place to start. And I made this resolution with one of my friends, so I have someone to keep me accountable and motivated!
Now, on to more Thailand eats.
Breakfast
For breakfast yesterday, I had a delicious bowl of Bircher muesli topped with pistachios, dried fruit, sunflower seeds and flaxseed. I love muesli but I never really have it at home, so I was excited that the hotel had it. Bircher muesli is a Swiss recipe for preparing it. It’s a lot like overnight oats (oats soaked in milk overnight in the fridge)—it’s thick, with an almost yogurt-like consistency, and served cold. Bircher museli is typically made with rolled oats, grated apple, apple juice, milk or cream, yogurt, slivered almonds, raisins and sugar or honey. Here’s one recipe to try if you’re interested (which you should be, because it’s so tasty).
I’m not sure exactly how the bowl I had was prepared, but it was very sweet so I think there was a lot of added sugar in it. This was more of a treat breakfast then, but I don’t regret it! I also had a few slices of mango on the side, which was amazing. I haven’t had mango in awhile, and these slices were very juicy and fresh.
Lunch
For lunch, our tour guide took us to a local restaurant for some Thai food. We ate family-style, sharing shrimp pad Thai, a green curry with chicken, a beef and vegetable sauté and a really flavorful and spicy vegetable soup.
I ate a little bit of everything, using bean sprouts and lettuce as a base instead of the white rice. It was all really good, but I have to say, disappointingly not as good as my favorite Thai restaurant back home, Coconut Café. My whole family agreed! Maybe we’re too used to American-style Thai food, or maybe Coconut Café is just really as amazing as I know it is.
Dinner
We ate dinner at our hotel and had—surprise!—Thai food. My mom and I ordered two dishes to split. One was a chicken sauté with carrots, onions, scallions and chilies, and the other was just a mixed veggie sauté. We ended up mixing them together, adding more veggies to the chicken sauté, because the sauce on the chicken was much more flavorful. It was really tasty and had the perfect amount of spice—hot enough to feel the burn, but not so hot to bring tears and frantic water-chugging.
As much as I love Thai food, I have a feeling that I’m going to max out my Thai food tolerance on this trip and will need a little break from it for a while when I get back. I’m also already missing almond butter and am starting to feel some withdrawal symptoms… HELP.