Today's Eats

Well, it was another "early" day here. Really early for me since I was cleaning up doggie presents at 3:15 in the morning but we won't talk about that. I really do love my new fur coat though. Ahhh, I'm only teasing! the pup is just fine. The boys were up at 8am and we hit the ground running because we had a lot we wanted to do today. I did make sure to take time and have a quiet, relaxing breakfast before all the craziness began. I cooked some natural bacon in the oven, a tad too long, my favorite way to cook it. It just cooks so much more evenly that way. I had that along with some organic french vanilla yogurt and my homemade granola. Mmmmmm. So good!



It took me a while to figure out what I was having for lunch. There was some chicken in the fridge that needed to be cooked today but I just wasn't sure what to do with it. I settled on Parmesan Chicken, mashed potatoes, and tiny green peas. For the chicken, I soaked it in buttermilk while I prepared the coating which was panko bread crumbs, grated parmesan cheese (NOT Kraft), hot hungarian paprika, poultry seasoning, parsley flakes, and coarse pepper. In an iron skillet I put 1-2 Tbs of canola oil and heated it up. Once I dredged the chicken in the coating, I placed it in the skillet, seasoned it with kosher salt and browned it on both sides. Then I placed it in a 350 degree oven for about 15 minutes, while my potatoes cooked. Here is the finished product:



Late afternoon, I decided to go ahead and have dinner. Sean has been getting home so late that it just feels pointless to try and eat dinner with him. Since lunch was so big I just had a small snacky dinner which consisted of a Granny Smith apple, some Danish cheese (which was not so great), and some fancy shmancy garlic crackers. I have to tell you that this dinner was less than satisfying so it will not be repeated. See for yourself:



As you can see, it wasn't very inspiring! LOL I've been combing through all my cookbooks and haven't found anything yet that I'm itching to fix. Maybe tomorrow some inspiration will hit. Oh, one more thing. I have added a quick, 15 minute exercise routine to my day. Nothing set in stone, just 15 minutes of activity. In the family room I have left some wrap-on hand weights so when I'm just sitting around, I can turn on the music channel on TV and dance around with the weights on my hands. I did it yesterday and can really feel it today. It's just something to get me started so I'm not doing a set step-by-step routine. Today the boys and I got out and walked a lot so that was my exercise today. My weight has creeped back up to 191 and I feel that it's because of little nibbles of things I have throughout the day. they don't seem like much at the time but apparently they're adding up. They seemed so insignificant that I didn't even mention them here. That's going to stop though. No more nibbling and more exercise!

See you all tomorrow!

Today's Eats

Not sure why but we were all up at what felt like the crack of dawn to me at 7:15am. The boys got up and came downstairs and we just hung out this morning. I made another batch of biscuits from www.pinchmysalt.com and, in an attempt to avoid the sticky dough from last time, I think I made this just a touch too dry. With butter and jam you can't tell the difference! LOL Here is what my breakfast looked like this morning:





They were really yummy!

For lunch I decided to try and make some fried chicken. My mom told me that my grandma used Crisco so that is what I did today, too. Crisco is not good for you but it sure is good. To go along with the chicken I made a cauliflower au gratin and some haricot verts. Here is my plate from lunch:



Later I munched on some Harry and David Moose Crunch, which is like PoppyCock or Crunch n munch, and I really regret it. I had a major sugar crash this afternoon and was weak, tired and a complete bi-yotch. I'm feeling better now but man, it was rough for a while. Not sure what I'm having for dinner because I'm not really hungry but, if I eat I'll be sure to update.

Today's Eats

Woke up this morning - Late! Well, at 9am anyway, and had to rush around because we had nothing to eat and we needed to get to the grocery store. Once we got out and back, it was almost 11am so I decided to just eat lunch. While we were in the grocery store Ryan had mentioned that he would like to get some macaroni and cheese. Of course, I wasn't buying a box just because it had Spider-Man on it but I told him we'd make our own. Once it was made though he only wanted a peanut butter and honey sandwich so I ate it instead! Really, I don't know why anyone would make the box version when it's just as easy to make homemade pretty quickly. I boiled 1 cup of macaroni and when it was ready, I added a Tbs of butter, a generous handful of shredded cheddar cheese, one slice of american cheese, and a splash of cream. Throw in a pinch of salt and a couple of grinds of pepper and you can go ahead an eat it if you want to. I however wanted to add a bread crumb topping which would add a tiny bit more cooking time. I put a small amount for my lunch in a ramekin and the rest in a larger dish for later. Topped with a tsp of butter and a sprinkling of italian bread crumbs, the ramekin went in a 350 degree oven for about 10 mins. While that cooked, I sliced an all natural hot dog on the bias and cooked it in a skillet with some butter. Here is the finished product:



After lunch I went a good while before I was hungry again and, while there were plenty of healthy things for me to choose for a snack, I instead chose to snack on this:



I spent a lot of time thinking about what to fix for dinner. That seems to be the norm these days because I want to show you something visually appealing but my personal repertoire is quite shallow. At any rate, it's 9:17 as I write this and Sean is still not home so around 7:30 I decided not to wait and just fix something easy. It's not the best picture but it's a record of what I ate! LOL



A couple of slices of natural bacon, 1 egg, 1 buttermilk biscuit, and 3 chopped strawmatos seasoned with salt and pepper. Like I said, not exciting but it was dinner!

