The Last Coffee Date

Today I got the opportunity to help out with the recipe contest I mentioned a while back. I met up with three of the ladies from the PEI Healthy Eating Alliance to create the four recipes that made the final cut. Each recipe had to celebrate local farms and have some consideration for healthy eating. The recipes were; a berry smoothie, lobster stuffed potatoes, vegetable potato salad and a potato pizza. I was in charge of the pizza, which proved to be a very challenging feat. First of all, the proportion of the ingredients for the pizza dough was completely wrong and I ended up making a make-shift dough (luckily I've had lots of experience of messing up recipes when I worked at the bakery, so I was able to create something not half bad). The dough had grated potato in it, and there was not nearly enough flour and other stuff to accommodate the amount of soggy potato, and the potato should have been thoroughly dried and wrung out, but it wasn't described to do so in the recipe and I had to follow the recipe exactly to ensure I was making what it suggested...let's just say that in the end it turned out passable for pizza dough. There was a panel of four judges (including me, which I didn't know I was doing until they told me to sit down and start eating) to test each recipe and decide which came out on top. I can't say which recipe won because the announcement isn't out yet, and what if by some insanely small chance someone from that school, or knows someone from that school or is a parent of someone from that school, somehow miraculously reads this blog...then I would get in trouble. And that wouldn't be cool. They'd never let me volunteer ever again which would be tragic. But the experience was fun and the entries that the kids sent in were adorable, and I want to thank the HEA for letting me be involved. Thanks guys!

After testing the recipes and saying my goodbyes to the ladies, I headed down to meet with Jo and Andrea at Leonhard's bakery for some coffee and sweets. Leonhard's is this lovely little German bakery that opened up in Charlottetown a while back, and everything there is so authentic and homemade and delicious...what they failed to mention is that as of April 12th they are no longer open on Mondays. Booooo. If they were considerate enough of an establishment then they would have called to tell us this little tidbit of information before we got all excited at the thought of eating there ;) So instead we headed to Beanz and had some warm drinks and sugary snacks to keep us energized. I'm going to miss those lovely ladies when I head to BC. I'm glad I got to have one more sit down chat session with them before I head out on Saturday. The last coffee date. Le sigh.

It's been quiet around here the past couple days. The weather has been crappy so I've been feeling a bit of cabin fever coming on. Plus the fact that I have this stupid cold isn't helping at all. I feel as though this may be the most unproductive I've ever been in my life. I am going to be working with SNAP a couple days this week, which I am looking forward to. Plus I'm going to try to give blood again on Thursday, and I am really really hoping that I am successful this time around. Last time I was all pumped, sitting in the chair and ready to go, only for them to be unable to find a stupid vein in my stupid veinless white girl arms. It was heart breaking and they told me to try again at another time. My plan is to drink just an insane amount of water for two days in advance (fill those damn veins until they nearly burst), and also do an intense upper body workout right before I go in hopes of getting my arm veins jacked. I really hope this works or else I am a complete and utter blood donor failure...which would look really bad on my resume.