Mmm…Olive Garden

Today is my third wedding anniversary. My husband and I had a small beach wedding (6 people, including us) so in lieu of a huge reception we just went to Olive Garden for dinner afterwards.

This was us at the Olive Garden right after our wedding 3 years ago today:

I LOVE Olive Garden and it’s one of my favorite restaurants. Since then we started a new tradition by having dinner at Olive Garden every year on our anniversary.

This tradition, however, posed a real problem for us this year due to lack of funds and my new outlook on healthy eating. It’s been bothering me for a few weeks now knowing that we wouldn’t be able to go this year. I’m very tradition oriented so the idea of breaking this new tradition of ours didn’t settle well with me…but priorities are priorities and sometimes being practical has to come before being sentimental.

So, we decided instead of going to Olive Garden, we would bring Olive Garden to us.

First, I made a nice little banner to hang in our dining room:

My husband prepared a nice salad (shown w/ 1 tbsp low fat ranch dressing):

and cooked this “delizioso” spaghetti with meat sauce and breadsticks.

No, it wasn’t the healthiest of meals with all the carbs ya know, but it could have been a lot worse (and would have been had we gone out). I feel this was a nice compromise! It just means that I’ll need to put in some extra exercise this week to work it off. That’s cool with me – it was worth it!

Needless to say I am very happy with how the evening went! The meal was great and I wasn’t tempted with bottomless oil drenched salad and breadsticks. Not to mention it really was a lot of fun to “pretend” like we were out at a restaurant! We even got our wedding wine glasses out – the same ones in the picture above from 3 yrs ago: (Filled with iced tea, of course!)

Cheers!