Tonight I'm going to cruise though my cookbooks and see what interesting fare I can come up with for tomorrow. Hopefully something better than breakfast for dinner.

Weekend Eats

I'm going to give a quick summary of the food I gorged on this weekend and, I do mean gorged. Right now I feel like an overstuffed pillow.....ugh.

So Saturday morning I got to sleep late and so I skipped breakfast. We went out to eat for lunch and I had two slices of cheese pizza. Not very exciting. Later on, we dropped the kids of with my parents for a sleepover and went crazy! Oh, it was so invigorating to be out and about without worrying about whether everyone's needs were being met. Sean took me from store to store helping me try to find things for me to use in my quest to become a cooler food photographer. You will see in a moment an embarrassingly bad shot I took trying to be all artsy but hold onto your britches, it's be here soon enough. So we went to Garden Ridge, Tuesday Morning, TJ Maxx, all on a quest for cool plates and kitchen items. Sean did try to get me to test drive a car but I wasn't having it. It starts with a test drive and 12 hours later your eyeball deep in a 72 year car loan. No thanks! After we wore ourselves out with shopping, we wanted to go somewhere hip to eat. You know, somewhere cooler than Ronald's Maison de boeuf. (mcdonalds for those who don't parlez francais) We settled on a brand new restaurant downtown called Rim. The name alone caused Sean to go into fits of 12 year old toilet humor. It was really good though! A tapas place, the offerings were not innumerable but they were absolutely divine. We started out with Marcona Almonds (peeled and roasted in sunflower oil) and Flash Fried Calamari. Next we ordered Tuna Tartare, Curried Lamb Meatloaf, and Hoisin Haricots Verts. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Everything is sized to share and perfect for two people. Next we ordered pork, cabbage and ginger potstickers. God, they were so good, I thought I was going to embarrass myself in the restaurant while exclaiming my satisfaction with the meal. Here are the things I remembered to take pictures of:


Hoisin Haricots Verts..see the black and white sesame seeds?



Curried Lamb Meatloaf with a cucumber sauce, oh god this was too good.


Tuna Tartare, this was spicy and mustardy, just plain delicious. It was served with a pickled tomato watermelon relish. Sounds weird but it was damn good!

After dinner, we ventured on down to Ganache Bakery for our over the top dessert of the night. Here is where the embarrassing photo comes in. See, when we got home had all these cool plates and cake stands that I'd bought and I wanted to get a cool, fantabulous shot of my cake to post here. Well, I overthought it just a tad. Here is the best shot I got and you'll see that's not saying much:



That picture is so terrible and I wouldn't share it with just anybody! LOL

We came home, watched a movie, went to bed. When we got up, we wanted to take advantage of the peace and quiet and grabbed some reading material and went out for breakfast. It was a major decision trying to figure out if we should go somewhere and get a big breakfast or just go somewhere small for pastry and coffee. Small won. We headed over to Panera and I had a Turkey Sausage and Potato Souffle with a Chai Latte. Chai Latte is my favorite! It was great too because we were able to sit outside. Sean read the paper, I read my cookbooks and Sur la Table catalog. For an hour. It was glorious!!



We picked up the kids and then headed home to get some things done before the beginning of the week kicked us in the ass. For lunch I had Shepherd's Pie leftovers which I won't bore you with another picture of that. Then my sister called and offered to buy us dinner in honor of my b-day. Cool, I can get down with that. We ended up ordering appetizers from a local place and I had some wings, some chips and dip, and some nachos. The only thing I got a picture of though was the wings. Here you go:



No cake tonight, baby! I was full after eating all that and here I sit feeling like a complete glutton but happy at the same time. It was a really nice weekend. I hope you all had a nice weekend too!

Yesterday's Eats - Birthday!

One might think that celebrating a birthday without a cake is a bad thing but I'm here to tell you that you can recognize your birthday without a cake and live to talk about it!

Yesterday morning I got up and opened my gifts which included some new camera and computer gear. I also received a birthday present I ordered for myself which was a book on digital photography. I've been incredibly inspired by some of the photos over at Flickr and really want to improve my skills so I tried something new when shooting my breakfast images. I couldn't really tell a difference but I'm trying! Breakfast was quite simple, two buttermilk biscuits with a touch of Bonne Maman cherry preserves. I adore cherry jelly, especially on biscuits...



