Kingsway Mall & A Sweet Potato Salvage Meal

Thanks to daylight saving time I got to sleep in until 7:30 am today, then set my clocks back to 6:30 am. Gotta love "fall back" (so long as you're not on call)! Really though, the time change means I won't be seeing the sun ever again, as starting work at 6 am sadly precludes one from enjoying the brighter mornings. Such is life!

As usual, I got tidying and laundry out of the way, then sat down to a breakfast of chocolate chip cookie dough oats, made in a nearly empty cream cheese container. I think this is becoming a weekend routine. At least I've cut out the added sugar (the PB and chocolate are sweet enough!).

cream cheese peanut butter chocolate chip cookie dough oats -- there's no going back

I headed to Canadian Tire to get my new skates sharpened, which they did free of charge since I had purchased them there. I'm looking forward to trying them out...and a little apprehensive as I haven't been in skates for at least a decade. Most of Edmonton's arenas offer free drop-in public skating, which I think is great!

sharpened and ready to go

Down the road from Canadian Tire I checked out Kingsway Mall. It's a nice two-storey shopping centre that is just the right size to host all of the standard chain stores without being tiresomely large. Its anchor stores are Target, The Bay, Sears, and Shoppers Drug Mart.

Kingsway Mall

I spent about an hour wandering through the mall before stopping by Target, which was in a state of transition between Halloween clearance and Christmas central. I'm glad I endured the Christmas music long enough to find a great deal on oats (got to feed my habit) and some desiccated coconut to test out the "best blondies" recipe my mom sent me.

only $0.17/100 g at Target -- cheaper than Walmart or Superstore!

While putting my oats away in the pantry (i.e. the shelf that I keep potatoes and oats ons) and realized that my sweet potatoes should probably have been cooked a week ago...not to worry, a little salvaging with a knife over the rubbish bin revived them.

shouldn't have left these guys for quite so long!

I "steamed" some sweet potato in the microwave and incorporated it into a one-pot clean-out-the-fridge fried rice mishmash. This one was particularly adventurous, containing rice, sweet potato, onion, frozen okra, eggs, cheese, banana peppers, sriracha, and -- after some contemplation -- a can of tuna. I figured that since gumbo mixes okra and fish, it'd come out tasty -- and fortunately it did, as I have about four meals' worth!

sweet potato fried rice

This afternoon I'm planning on doing an elliptical session (got a new Amazing Race episode to watch!) then sitting back with a book. I finished Unbroken: A WWII Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand last night and would highly recommend it as a superbly researched and well written biography. It's non-fiction (in fact, Time ranked it as the #1 non-fiction book of 2010), but with a story so riveting that it reads like fiction. It's been adapted into a film by Angelina Jolie, to be released on Christmas day. Unfortunately the biography's subject, Louis Zamperini, died six months short of the film's release, in July at the age of 97.

The next book on my reading list is considerably lighter -- Lena Dunham's Not That Kind of Girl. It's surprisingly surpassed Unbroken on the New York Times non-fiction bestsellers list (which probably has more to do with the population than the quality of the book...but I'm hoping to be surprised).

What are you reading? I'd love to hear any recommendations!