Dinner and a Contest

Well, all day I had a yucky feeling in my tummy and had to break down and drink a Coke to settle my stomach. 14 million burps later, it was feeling better but I was still uneasy about having anything major for dinner so I settled on something simple - breakfast for dinner! I scrambled a couple of eggs for Sean and myself and separately diced some potatoes, red and green peppers, and onions and sauteed those in a pan. The potatoes took about 20 minutes to cook but they were well worth the wait. It was a nice, comfy meal and hit my tummy just right!

Now, down to business. On my other blog, I'm having a contest. I love Pioneer Woman and, in honor of her, I'm giving away the first $25 I earned from the ads on that blog. Please journey over there tomorrow and enter yourself in the contest. I will put the $25 on a gift certificate to the store of your choosing and will mail it to you just in time for holiday shopping, if you so desire. So come on in and play! Not too many people read my blog so your odds of winning are pretty darn good!

I'll be back tomorrow with more good eats!

What I ate yesterday

Well, in an effort to "do better" eatswise, I got up yesterday and ate my favorite simple breakfast, a croissant and a small glass of milk. This breakfast is so good and so filling that I didn't eat again until much, much later. However, what I ate later was not a great choice, two of my favorite christmas cookies. They tasted delicious though!

For dinner, I decided to try Mama Podkayne's Turkey Tetrazzini recipe and it was delicious. The only thing I did differently was to add some parsley flakes, chopped mushroom, and italian style bread crumbs to the top. Follow the link and get her recipe, it was really quite good! I had a small serving of that along with a salad topped with a tsp of Caesar Dressing.

This morning I awoke with a killer sinus headache, and even after advil it's still bothering me. I feel dizzy and out of sorts, too. Really sucks. Anyway, I had another helping of the tetrazzini for breakfast and the advil makes it feel like it's jus sitting there. Eat first THEN take advil, not vice versa! Otherwise you'll have a lead balloon in your tummy. As a result of that I will be skipping lunch today! LOL

I will try to update later with the dinner meal.

Favorite Christmas Cookie

There's nothing remotely Christmasy looking about this cookie. The only reason I associate it with Christmas is because my mom made them every year during the holidays and I adore them. They have a decadent, buttery crust and then the top layer consists of brown sugar, sliced almonds and coconut. It is baked until it reaches a gorgeous golden brown color, not at all this:



Have I mentioned that my oven is 30 years old? It tends to cook a little hotter than I anticipate and I forget to check on this batch. They're not burnt at all, just browner than usual, but they still tasted chewy and buttery. So freakin' good.

I got on the scale today, after I promised myself that I wouldn't and damn it! I have put on 2 pounds. Now I'm all freaked out and want to lose 5 before Christmas. Am I crazy? Is it unreasonable to try and do that during the holidays? Not like I have tons of friends and am going to be inundated with party invitations so I don't have to worry about party food gluttony. I think I can do it and I'm going to give it a shot.

Anyway, I wanted to give you all the recipe for my favorite cookie. It's from a Betty Crocker book called, Cooky Book and it's chock full of other great cookie recipes. If you like baking cookies, then I highly recommend this book!

Here's the recipe:

Dream Bars, Sometimes called Toffee-Nut Bars

1/2 cup shortening (part butter or margerine) I use all butter
1/2 cup brown sugar packed
1 cup flour
Almond Coconut Topping (below)

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Mix shortening and sugar thoroughly. Stir in flour. Press and flatten with hand to cover bottom of ungreased oblong pan (13x9.5x2"). Bake 10 minutes. Then spread with Topping. Return to oven and bake 25 min. more or until golden brown. Cool slightly then cut into bars. Makes about 2 1/2 dozen 3x1" bars.

***NOTE FROM EVIE*** My sister and I have found that we have to make a double batch of the crust to get this to turn out right but my mom says we're crazy. Take that for whatever it's worth.

Almond-Coconut Topping
2 eggs, well beaten
1 cup Brown sugar, packed
1 tsp. vanilla
2 Tbsp flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup moist shredded coconut
1 cup slivered almonds, or other nuts (I used 2/3 cup sliced almonds)

Mix eggs, sugar, and vanilla. Mix with flour, baking powder and salt. Stir in coconut and almonds.

Unless you have a serious aversion to coconut I believe everyone will enjoy these cookies. I usually bake up a bunch of these and give them out to my neighbors!

Enjoy!

Pics of yesterday's feast

Here's a collage of yesterday's feast which was repeated at tonight's dinner. For breakfast I had some cornbread dressing, and for lunch I had a turkey sandwich and some green bean casserole. LOL Doesn't that sound elegant and delicious?



Gravy, cake in a box, green bean casserole, turkey, and dressing. In the center was my plate last night. Mmmmm good! Even two days in a row!

Unscathed!

