Wednesdays are my long days (8 – 4:40 on campus) but today didn’t feel so bad.  I’ve fallen into the swing of 8 am classes and my friend Janessa and I had a group project to work on that filled up our long break between classes.  Throughout the day I did eat all of my packed lunch components.  I also bought a short apple cider from the school coffee shop.

This wasn’t a total fail like the Tim Horton’s cider, but it still tasted a lot like warm apple juice.

I need to find a good cider before the end of September Apple Month!

Adam came to pick me up at the end of the day and wanted me to go to Wegmans with him to pick something up for school.  He plied me with hot bar.

I caved easily.  To be fair, I genuinely needed some greens to go with my dinner.

Plus a few pieces of chicken for good measure.

It’s a good thing I was still hungry when I got home (ha! when am I ever not still hungry?) because I got to work cooking an actual dinner.

I’m not sure what corn chowder is supposed to look like but to me that looks like success.

I pulled the recipe for Bacon-Corn Chowder with Shrimp from Cooking Light last month but I was waiting until it felt more like fall to try it out.  Here were my changes –

• using 5 strips of (Applegate Farms) turkey bacon and crumbling it all into the soup
• skipping the thyme
• throwing in 2 extra cloves of garlic
• leaving my frozen corn frozen when it went into the pot

I gave myself a large serving and happily tucked into the first soup of the season.

Adam and I thought that the recipe was good, but not amazing like we wanted it to be.  I wanted the flavors to be more vibrant and definitely sweeter.  I think a large part of the problem was using frozen corn; I’d love to make this again but with fresh corn off the cob.  We gave it a 6.5/10 but considering how low-calorie it was (~300 calories for 1 and 2/3 cups) the flavor certainly wasn’t bad.

My taste buds weren’t fully satisfied by the meal though.  I actually ended up making myself an after-dinner coffee.

A little bit of lukewarm coffee, a Tbsp of sugar, and a lotta bit of Plain Silk Almond Milk.  I hope the caffeine doesn’t keep me up!