Happy Monday! I hope you all had a lovely weekend.

We had beautiful weather here in PA and my mom and I took full advantage of it all weekend.

On Friday, we hit the outdoor outlets where I was able to score some great bargains: a cute shirt from Ann Taylor, a dress for my friend's wedding and a bunch of new sports bras.

I needed some replacement things after I did a major purge of my current wardrobe.


These bags are full of clothes that either don't fit or haven't been worn in more than a year. I'm donating all of them. I suddenly have room in my closet again.

I was seriously disappointed in the finds in the Under Armour outlet. The bargains weren't great and I couldn't find booty shorts in my size. I didn't end up buying a single thing there. Crazy right?

I did manage to score some booty shorts at Sports Authority on Saturday.

I took them for a test drive during my six mile run. They worked wonderfully.

What didn't work wonderfully was having a big bowl of ice cream for lunch and eating nothing else before heading out for a run three hours later. Major nutrition fail! Needless to say my six miles was a struggle. PA is hilllly. And my stomach was miserable for the rest of the night.

My stomach cramps went away over night so I was able to enjoy Easter "linner" (Late lunch/early dinner) with my family yesterday.

For the past several weeks, I have been eying the eggplant at the grocery store, almost as if I was daring myself to buy one and try to make something with it. I've never cooked with eggplant in my life, but I love ordering it in all kinds of dishes at restaurants.

This week I finally picked one, put it in my cart and quickly walked away before I could change my mind.

With the help of my friend Google, I found a super easy recipe for eggplant parmesan that I modified slightly.

Start by chopping the eggplant into circles.

Then sprinkle with salt

And place in a colander for an hour. This will allow the bitter eggplant juices to run out and make your end result tastier.

After an hour, rinse the salt off and pat the eggplant dry.

Instead of using breadcrumbs, I dipped the eggplant into a mix of olive oil, garlic powder and onion powder.

Then place in a baking dish in the oven (350 degrees) for five minutes on each side.

Once your eggplant is tender, cover in pasta sauce and sprinkle with mozzarella and parmesan cheeses.

Pop back in the oven for 30 minutes.

For my first go at eggplant parm, this came out rather tasty. Even the BF liked it, and he doesn't do vegetables.

The BF also said the beer he had with dinner was pretty good. It was this IPA.

Experimenting with a new vegetable was fun and I'm sure I'll be looking for other eggplant dishes to try.

What's your favorite eggplant dish?

Sometimes you just can't control it, you go out for a run and its hard from beginning to end.

The sun's too bright.

It's hot for the first time in six months.

You probably should have brought a bottle of water with you.

Your legs feel like dead weight.

Never once during the entire run does anything feel easy. Sometimes bad runs happen to good people. There's nothing we can do about it, but chalk it up as a bad day and hope the next run is better.

My 4.5 miler yesterday was no fun for all of the above reasons so I was imagining my average pace per mile would be pretty crappy. But it wasn't. I ended up averaging 9:34 per mile, which was really shocking, because nothing about the run felt easy. And I certainly never felt like I was going fast. Quite the opposite, I felt like I was crawling.

I treated my legs to some nice stretching and foam rolling afterward to work out any kinks and to loosen them up for my next run. I'm not sure it was all that successful though because they are still mighty heavy today.

I head home to PA tonight to spend a long weekend with the family. I'm really looking forward to it. My mom and I are hitting the outlets tomorrow and I'm determined to get some sweet, cheap gear at the Under Armour store!