WOO! I made it! I didn't overdo it this Thanksgiving holiday and that feels like a real accomplishment. Many times holidays are an excuse for me to overindulge but for some reason, this year was different. Perhaps it is the permission I grant myself on a daily basis to eat whatever I choose thereby defeating any associations with denial. Denial always sets me up for a binge. Also, we didn't spend exorbitant amounts of time with my sister which also seems to be a binge trigger. She and I are not good for each other that way. We each enable the other to give in to our baser desires for food. Perhaps it's a subconscious wish to see the other fail in our respective quests for weight loss. Damn, sibling rivalry is rough!

Thursday, I got up and had a croissant for breakfast. It was a low-key morning because we were heading over to my sister's for Thanksgiving lunch. There, I was quite good about putting a TASTE of each item on my plate and not heaps of food. As a result, I didn't overeat and suffer needlessly. Later, we went to Sean's mom's house and thankfully I was still content from our late lunch so I didn't eat anything there. I did eat something when we got home but I don't remember it being much of anything. The rest of the weekend is a blur eatswise but there weren't any calorically crazy meals. Today, I did actually roast a turkey breast, make cornbread dressing and green bean casserole. We have leftovers but not a ton so it will not be Gorgefest around here.

I feel really good about how I handled eating this week. We did eat out once but I ordered a grilled chicken sandwich. I feel like things are finally under control and like I'm really ready to face this challenge head-on.

Here's to a new week of good eats!



Food at my sister's house.



All my boys on Turkey Day. Don't they look handsome?!

Recent Eats

Alrighty then! Let me try and run down my grub-a-dubs since Saturday for you. Saturday night, I cooked a gorgeous New Zealand rack of lamb, along with some mashed potatoes and tiny green peas. We spent the rest of the evening on our patio, sitting in front of our new fire pit. It was really, really nice.

Sunday morning, I got up and had this for breakfast:



Remember this? It's my version of the Panera Souffle that I love so much. Then, for lunch I had an egg salad sandwich on whole wheat bread. Dinner was a little less healthy, a sub from Jersey Mike's and I was regretting eating that almost immediately.

Monday, I got up and had one of these glorious things for breakfast with some cherry preserves:



I can't remember what I had for lunch but, for dinner I made Shrimp and Grits. Yumm-O!



Today for breakfast I had another croissant. Sooo good. Then for lunch I had leftover shrimp and grits. Dinner was fairly substantial. See, I have taken on the mantle of cooking Christmas dinner for my family and we traditionally have a rib-roast. Well, that's not exactly something I cook all the time or ever so I felt a need to practice before the big show. Last year my mom helped me but she got drunk and gave me some very bad instructions so this year I'm doing it alone. Luckily, the grocery store had roasts on sale this week so here goes.

Here is the roast totally naked. It's okay, I'm not exploiting anyone here, we're all consenting adults...



I placed it rib side down in a roasting pan and then slathered it with olive oil, herbs de provence, salt and pepper. Then I surrounded the meat with some root veggies (carrots and onions) and covered those with olive oil. Here, take a look for yourself:



Then, I put the pan in a preheated 350 degree oven and cooked the roast until the internal temp reached 125 degrees. I took it out of the oven to rest for 20 minutes.



While it was resting, I prepared some mashed potatoes and some baby broccoli. It was fabulous! The roast was so incredibly tender and juicy! I'm not scared to cook it at Christmas at all.

This week, I have really gotten back on "plan" and, with the exception of the Jersey Mike's incident, I haven't eaten any junky food. I'm feeling good about getting through the holidays without going crazy.

Tomorrow's food won't be terribly exciting, it'll just be more leftovers but I'll fill you in all the same. Have a great night!

Fooling Myself

Friends, I have been in deep denial. I somehow have been able to rationalize eating unhealthy food, which I haven't documented here. Frozen Pizzas, hot dogs, and McDonalds are not great choices and once in a very long while, it's ok to eat something like that. However, I have been eating like that a lot during the week and have been cooking less and less. My weight is back at 192, after having lost 3lbs by following the principles set forth by Dr. Clower in The Fat Fallacy so now is the time for me to get a grip. The holidays can be such a difficult time for dieters but for people who eat whole foods, not processed foods, it can be a cornucopia of delights. Eating whole foods in the proper portion sizes is my goal, along with banning all junk food through the end of the year. Not only is it bad for my waistline but it's bad for my wallet as well. You will begin to see more posts from me again regarding what I'm eating because it's gotten to the point of ridiculousness here. It is possible to lose weight eating good food. One just has to make the conscious choice to do it.

Thanks for sticking around and hopefully, you'll find the site a little more interesting once I get back on track.

Mmmmmm...pasta

Normally, I'm not such a big pasta fan but, as you will see later in this post, I enjoyed a lovely pasta dish this evening. First things first. Breakfast.

