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Pre-Wedding California Shots

8/27/2012

This girl is exhausted since she had to wake up very early and drive to the city for her graduate school orientation (and she likes to talk in the third person), but she still wants to show you some photos that were taken in between the time that she went to California and got married. She hadn't seen her fiance since January, so it was pretty exciting to see him again in San Francisco!

Enjoying cocktails at the Top of the Mark at the Mark Hopkins Intercontinental

Our first night (I'm so over third person), we met up with Al's best man Duncan and his girlfriend Claire for dinner. We then went to the Intercontinental Mark Hopkins after for a drink since they were staying there and we were staying next door to them. It was pretty neat seeing them in America, because the only other place I've seen them in is Australia!

They went up to Sonoma Valley a day early, and we hung around in San Francisco. We met up with all of the other Aussies on Tuesday night (July 31) and had a blast at an Irish pub off of Union Square.

My brother Jon's friend Bobby, me, and my new sister-in-law Anna all in colorful pants!

Mum and sis-in-law

I'm sure that we were all reluctant to get out of bed the next morning, but we still did and took a shuttle bus to Sonoma Valley. Al and I greeted our friends and family at the hotel, met briefly with our rabbi who officiated our ceremony, and then we went to Chateau St Jean for the rehearsal.

It was quick and painless. We were done in less than an hour, and we had plenty of time to go back to the hotel and change for the rehearsal dinner.

Rehearsing! (Photo from Goda)

Gifts from the Hilton Sonoma: Champagne and lots of chocolates!

The girls at dinner (photo from Courtney)

Our rehearsal dinner was at Johnny Garlic's in Santa Rosa. I got the volcano chicken, and I loved it. I think it was the most popular menu item for our group.

The Aussies discovered that they could order drinks that were three times the size of a normal portion. If you look in the back, you can see Anna and Fel drinking a mojito from a giant fish bowl! Other tables soon caught on and ordered similar massive drinks.

You can't really tell in the photo below, but I'm wearing 5-inch platforms. I wasn't able to wear them to the actual rehearsal since I would have been tripping all over the grass, but I figured it was safe to wear to dinner. I liked being a normal height for the night!

Photo from Kailee

By the way, it's now Sunday and I started this post on Thursday. I start my grad school program tomorrow, and I can't WAIT! I'm looking forward to telling you all about it and being able to share useful info on nutrition. I can't promise that I'm going to be a consistent blogger, but I'm still here. Stay tuned for some post-wedding and honeymoon photos!

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Oatless Oatmeal

8/22/2012

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Hi friends! One of the lifestyle changes that I made during my quest to slim down for the wedding included a diet high in protein, fruits, and veggies and low in flour and grains. I was very reluctant to give up oatmeal, but I found a recipe on Carrots 'n' Cake (still my favorite blog this many years later) for "oatmeal minus the oats". Tina (the blog's author) said it was good, so I decided to give it a go.

Here are all of the ingredients that I needed:

I play around with recipes from time to time, but I already had all of the ingredients from Tina's recipe. I followed it exactly. I used:

1/4 cup chopped walnuts
1-2 tablespoons flaxseed
1 tsp ground cinnamon (or as much as you want)
1 mashed banana
3 egg whites
1/2 cup unsweetened almond milk
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
some time to clean up your kitchen, because you will make a mess!

I used our newest measuring cups (I have some of my own in the basement that I can use as soon as I get my own apartment!) from The Pampered Chef. My mom's friend hosted a party recently, and we stocked up on some cool new kitchen gadgets.

The rims are flared so that it won't drip when you pour liquids into the cup, and you can read the measurements from above instead of having to squat down, pour and watch from the side like we have to do with all other liquid measuring cups. What will they think of next?

I don't have ground flaxseed, so I ground it up along with the walnuts in the food processor until it resembled a paste-like consistency. It still had big pieces of flaxseed in there, but it didn't matter to me.

I put all of the remaining ingredients (not including the raspberries that are in the ingredients picture...or the wine) in the blender for about 20 seconds (just until liquid-like) and then poured everything into a pot.

I heated it on low and made sure to stir frequently.

After a few minutes, the mixture began to thicken up and started to resemble oatmeal! It was ready to eat once it was the consistency that I wanted.

I sprinkled more cinnamon on top, a few fresh raspberries, and a spoonful of natural peanut butter.

It was surprisingly delicious! The only downside was cleaning up afterwards. It's a great breakfast to make on weekends when you have more time to do that. If you need some low-carb breakfast ideas, I highly recommend this one!

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