September Birthdays, Part 1

I had my brotein bar. Enough said.

Later in the day, I would be picking Sidney up and we would be heading south to Tallgrass Prairie. It's about an hour and a half drive, and since I don't get out of class until around 1600, we would need to leave immediately thereafter. That means we wouldn't have time for dinner. To avoid potential hangriness, I picked up a couple Crunchy Chicken Cheddar wraps from the Underground.

When I got to Sidney's work, we ate these beauts.

This is the best food item available at KU and maybe at any college in the United States. Back in maybe 2012, some website did a College Food tournament, and this thing made it at least to the Elite Eight. I never could find the final results, so I don't know what ended up happening. I'm just going to assume it won.

Fast-forward about two hours, and we were in the midst of one of the largest remaining native tallgrass prairies in the world.

It was actually stunningly beautiful.

There was even a wild mint to be spotted.

After the drive back home, my late dinner consisted of bread...

...and pot roast.

Not a bad way to end the day! I made sure to get extra potatoes because delicious.

I had a little more bread, but the butter was too hard to spread. First world problems, for sure.

Luckily, Sidney is a wizard and knew exactly what to do. She heated up a glass with hot water and then placed it over a stick of butter.

Enter, spreadable butter!

Encore! Encore!

I grabbed a brotein bar to go this morning, and ate it while walking to class.

I then proceeded to unintentionally starve myself for the remainder of the school day. Normally I would say that's alright because I'm getting lean, but I had an intramural tennis match today. So, about 30 minutes before my match, I had 4 servings of PB2.

Would this be enough??

It ended up being just enough. My tennis match lasted at least 2 hours and ended just as it was getting too dark to see. I prevailed, and then headed straight to Encore to meet Sidney and her family for dinner, sweat-soaked clothes and all.

We started off with some fancy fried spring roll looking things. They were good.

But then it was time yet again. Remember the beef teriyaki? Yeah, it was so good that I didn't even hesitate to order it again.

Oh yeah, I also got another mango smoothie with bubbles.

And, following the applicable law of the universe, we went to Sylas and Maddy's afterward. This time I got a new flavor called "Think Pink" along with Triple Fudge Brownie. No Da Bomb this time.

Here's what Think Pink included:

In case it's hard to read, it's cake batter ice cream with white chocolate macadamia cookies.

A 2.25 pound Burrito!!!

Brotein and tennis. A perfect combination!

Brotein and lawn mowers. A perfect combination!

That was all I had to eat for a majority of the day, and I still had tennis practice later. It's never good from a performance standpoint to only have eaten 380 calories of brotein, and luckily for me Sidney offered to stop by Chipotle on her way home. I asked her to get a double wrapped chicken burrito with double everything. Here is what she brought home:

That's a full-size dinner plate.

Yes, you read that right. This burrito weighed over 2 pounds! The foil wasn't even close to covering it.

This thing was almost as big as my head. I say almost because nothing can ever be as big as my head.

This burrito was similar in size to the one I ate with Andrew way back when when we were going for speed. We finished those in about 5 minutes, so being able to eat the whole thing wasn't a problem.

Unfortunately, I thought it better than to eat over 2 pounds of Chipotle burrito and then play tennis immediately afterward. So I ate half, then went and dominated, and then came home and finished the rest.

Chicken and Cheese

What is an ideal breakfast food? Muffins! What did we happen to have this morning? Muffins!

The gloriousness of Sidney's muffins is without bound.

A milk is the perfect counterpart.

Just look at that perfect texture!

Summary of school day: my ecology lab went somewhere and took some measurements.

With that out of the way, we come to dinner. I had some more boneless chicken thighs, so I threw them on the grill.

I also had some left over thigh strips from yesterday that I didn't want to fry (I ran out of breading and didn't want to get more out). I grilled those up too.

I used barbecue sauce to make them taste even better.

To complement the chicken, we had some three cheese macaroni and cheese.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. There really is a huge difference between original and three cheese macaroni and cheese. The three cheese kind is just sooo good. But you know what might make it better?

Sausage! I cut up a sausage and threw it on top of the mac and cheese. I also had another one just to eat with the chicken.

It was looking like a good dinner.

Then there was some more macaroni and cheese, because why not?

Then cookies happened.

Remember that law of the universe? It was followed.

Fried Chicken Best Chicken

Today was a day. I was about to head to work, but first I wanted to make sure I would have enough energy to make it through my shift. How's this?

Nope, I didn't think so. Not enough. I'll fix it.

Add some milk and I'm golden.

To my surprise, the doughnut had some sort of frosting filling. Bonus!

Later, while at work and on my break, I snagged a chocolate macaroon thingy.

Only I forgot that it had coconut inside.

Unfortunately, I'm still unable to eat coconut. It's been over a year since I became coconut intolerant, and I keep hoping that it'll get better. Still not yet.

Also unfortunately, I once again worked in the back cleaning pots and pans. And once again it appeared as though I had aged 100 years in just a couple of hours.

I drowned my premature aging sorrows in some bread, bacon, pepperjack, and fries.

This is how we sandwich:

Actually, it was quite good. But it's bacon, which is hard to mess up.

When I got home, I grabbed a quick gummy pick-me-up.

Then I was struck by the amazing sunset that was unfolding outside. I ran outside, snapped a few pictures on my phone, then realized that I had never seen anything like this before. I sprinted inside, grabbed my camera, sprinted back outside, and had about 30 seconds to capture the beauty. Unfortunately, pictures don't do it justice, but here's one of my phone pictures:

Those clouds just made for an incredible sight. Everything was lit up so red. It was an awesome sight.

After the blazing sky faded, I returned to what I was doing. And what I was doing was making dinner! I decided to go all out today and make some deep fried chicken.

I didn't have any actual strips, so I cut up some boneless thighs into little strip like pieces.

Into the oil they went.

They were looking pretty good!

Finally, when they were all done, I piled them onto a plate and got busy!

I got some ranch to go with them because ranch.

Here's what I'll say about the chicken. While I believe it impossible for almost anything fried to be bad, especially chicken, these wasn't the tastiest fried chicken ever. I struggle when it comes to seasoning the breading. Live and learn. The ranch helped a lot!

After dinner, I again grazed on some lemon heads.

And on some gummy pumpkins.