Yesterday I really wanted French Toast but no one else did so I waited until today to satisfy my craving. It was well worth the wait.



One beaten egg, a splash of cream, mixed with a generous amount of cinnamon and a sprinkling of vanilla and nutmeg. Add to that three slices of bread and you have breakfast for one mom and one kid. Ryan had cheese and crackers instead. He's not real big on breakfast food!

For lunch today, I had a hot dog with mustard and a handful of chips with a glass of organic lemonade. Yummy!

Dinner. It's always a challenge for me. Sean gets home so, so late and, if he hasn't called me by 7pm, I'm just about ready to give up on cooking at all. However that has been leading to some bad eating habits lately (I'm back up to 192) so I think I need to cook dinner early and just let him eat leftovers when he gets home. Tonight was my first journey down that path and I created a really delicious meal.

First, I took a cup and a half to two cups of penne pasta and boiled it. At the same time, I put 1 Tbs butter and a cup of half and half in a small saucepan over medium heat. Once the butter had melted, I added about 1/2 - 3/4 cup of parmesan cheese, a handful of Monterey Jack cheese, some dried rosemary leaves, freshly ground pepper, and a pinch of nutmeg and left all that to simmer over Low heat. Then I chopped some baby bella mushrooms and cooked them in a Tbs of butter. When they were ready (soft and slightly browned) I added them directly to the sauce. Then I cooked 1/2 of shrimp in 1 Tbs butter with one clove of finely chopped garlic and a splash of vermouth. When the shrimp began to get pink, I added the entire mixture to the sauce as well. I combined the sauce with the pasta (DRAINED) and then put it in a casserole dish, topped it with some Italian breadcrumbs and put it in a 425 degree oven for about 10-15 minutes. Since I was cooking the dish in the oven I didn't cook the shrimp in the pan all the way through. It's better for the shrimp to be slightly underdone in that instance.

When it came out of the oven, it looked like this:



Oh, and like this:



And when I put it on my plate it looked like this:



Like I said, I don't usually like pasta but this was really darn good! There was no recipe, just throwing some stuff together at the spur of the moment.

In other news, I got a new food processor today. My old one called it quits after my mom helped me make bread the other day. My new one is a Wolfgang Puck monster, 900 watts and 12 cups. Hopefully it will last me a long time. Good night sweet cuisinart...you were good to me.

Oh. My. God.

Remember how much I love these from Panera?



Well, after scanning the internet for a recipe, I got lucky and found a message on a board from someone who bakes at Panera and, while they couldn't divulge the actual recipe, they did give a general how-to which I followed today. It's not as pretty as theirs but it was just as tasty!



Forgive the photo, it was taken in my kitchen at night and I was in a hurry to eat the darn thing so I didn't take the usual care in taking a photo.

Here are the general directions I copied from the internet:

Although, the term "souffle" is a misnomer here. They are not made in
any "souffle" style/technique that I know of! The batter is
quiche-like (and I really wish they would all it quiche). Recipes are
strictly confidential, but I can say that the dough is a french
croissant dough richer than the typical American version; ours is
made with European butter--i.e. higher butter fat content). You could
just use your favorite quiche recipe for the batter (ours contains
Romano and asiago cheese, spinach, bacon, red pepper, Tabasco sauce,
artichoke hearts). The "souffles" are not actually baked in the paper
molds (but I wish we could bake them in the molds because the
dishwashers frequently run the pans through the dishwasher (they are
not supposed to do this) which strips them and makes the "souffles"
stick horribly), but we use specially designed "souffle" pans. If you
can find a pecan roll mold, that will work fine, or even a
Texas-sized muffin pan.

The dough is rolled to about 1/4 inch thick, cut into 3.5x 3.5 inch
squares (of course, this step is done for us in a factory, and the
squares come to us frozen) and then it is stretched by hand to 6x6
inches and then fitted into the mold. Each piece of dough is then
filled with about 1/4 to 1/3 cup of batter, and topped with a bit
more asiago cheese before being folded over.

They are baked at 360 degrees in our rotating oven for about 26
minutes with 20 seconds steam. You will need to bake at 400 degrees
for about 20 minutes or so in a home oven (mist the top generously
with water and then egg wash).

I used a croissant recipe out of one of my baking books, which was quite tedious. If you're not feeling particularly picky you could take a shortcut and try Crescent Roll dough in a can. I cannot guarantee the same results but it would be a lot faster than making croissant dough by hand. For the quiche-like batter, I took 7 eggs, 1/2 cup of cream and beat them by hand, adding 1lb of cooked, crumbled breakfast sausage, sauteed peppers 1/2 of a red and 1/2 of a green), 1/2 an onion, a handful of chopped mushrooms, and some parmesan cheese. Baked in the paper molds for about 20-30 minutes at 400 degrees and, damn, they were good!!! I hope someone out there will try this as well and let me know how you tweaked it.

mmmmm...Cornbread Dressing

Well, here it is. If my mother were dead she'd be rolling over in her grave but she's not so she'll just be pissed if she sees this. Thankfully, for me, my parents have little to no interest in either one of my blogs so I'm pretty safe in posting this here without fear.

