Recent Eats

I've been a tad under the weather, friends so my recent eats have been pretty slim to none. Yesterday I didn't manage to eat breakfast but I did eat some soup for lunch. Our grocery store carries some all natural soups that are pretty darn good, no additives, no preservatives. They were running a by one get one free special so I got one container of New England Clam Chowder and one of Charleston She-Crab Soup. Mmmm-mm good! Here's my bowl of soup from yesterday:



I spent a lot of the day on the sofa because I felt incredibly weak. Last year around this same time I was diagnosed with extreme fatigue. I don't know if it has anything to do with the time of year, or time of the month if you catch my drift, but I've been pretty exhausted for the past couple of days. I did manage to take the boys to the park for a little bit yesterday but then spent the rest of the night on the sofa. For dinner I had a bag of organic microwave popcorn and a Coke.

This morning I was determined to get off to a good start. There was some leftover french bread in the freezer so after thawing it out, I used it to make some french toast. Usually when I make french toast it turns out AWFUL. Have no idea why that is but sometimes the things that are the simplest for most people are the hardest for me. LOL Today though, someone was looking over me because the french toast this morning was delicious. Even Iain liked it! He said it tasted like the french toast at Disney World! Here's a shot of it:



For lunch, I simply had a hot dog and some water then a couple of squares of chocolate. For dinner I was going to fix pork chops, brussel sprouts and mashed potatoes but I only got around to the brussel sprouts and potatoes. The brussels were good! I used to despise these things but once I used the Barefoot Contessa's recipe, which involves bacon, I was hooked. I'll post a picture of them tomorrow.

Tomorrow's eats are going to be interesting. My sister and I are meeting up with RinnyBoo at the State Fair and I'm looking forward to having some fair food!

Good night!

Today's Eats

I think we're developing a Sunday morning ritual. Why, you may ask? Well, this morning, Sean went out to Panera and picked up a couple of those delicious souffle's we ate last weekend. They are sooo good! Although, after eating it again today I think it's more of a strata than a souffle. Sean also went to Starbucks and picked up my favorite beverage, a chai latte. While I didn't take a picture of that, I did take a couple of good shots of the souffle:





I ate every stinking bite of that and it was delicious. However the Chai Latte was huge and I only drank about half of that before throwing the rest away. I love that drink so much. It's like drinking gingerbread!

Lunch had me in a quandary. We have tons of leftovers in the fridge but they were all so cheese laden and I didn't think I could handle anymore cheese today. So then, what to have for lunch? I decided just to have a sandwich. A ham and mayo sandwich with pickle slices on whole wheat bread. It was really good!



Now that it's time for dinner, I'm not totally sure what we're having. I put out a London Broil but I don't think it's thawed out yet. If it doesn't thaw, I'm not sure what we'll do. Whatever happens, I'll update you later!

DINNER:

Ha! Dinner was a comedy of errors which I won't dwell on here but it finally got done and we all ate together as a family. Nice! We don't get to do that very often. I made London Broil, a package of Parmesan and Romano Cheese Rice, and baby broccoli florets:



I overcooked the london broil just a tad but all in all it was pretty good. RYan tried it and didn't like it but he did eat the rice and broccoli and a PB and honey sandwich. Iain liked the london broil all right but he didn't like the rice. He thought it tasted like Mac and Cheese, which he can't stand. I'm just happy they both tried something they didn't like. I fixed the leftovers for Sean to take to work tomorrow for lunch so hopefully he'll eat them. He's been eating out a lot and I told him we haven't budgeted for that and he really shouldn't do it every day. We'll see what happens tomorrow!

Good night!

Today's Eats

I got up early this morning and made these beautiful pancakes. If you click on the picture, it will take you to my Flickr page which has a link to the recipe I used. These turned out really nicely and went really well with the bacon I cooked, too. :)

We had a busy day. After breakfast, we wandered out to a Fall Festival, which had been very poorly organized but we didn't let that get us down and we all had a great time. Be sure to go to my unschooling blog tomorrow and check out some pics from that adventure. We were at the festival smack during lunch time and, since I love a good hot dog, that was my lunch of choice along with a Mountain Dew.



