What's on your Monday Menu?

Hello, my friends! Happy Monday! Oh how I wish this weekend was a little longer. I Had a really nice one! Grim and I took the day on Saturday to drive around and look for a socially distant adventure. We picked a long road and kept driving, seeing all of the sights along the way. We ended up at a really high end antique furniture shop. It was such a nice day! And yesterday I cleaned the heck out of the house and then a friend came over in the evening for dinner outside. Pics from our adventure on Friday! Actually Grim had a good idea for Photo Friday-- show us a pic of something ridiculous near where you live. We have a great one from our drive, haha.

I need to reign myself back in with my food choices. It was not a disaster, exactly, but I took too many bites of this and that, on top of having grilled hotdogs and cheeseburgers with Grim. So I did a fair amount of cooking and prep, so I hope I can get it together. I am expecting a very busy day, but I hope that in lieu of much exercise, I can at least get moving on the walking desk!

QOTD: Hot coffee or Iced Coffee? My first cup (mixed with Fit Frappe Protein) has to be hot. But then I usually grab one of my big metal Yeti cups and fill it with ice and make myself one or two iced coffees that I sip all day :)

Morning! We also had a nice weekend, but didn't really do much of anything. I found a place about an hour from here that has soft serve ice cream. Who knew that wasn't a thing everywhere? Back home (upstate NY) it's literally in most gas stations. The only thing I've tasted that tastes similar is Chik-Fil-A milk shakes and I don't love them as a company and don't want it as a milkshake! So, I told the kid's that next weekend we'll make the trip to get soft serve. You can tell we've been pandemic bored because they are super excited, lol.

QOTD: Hot pretty much always. I have three cups of hot coffee with a splash of heavy cream, and a glug of half & half every morning. I love my coffee to be really creamy and not at all sweet when it's hot. If I get an iced coffee, it's generally from Dunkin (we only have a single Dunkin here and it doesn't have a drive thru, so it's pretty much only when I'm traveling). I like iced coffee milky and sweet, so generally get SF flavoring in it. Back before I was a real coffee drinker I drank over sweetened "dessert" coffee for the most part.

My Food:

• Coffee w/ Cream x3
• Cucumber, Cauliflower, Pepperoni, Cheese
• Hot dog (w/ bun) & Veggies or no bun and add a little pasta, we have hot dogs in the fridge to use up, either way.

We have so many places near us with homemade softserv. The best is a place that has "Javaberry" which is half raspberry and half coffee, swirl. I think I would actually die if I had that today, but it might be a worthwhile way to go :)

This place has 50 flavors, but all I want is like 3 bites of vanilla! My diabetes won't let me eat much without feeling gross. So we'll drive 50 minutes so I can share 3 bites of Jon's. But that's okay!

50 flavors of soft? Wow!

yes I do remember soft serve was pretty rare in the South (we moved to NC when I was 16). It was pretty much EVERYWHERE in the Midwest, so this was a bit...odd. But then there are things that are ubiquitous in the South that you don't see up here (like pimento cheese - although I've been seeing it more the last few years - but only in certain stores, and only one brand - unlike in NC where there used to be entire walls of it!!)

I have found two stores that sell what they call pimento cheese but it is not what I remember. It is waxy tasting and has tiny little hints of chopped pimento. I grew up eating pimento cheese where there was no doubt that it had pimentos in it.

One of the things I remember was trying to enter it on Weigh****chers database and all that came up was pimento cheese spread, which is not what sliced pimento cheese is.

it's the spread that they have in South, and it is EVERYWHERE! I hardly ever eat it, but the times I've gotten a hankering for it while living in the Midwest, I've just made my own. For a long time it wasn't available anywhere up here, but now, like I said, a couple of stores carry it, but just one brand. I figure my homemade version is probably better anyway...

To me pimento cheese is the same as American cheese, but had big chunks of pimento in it. It is my favorite for grilled cheese sandwiches, if I could actually find it. I don't think I ever tried the spread.

I grew up in and around Cleveland (lived there 'til I was 16) - I don't remember that cheese, but I'm sure they had it since you're in NE Ohio, too. It could just be that my mother never bought it. She used to buy Colby cheese all the time - esp in this waxy, cylindrical shape covering. I never saw the spread version of pimento cheese until I moved to the South - but it may be more widely available now (as I mentioned, I've seen it up here in WI at a couple of stores...)