As a revision to an earlier post on weight lost, I’ve actually lost 6 lbs in 3 1/2 weeks, not 5 weeks. It’s certainly felt like 5 weeks with the long work days…Anyway, my pounds of muscle have remained constant, according to our fancy scale, over that time period.

Lunch: We are fond of our variations on wraps and burrito type things. For me, it’s the almost mandatory avocado that makes them irresistible. That and the fact that they take 15 minutes or less to assemble from random components. I used to go crazy with baking my own bread and making pasta and doing everything from scratch and by the book…before I became so big and important with a real grown-up job. Now I just slop the trough!

Dinner was another melange of various recipes that I like, based mostly on an Italian peasant soup I used to make that my best friend and I called the “Soup of the Evening” (from Alice in Wonderland, where the turtle sings the refrain “Soup of the evening…Beautiful sooooo-oOUP”?)

Think of it as a cross between the aforementioned soup and pasta puttanesca.

As usual I only made 5 oz of whole-wheat pasta ( we have a crappy plastic kitchen scale)- it looks like a lot more in the picture.

Into the pan went:

• 2 14.5 oz cans no salt added diced tomatoes
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 zucchini, chopped

I cooked that for a while, then added:

• 2 Tbsp capers
• 2 Tbsp tomato paste
• a cube of frozen fresh basil (available at Trader Joe’s!)
• 1 can of cannellini (I prefer Great Northern beans, but eh)

Cooked that for a while longer, then added the pasta. I further cut down on prep time by microwaving a bag of brussels sprouts, as per the bag directions. And we had the ever-present 2 big bowls of salad apiece.

I never mention the fruit we eat, but we also eat a lot of that throughout the day, like today it was Rainier cherries (much sweeter than nasty old red cherries) and plums and a clementine. A better afternoon snack than the chocolate soy pudding cups and english muffins of yore.