It was plain, my usual is slaw and mustard, but the line was pretty long and we all just wanted to sit down and eat!

Tonight, we went out to dinner with my sister and her hubby to a Mexican restaurant that was okay. A little on the salty side but not greasy at least. I got combo number one, 1 taco, two cheese enchiladas and rice. I ate half the taco, one enchilada, 1/3 of the rice. Oh yeah, and a million chips with salsa. Why is it that you can eat a whole basket of those before you realize what you've done??

I got my "studio" partially set up with a table, a lamp, some foam core to try and direct light in the room, and some props to use. The pancakes are the first picture I took in there and I think it turned out pretty well. It's nice to have a dedicated spot to take the pictures because it was getting to be a big ordeal to drag out all my equipment to get the kinds of shots I wanted. See, in order to get my shots really, really sharp, I've started using a tripod. I've been using a higher aperture, a lower film speed, and both of those require a tripod when the light is not totally bright because the shutter speed will be slow and you'll get a very blurry image otherwise. Also, using the ISO 100 gives me a much clearer picture than I was getting at 400 ISO. I'm really learning a lot and am enjoying taking pictures of food. It's inspiring me to cook more and making me step outside of my comfort zone, too. This week I'm thinking about trying a couple of French foods that I love. We'll see!

Have a great night!

yesterday and today's eats - ugh

It's been a crazy couple of days around here. I'm beginning to appreciate how difficult and time consuming it is to maintain two blogs, a household, two kids, and a burgeoning hobby in photography. It's exhausting and frankly all those have suffered a little over the past couple of days.

Yesterday's breakfast was boring. I wanted to make a beautiful souffle or something but just couldn't find a recipe I wanted to use. Instead I just made the Old Faithful, scrambled eggs and biscuits. The picture is terrible, too. I think I did something wrong when I developed it so later on I'll revisit it and put the better version here.



I didn't eat lunch yesterday. Well, I did if you count the 12 raw almonds I ate while walking out the door. Breakfast held me over until almost 3 and then Iain and I had to go out and run some errands while Ryan was at a Kid Mosh. That's what we call playdates because my husband hates the word playdate. Anyway, I ate the almonds and drank some water and we were off.

Dinner. Another missed meal. Unless you count the tiny slice of frozen pizza that I ate. I made Tuna Casserole but I didn't eat it. Don't know what was up with me yesterday...

This morning, I got up and had to run some more errands and when we got back, I had another handful of almonds. It was late and I thought we were having lunch with Sean so I didn't want to eat a big breakfast and get so full that I couldn't enjoy lunch. Well, of course we ended up not going. Sean was really busy and didn't even call me until 12:30 to tell me that we couldn't get together. Oh well. I had the tuna casserole in the fridge so I just reheated some of that. This picture turned out terrible too. I'm not sure what's up with that but here it is anyway! LOL



It's all out of focus. Would you believe I took 25 pictures and every last one of them looked that way?? I was really pissed.

This afternoon I'm going to be spending time setting up "my" room. The boys just combined rooms so I'm taking Iain's old room as my own and am going to set up my own photography studio. It's just so difficult to keep all my camera supplies downstairs so I can get a picture together when I need it. This will be easier on everyone I think.

Not sure what we're doing for dinner. The boys wanted to go out but we'll just have to wait and see. Whatever it is, I'll update and hopefully the picture will be in focus!!

DINNER:

We ate over at my sister's last night and I didn't feel like taking my camera over but I'm going to do my best to describe for you what we had. First, we started with the Pioneer Woman's cheese bread, toasts as we like to make them. This time, instead of using all monterey jack cheese, I used a combo of pepper jack and monterey jack. They were quite good and I probably had 4. Ok, 5. No really, I had 10. They were SO good! LOL Then my sister made her own sloppy joes using a Rachael Ray recipe. INstead of ground beef though Beth used ground turkey. They were better than any Sloppy Joe I've ever had in my life. The sauce was sweet and savory, just perfect! I only had a half of one though since I'd eaten all those cheese toasts. To go along with the sandwiches, she made a caesar salad. It was a really nice dinner, but I did eat a tad too much. Hopefully I won't regret eating all that cheese. LOL!

see you later!

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.