Brownies and Zucchini

For me, not being in control of what I will be eating can be a bit of a stressor.  Going to a conference for three days and knowing that I will be eating three meals (plus snacks) that someone else has planned did cause a little bit of stress.  However, I knew that there were many different dietary needs in the group and I know that the HLS and HLB planning teams put many hours of work into planning the meals, and there were some fabulous sponsors on board providing food as well, so I had to just trust them and not let it stress me out.

Good news:  I had nothing to worry about.

The first official conference sponsored food was at the cocktail party on Friday night. The spread of food was great – definitely something for everyone!   A cheese and veggie platter with lots of different dippers, popcorn, and of course a dessert tray.  Of course my first stop was the dessert tray.

(Photo courtesy of Heather)

These little mini whoopee pies were moist and delicious!  Not super sweet, but a nice little treat for sure.  I did have some of the cheese tray as well and that tasted great too.  (I do eat more than just desserts, promise 🙂 )

Breakfast the next morning was put on by the fabulous HLS Gold Sponsor Wild Harvest.  The spread for breakfast was pretty great.  Fresh fruit, muffins, hot dishes, granola, and more.  The breakfast featured the winning dish of the Breakfast Showdown competition which was a Greek Inspired Egg Scramble created by Kelly of Cupcake Kelly’s! I ate a bunch of fresh fruit, and a banana nut muffin, as well as some tea and CheriBundi tart cherry juice from my swag bag. (which I just had for the first time this weekend, and I’m a big fan!)  In case it isn’t clear by the bite mark in the cantaloupe in the photo, I ate much more fruit than is pictured.  It was delicious.  I also really liked that Wild Harvest provided recipe cards with all of the recipes on them!  Such a great idea – especially for a conference full of food loving people wanting to re-create things at home!

By the time lunch rolled around I was VERY hungry.  I guess live tweeting a bunch of sessions takes a lot out of you? The lunch was provided by the hotel catering.  There was a pretty good spread – although I’ll admit much of it looked kind of scary to my non-adventurous taste buds.  There was a lentil chili – which I heard was quite spicy – as well as a soup.  I had pile of greens with a vinaigrette dressing, some chicken, and some pita bread.  All of it was very good – I definitely went back for seconds on the pita bread!

Dinner was on our own, so the next Summit sponsored meal was breakfast on Sunday morning.  This breakfast was put on by the hotel catering, and I think it was my favorite meal.  Well, breakfast in general is my favorite meal so I suppose it had a leg up on the competition to start with.  There were personal sized quiches, fresh fruit, oatmeal, granola, pastries, muffins….and maybe some more things that I am forgetting. For my meal I had some oatmeal, fruit, and a cheese pastry along with tea of course. (and then I went back for another pastry on my way out.) Everything was great, but I especially loved the size of the pastries – small enough that I felt like if I wanted to have more than one I could without total sugar overload.  I wish I had gotten one of the individual egg dishes too, they looked delicious!

 There was also a great snack break provided by Driscolls Berries and Cabot.  I don’t have a photo of this, but it was delicious too.  Berries and cheese are two of my favorite things, so I knew that would be a winner!

Overall the food was great, and I definitely didn’t go hungry. Thanks again to all of the great sponsors and hotel who provided food for us!

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Filed under: Healthy Living Summit Tagged: | food, Healthy Living Summit