Fresh & Easy

So we have this little supermarket chain here in Vegas called Fresh & Easy.  I saw some in southern California when we were there visiting family too so they're probably pretty big but I had never heard of them before moving to Nevada.  The stores are usually small but they carry a lot of organic products and healthy-type items.  Some of their groceries are expensive, depending on what you're buying, and some of them are very reasonably priced.  For example: an ahi tuna steak is about $11 for a pound which is a lot more than you would pay at some other places like Smith's or the Korean grocery store we found in Vegas' China town.  But then they have their own line of frozen dinners that are very similar to Healthy Choice meals but average about a dollar less in price.

Yesterday I posted a Healthy Choice lunch but it was actually a Fresh & Easy lunch, squash ravioli with julienned veggies in a carrot sauce.  It was really good and it was nice to try something different because I've gone through all of the Healthy Choice meals now at least once or twice.  In addition to their frozen meals they have prepared, pre-packaged meals on a back wall that are a bit more up-scale and larger portions.  For dinner last night I had pork loin with pumpkin couscous in apricot sauce with asparagus on the side.  It was exceptionally delicious so if you have a Fresh & Easy in your area and you're looking to mix things up from the usual frozen meals I highly suggest checking them out.  The pre-packaged meals are a bit more expensive, usually around $5-$6 each but they are also bigger portions; what I call "dinner portions" and their frozen lunches are around $2 each and are the exact same size as the small Healthy Choice lunches.

Now if Vegas would just open an Aldi so I can get my staple items dirt cheap!  I love Aldi.  For those of you who aren't familiar with it, it's a mid-west grocery chain that I shopped at all the time when I lived in Chicago.  They don't have shelves, they just drag pallets of food right out onto the floor and let the shopper open up boxes to get the items out.  You can pick up empty boxes off pallets as you shop or bring your own shopping bags with you because they don't have bags except the reusable ones that you have to buy.  You have to bag your own groceries and the whole experience is very informal but the savings that it generates are fantastic!  You can get cans of Campbell's soup for $0.20 and a gallon of milk (their cold foods are the exception to the pallet rule, of course) for $1.00.  It's a really great concept that more chains should explore.





Food:
8 glasses of water
1 cup of coffee w/creamer
1 bowl apple cranberry granola & milk
1 frozen lunch
2 fish tacos on corn tortillas
1 cup lime rice
4 tbsps coffee ice cream
--------------------------------
Daily Caloric Intake: 1,227




Activity:
5 flights of stairs
Sprints: 20 - My heel hurt too bad to even walk around the house without limping tonight (bone spurs I think) but I didn't want to wuss out so I figured, since tomorrow night is 1 mile walk and 20 sprints, and because sprinting puts pressure more on the balls of my feet, that I would do my sprints tonight and walk four miles tomorrow - bone spurs be damned.  My heel actually felt better after sprinting ... though I can't seem to find a logical explanation for that.  The fronts of my thighs are TIGHT though, probably because I didn't warm up with a 1-mile walk first like I usually do.  Oh well, anything shy of being in a wheel chair tomorrow, I will walk four miles if I have to use Vladdy as a cane to do it.