This held me over for a long time, surprisingly and later I had some leftover Shepherd's Pie for lunch.



For dinner, Sean asked the boys where they wanted to take me and they, of course, wanted Mario's Pizza. However I wasn't in the mood for a big greasy slice of pizza so instead I had a big greasy burger at Fincastle's, a diner downtown. LOL



It wasn't greasy actually. We hadn't eaten there before but the menu looked like fun, Cherry Crush, baby cokes with peanuts, fried pickles. I didn't have any of that, though I was sorry I didn't order a Cherry Crush because I loved those when I was a little girl. The burger was really tasty. A lot of places do not season their burgers and this one had a great combination of pepper and salt. Really good. I ordered onion rings as my side because I'm a total sucker for them:



These were good, too but they could have used a touch of salt. It's hard to beat the flavor of a salty onion ring dredged in ketchup. Mmmmmm, that's tasty!!

After dinner, Sean wanted to take me to our most decadent local bakery called Ganache. They have the most incredible cakes and are the only game in town to go to when you have a special occasion and you want to get something other than the standard cavity-inducing fare offered at the grocery store. They made our wedding cake and that was to die for! Anyway, I was so full after dinner though I decided to wait until tonight to get some cake. The kids are spending the night with my parents so maybe Sean and I will head over to Ganache later and enjoy something gorgeous with a cup of coffee. Here's what my plate looked like at the end of dinner by the way:



After dinner, we headed over to my favorite book store and there I was able to buy $250 worth of books for $84. I love the used book store! I picked up The Joy of Cooking, How to Bake, and The New Basics Cookbook. Also got a couple of books on parties, a Celtic activity book for kids (super cool), a Marvel Encyclopedia and a photography book. Awesome, awesome, awesome.

I didn't miss the cake one bit. It was a great birthday!

Yesterday's Eats

An exercise in junky eating! Ryan had to go to the dentist yesterday to get some fillings and couldn't eat before he went so, in solidarity, I decided to abstain as well. His appointment wasn't until noon either so we both got there hungry. After the appointment, I promised I would take him to MCDonalds for a Happy Meal. Well, my resistance was low due to the fact that I was starving. I ordered this and told myself I'd only eat half:



That didn't happen...I ate the whole thing. At least I ordered an unsweetened tea and saved myself some agony on that score.

Later on, when it was time for dinner I began making Shepherd's Pie and it was late, probably around 7:30, and I still hadn't heard from Sean what time he was planning to get home. While I cooked I snacked on a couple of cookies, a handful of peanuts and a couple of spoonfuls of mashed potatoes. Then Sean got home around 9:30 and I just didn't feel like having dinner! So this is what I made:



But this it what I had around 10:00...



Good stuff, huh? Well, today is my birthday and I plan to celebrate by treating myself well. Check back later for an update on today's eats.

Today's Eats

Woke up this mornin' and had a hankerin' for some biscuits. Hot, soft, fluffy biscuits. My mom used to make homemade biscuits every weekend when we were little and I would pile mine up with butter and cherry jelly. Cherry is still my favorite today. So when I was roaming around a website called www.pinchmysalt.com and saw a recipe for buttermilk biscuits, I knew then that a plate of these were in my future. My very near future. So, am I repeating myself too much when I say that baking isn't my thing? Baking and my laissez-faire attitude just don't mix because baking requires precision and many times I just don't have the patience for that. The biscuits turned out great it's just that I added too much buttermilk to the dough so they were too sticky to roll and cut out so I had to make drop biscuits. It didn't affect the flavor at all though. Check this out:



I'm going to be honest. I had two of these lovelies because it had been a long, long time since I'd had a homemade biscuit that was any good, and these were GOOD. The biscuits along with a small glass of creamery fresh whole milk held me over until 3:00 today.

Lunch was light. I decided to have a salad and topped it with some black beans, tomatoes, salsa and sour cream mixed together with some salt and cumin. Along with that I fixed myself some more of the olive cheese bread but I fixed it on rounds instead of the loaf halves. It was really good!



Here is the salad.



Here are the toasts.

I think for dinner tonight we're going to have breakfast: eggs, sausage, and biscuits. Sean will be home shortly and I'll be sure to update after we eat!

DINNER

I'm embarrassed to post this picture because it's terrible but it's a record of dinner so it's going on here anyway:



It's a biscuit with a tiny bit of butter, a fresh sausage patty, and a scrambled egg. It was a good dinner just not exciting! Sometimes breakfast for dinner is soooo good! Just overlook the really dark part on top of the biscuit. My oven cooks really hot and I forgot to check on them. LOL

See you tomorrow. Have a great night!