WIAW: Seasonally Confused

Hooray for celebrating the simple joy of our Wednesday Tuesday eats!  Sending out a huge "Thank you" to Jenn at Peas and Crayons!  As I've mentioned in the past, blogging has been a huge help in my journey towards conquering my fear of food.  This weekly tradition is certainly a big part of that!  
**A quick note: In my WIAW posts and in general, what I post is NOT everything I eat in a day.  While I would love to share every delicious morsel with you, documenting every single thing I put in my mouth would cause me to fixate on how much I'm eating and obsess over it - definitely not what I'm trying to accomplish!  So I'll just stick to the highlights of my meals and snacks!**

The theme of this week's meals?  Seasonal confusion!  This is perhaps the strangest winter I have ever experienced!  I can only recount two days of (very light) snow, one of which was back in October.  While there were some "If I go outside all my limbs will freeze off even if I wear my entire coat closet" days back in January, most of the time it's been unseasonably warm.  On many occasions I've worn two or three layers under my coat, only to take them off after spending just minutes outside.  And word has it that this Thursday it's going to be almost 70 degrees!  
With all of this strangely variable weather, it's no wonder I've been craving the most random foods from across the seasons!  And since I've been working on listening to and honoring my cravings, I decided to just roll with it and break the seasonal stereotypes!  
Last night I decided the last thing I wanted for breakfast was hot oatmeal, so I prepared a batch of cold overnight oats instead: 

I combined oats and chia seeds and almond milk, and this morning I added a banana and some almond butter.  And if that wasn't cool and refreshing enough for a mid-winter morning, I made a smoothie out of frozen berries and ice (I tragically ran out of spinach so no green monster today!).  

For a snack, I had a creamsicle muffin from a batch that I made last weekend, with some peanut butter.

 An almost empty PB jar... I'm sensing some OIAJ in the near future!  

These muffins are great as part of breakfast or as a snack, and the taste is perfect with some nut butter (especially almond)!  I'm also proud that I played around with a recipe the result was not only edible, but also delicious!  Plus they're fat-free, sugar-free, and contain a secret vegetable!  I now present to you the healthiest muffins ever:  

(Adapted from this recipe from Oh She Glows)

1 cup whole grain spelt flour

1 cup oat flour

1 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp. kosher salt

1 flax egg (1 tbsp. ground flax seeds plus 3 tbsp. warm water)

1 1/4 cup packed, finely shredded carrot

3 tbsp. freshly squeezed orange juice

1 1/4 cups unsweetened almond milk

1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1/4 teaspoon pure almond extract

Stevia to taste

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.  Whisk up the flax egg and set aside.  Then mix the dry ingredients (flours, baking soda, and salt) and in a separate bowl combine the wet ingredients (carrot, flax egg, orange juice, almond milk, extracts).  Making these muffins is an excellent upper body workout!  You'll see what I mean when you discover just how long it takes to shred 1 1/4 cups of carrot!  Add the wet ingredients to the dry, add stevia as desired, and pour into muffin tins.  Baking for 30-40 minutes.  A word of warning: This batter isn't "lick the bowl and spoon and then eat half of it before anything gets into the oven" worthy the way cake batter is.  But don't judge them until they're all done - they taste much better cooked!  

For lunch I further added to the seasonal confusion with this unintentionally fall and summer-themed meal: 

Everything is so orange!  

That's leftover Bread free Thanksgiving stuffing, baked kobocha squash, a slice of bready (my home-baked bread that I treat like a beloved child, minus the whole eating it part), and a Valencia (aka "summer") orange.  Seasonally confused?  Yes.  Tasty?  Indeed!  

My dinner was not only seasonally confused; it was confused in general!  In my efforts to spend less on food (my goal is to come in under $50 a week!), I threw together some leftovers. 

A hearty black bean soup (you know, to warm you on a cold winter night), more kobacha squash (those things are HUGE!  I've had some with three meals already and there's still over half left!), and some cool cucumber.  To add further to the randomness of this meal, I ate the veggies with chopsticks!  

That soup was even better today than when I made it yesterday, and it was so inexpensive to make.  I cooked some dry black beans and threw in a can of diced tomatoes, a can of corn, and lemon juice.  I roasted chopped red pepper and onion along with some garlic that I later crushed, and added them all to the soup.  Then I flavored it with chili powder and cumin, thinned it out with water, and it was done!  

Since I've been dying to play with the ice cream maker that's been sleeping in my kitchen for years, I thought, "What better why to end a winter night than with ice cream?"  So I threw in some almond milk, vanilla and almond extracts, and a bit of stevia and 20 minutes later I had created this: 

It was so frothy and refreshing!  

Listening to my cravings instead of eating what I'm "supposed" to eat is so freeing!  Yes, allowing myself to eat unseasonal foods has nothing to do with my eating disorder, but the fact that I was able to have the confidence to enjoy what I wanted, even if it's not what everyone else was eating, is a huge step forward!

Do you ever crave cold food in winter?  Usually all I'm focused on is staying warm, so this was strange for me!  

What's the most random meal you've eaten recently?

Do you ever use an ice cream maker?  I'm definitely going to be experimenting with different flavors of iced almond milk now that I discovered how much fun it can be! 

Happy Wednesday!  :)