Free Friday {healthy grocery haul}

Tags

free friday, french toast, fruits and vegetables, grocery haul, grocery shopping, organic, turkish market

It’s free Friday, the start of the weekend for me, since I grew a habit over the last years to stuff all of my work, classes and other commitments into the first four days of the week. That makes those days a bit more stressful, but for me it is worth the three relaxed days that follow. But before I tell you how I spent my free day so far, I want to beat the big drum for the Health Ninja Facebook Fanpage.

I finally set it up yesterday and was surprised by how easy it is and again how well connected WordPress is with all the social media. My posts are shared automatically on twitter and tumblr and it just takes me a few clicks to also share some content on the facebook fanpage and pinterest. So if you are interest: you still have the opportunity to be the first HN facebook fan.

Enough of the business already, let’s start with my Friday morning:

A perfect free day starts with a long, relaxed breakfast for me. Since I had a stale spelt roll in my cupboard, today was an easy choice: french toast (use this recipe, and just replace the cinnamon bun with the baked good you have at hand) with greek yogurt and blackberry chia seed jam (that’s to easy to be true: microwave a handful berries and 1 tsp agave/honey for 1 minute, stir in 1 tsp chia seeds, let sit for a minute or two). Add a cup of coffee and some blog reading to the picture and there you have my Friday breakfast routine.

Afterwards I changed in some light summer clothing, put my glasses on and went for a grocery walk, before the lunch heatwave hit in. And no, you don’t have to worry about me because of those bruises. You should have seen the punching bag, it’s worse off, believe me. (read: I had a rad kickboxing class on Wednesday, and we trained quite a few kicks.)
 

Best thing about doing your groceries by feet: you can have your thoughts travelling around and enjoy the amazing blue sky (I mean look at that – it’s unreal!). I also once again envied my neighbors for the backyard cottage they live in. Strange thing, I know. It probably doesn’t look like a dream residence to you, but I just would love to have winding stairs in the backyard leading to my own tiny cottage with a garage roof top patio. Let’s not discuss it, my mind goes weird ways when I am strolling around.

But another thing I really wanted to share in this post is my love for the Turkish market I always go to when I want to buy heaps of fruits and vegetables.

Look at these isles filled with the color of the rainbow! Don’t you just want to take everything home with you? Good thing that I did not take my car and was limited to what my two hands can carry.

But I do not only love it for the huge assortment they offer, but also because it is way cheaper than other stores around. A bunch of cilantro or a huge batch of spinach for under 1€ just make me (and my purse) really happy. If you wonder how they do it: they buy second choice fruits and vegetables: cucumbers tend to be small and not in perfect shape, the wild peaches look like a bunch of wild peaches and not all uniform; and they do mostly sell seasonal produce. I’ve never seen green asparagus or cherries when they are not in season.

So after spending the morning grocery shopping, I came home with this:
Fruits and veg from left to right: cucumber, zucchini, sweet potatoes, corn on the cob, lemon, grapefruit, red pepper, tomatoes, peaches, cilantro, butternut squash, spinach, prunes, fresh garlic, arugula and watermelon. And all of this for just about 13€. Nice.

I also bought some things in an organic store: sencha tea, coconut dark chocolate bar, linguine (I am cooking pasta for me and my brother this evening), vegetable stock, milk chocolate, kitty snacks and rice wafers.

Add in some things I bought yesterday, which are sitting in my fridge right now: organic eggs, greek yogurt, bacon, tempeh, soy milk, goat camembert, bananas, carrots and apples – oh and don’t forget the fresh blackberries that are growing wild all around my neighborhood, as well as my moms raspberries that I need to pick when I am going over later – yeah, I do have definitely enough produce for the week.

Back home I made another batch of my go to bread: Sarah’s life changing loaf of bread. I tend to get nervous when I am out of it and since it needs to soak for several hours or better overnight, I thought it would be best if I mix the ingredients today and bake it tomorrow. Then I made the salad I dreamed of for weeks, but needed the first blackberries to become ripe to actually make it. It came out fabulous, so I am sharing the recipe with you this weekend. I watched the latest episode of Misstresses (thanks Juli for the recommendation) while cooking and later some old top chef episode, while sorting out the pictures for this post, and now I am going to read a bit, before hitting the road to my parents house. They are on vacation right now and I am visiting my brother for a pasta-vino-movie night.

How do you spend your free days? And what is your favorite place to get fresh produce?