Remember my recipe for Mamaw's Cornbread and how you were supposed to let it sit out for a day to get stale? Well, hopefully you haven't been waiting on my lazy ass to post this recipe, since I've been so slack about it and all. At any rate, late or not, here is Mamaw's Cornbread Dressing Recipe.

1 loaf day old cornbread
6 slices Pepperidge Farm White Bread, torn and toasted in oven (350 degrees, 5-10mins)
1/2 - 1 cup celery chopped
1/2 - 1 cup onion chopped
2 cloves of garlic, choppped
1 stick butter
1 Tbs Poultry Seasoning
1 can cream of chicken OR cream of mushroom soup
(sometimes I mix it up and use some of both)
1 3oz can of evaporated milk
chicken broth to moisten and to taste
2 eggs beaten
salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Break up the cornbread and put it in a large bowl with the torn white bread.

Melt the stick of butter in a saute pan over medium heat. Add the chopped celery, onion, and garlic and cook until soft and translucent. Don't brown them!

To the dry ingredients, add the poultry seasoning, soup, evaporated milk, eggs, cooked veggies, and chicken broth until the mixture looks nice and wet, not soupy but really, really moist.

Pour into a deep, rectangular casserole dish and cook in 350 degree oven for 30-45 minutes, until the top is deep, rich brown. Unless you're from up North, I can guarantee that you will love this dressing. If you're from the North, all bets are off. My mother-in-law is from the North and has her own style of stuffing, which I really don't care for at all. She makes many things that I love but stuffing is not one of them. I've been ruined from years and years of cornbread dressing though so it's not her fault.

Please let me know if you make and like it!

I made bread today!

Look! I made bread!! French Bread!



My mom came over this morning and very kindly helped me get the yeast going and put the dough together then I took her home and came back and did the rest. I was really pleased with how it turned out! I haven't eaten a piece yet, just a nibble, but it was good.

I don't have the recipe, it was in my mom's head, or else I'd share it with you.

Speaking of heads, I was puttering around today and an object fell from up high and bonked me on the head causing me to bleed for quite a while. Yeah, it was a lot of fun! Thank goodness I have a wonderful neighbor because she came over and administered first aid, and may have even dyed my hair in the process since she used peroxide to clean my wound. LOL Honestly though she was awesome and I'm so glad she's our neighbor. She rocks!

I'm still feeling a little woozy but I wanted to show off my bread. Tomorrow, I'll post pictures of my recent eats and give you the recipe for my Mamaw's Cornbread Dressing. Just don't tell my mom I gave it to you, okay?

Mamaw's Cornbread

So today I made up a batch of my Mamaw's cornbread. I never had the pleasure of meeting her, she was my mother's grandmother, was 1/2 Native American, and died a long, long, time ago. When my mom would spend summers with her, she had to use an outhouse, ok? Long time ago. Anyway, this recipe is for the cornbread that we have been eating for as long as I can remember and it's what we use at Thanksgiving to make Cornbread Dressing. I'm going to make the dressing tomorrow.

Mamaw's Cornbread

1 cup yellow cornmeal (not self-rising)
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 Tbs Sugar
3 tsp Baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 1/4 cup of milk or buttermilk
1/2 CUP of butter, melted
2 eggs beaten
1/2 tsp vanilla

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

Sift together the first five ingredients. Set aside.

Blend together the milk, butter, eggs, and vanilla then add them to the dry ingredients. Stir until well combined. Pour into a greased 10" iron skillet and then place in the 450 degree oven for 20-25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Here is a photo of the batter:



Doesn't it look pretty? :)

Here it is in the skillet:



You could use a pie pan if you don't have a skillet but keep an eye on it in the oven because I don't know how that would affect the cooking time.

Here it is when it came out of the oven:



Now I will leave it on the counter overnight to dry out in order for me to use it in the dressing tomorrow. If you make it, please let me know how it turns out!

Enjoy!

Back and I have a recipe to share!

My sister and I had a wonderful time in Disney World and it was a much needed vacation. NOw I'm back though, and I'm ready to face my eating head on. Today I'm going to be posting a recipe for my great-grandmother's Southern Cornbread. It's the best cornbread and I'm going to use it later in a Cornbread Dressing that I'm making later today. I'll post the recipe for that as well.

So come back this afternoon for a bonafide southern treat, courtesy of Mamaw!

Off to Disney World

See you on Monday! I'm off to Disney World with my sister for a Girls Vacation Weekend!

Have a wonderful weekend,

Evie