Today's Eats - Leftovers and Repeats

Still dragging my ass outta bed every day I suppose because I'm still recovering from the weekend. Or could it be because Friday I'm officially one year older? Hmmmm. At any rate I got up and puttered around a little bit and then, since the weather was so lovely and cool this morning, I thought it would be nice to break my fast outside.



This is not a great picture. It took me a while to get into picture-taking today. French Vanilla Yogurt and homemade granola.

For lunch the boys wanted to go on a picnic so we invited my sister and her daughter to go and we were off to the park. I had an egg salad sandwich, some grapes, and a few wheat thins that I had brought for the boys.







After snacking on at least 5 of the pioneer woman's deadly oatmeal crispies this afternoon, I prepared dinner. It was really tough. I had to walk over to the fridge, pull out two containers and reheat the shrimp and grits from last night. Whew! Can't you see the perspiration on my brow?!



Except for going a little crazy on the cookies, it felt like a good day.

Today's Eats

Today I am beat. After being up late every night this weekend and then eating a bunch of crap on Saturday, I just feel run down. But I still got up this morning and ate a wonderful breakfast of scrambled eggs and sausage:



Iain is my scrambled egg buddy. Ryan doesn't like them so Iain and I always eat them together. I cooked two eggs for Iain and I to split and I cooked two small sausage patties that I formed from freshly made sausage at a local grocery store. It was really good sausage. I'm usually a little wary of buying it there because the first time I got it someone was quite heavy-handed with the salt but the past two times it's been great.

Anyway, that breakfast kept me feeling full for a long time and I didn't eat lunch until around 3pm. I had an egg salad sandwich and a granny smith apple and until just now, as I was typing the words, I didn't think about the fact that I had an egg for two meals today. Hopefully I'll have something else at dinner! Anyway, here's a photo of lunch:



My plan for dinner was to make the most fabulous Shrimp and Grits you have ever seen and, depending on when Sean's planning to get home, I still have every intention of making it. Also, I will post the recipe later and request that you make it ASAP. It is that damn good!

Come back tonight for the update!

*********CLANG CLANG CLANG******* DINNER BELL'S RINGING

Well, I did it. I fixed my go-to dish. You know, we all have at least one that we came up with and feel so good about sharing. This is mine. Barbeque Shrimp and Grits. For those of you who have never had the pleasure of eating grits, please do me a favor. DO NOT get instant grits or I will have to personally come to your house and whomp you upside the head with my beautifully seasoned iron skillet. And I don't want to do that 'cause I like y'all! Bear with me, because the photos are going to look like one of my kids has a stomach bug and threw up in our family barf bowl but trust me. This smack is GOOD! A restaurant here, called Lucky 32, served this forever and it was what I ordered every time we went. Then they up and changed it to regular old shrimp and grits with sausage. I like that, too but this was so different that I wanted it instead and I was forced to try and find my own recipe.

You will need:

1 or 2lbs of shrimp (i usually get the peeled, frozen variety, no tail thank you)
1 bottle of Heinz Chili sauce- Don't you dare use ketchup
2 or 3 cups combined of onion and peppers
1/4 lb of bacon OR olive oil for a healthier version
a handful of brown sugar
chicken broth (3/4 cup)
heavy cream (1/4-1/2 cup)
half and half (2 cups)
water (2 cups)
1/2 stick of butter
salt to taste
1 cup Old fashioned grits

First, boil the half and half and water adding the butter and turn the heat down. Add the grits and stir so they don't get lumpy. Cook over low heat for 20 minutes. They will thicken with time. Stir occasionally. I added a couple of generous pinches of kosher salt as well.

Second, heat the olive oil in a medium sized skillet. If you're using the bacon instead, dice and cook until crisp, reserving the grease. Add your peppers and onions to the oil and cook over medium heat until soft and slightly caramelly. Is that a word?! Once the peppers and onions are cooked, add the entire bottle of chili sauce, the handful of brown sugar, and chicken broth, allowing this to simmer as the grits cook. Taste to see how much salt is needed. This is a sweetish dish so don't be shocked by that when you taste it. Add your cream here. Don't use milk or it will curdle. Cream is a requirement and there's not enough in here to cause the calorie conscious too much trouble. In fact, when I was doing weight watchers, a serving of this was 8 points. Carrying on......

While the sauce is simmering, take your thawed shrimp and cook them quickly in another skillet but don't overcook them. In fact, if your husband calls and is going to be later than you thought he was because he's stopping at the store to buy this GINORMOUS box of crackers:



then please, in the name of all that's holy, under-cook the shrimp and add it to the sauce to let it finish cooking until he gets home. Once he arrives, fix him a lovely bowl of these gorgeous, creamy grits:



and then top them with the BBQ Shrimp Sauce. This is where it looks ugly as a mud fence but tastes incredible:



This recipe will easily serve 6 people nicely. If you make it, please let me know what you think, or what changes you made to the recipe to make it your own.

Weekend Eats

Holy Moly! I can't believe I didn't post a single thing ALL weekend. That's really crazy. Well, it reflects the weekend I had at any rate. Saturday morning we all slept really late because we were up until 2 or 2:30 the night before. I ate a ham sandwich for brunch then took the boys to a birthday party for one of their friends. There was pizza and soda but I abstained and it felt good! After the party, the boys were hungry. They didn't eat much there because they wanted to play so I took them by a drive-thru on the way home. Lord, it was so hard not to order fries for myself, but I didn't! When I got home my sister and brother-in-law invited us over for dinner. I was exhausted from being out in the hot sun at the party so I was more than happy to let someone else cook dinner! We had rib-eye, Caesar salad, mashed potatoes, and some kind of frozen bread appetizer. Did I mention the jalapeño cheddar cheese dip with tortilla chips before dinner? Woo! It was a lot of food and all of it was processed in one form or another. Let me tell you, yesterday I was regretting that meal.

Sunday morning, my sister and I went to the grocery store together. We do this a lot and I often wonder if people think we're a lesbian couple with 3 kids. Not that it matters, I just wonder because it makes me laugh to myself when I think about it. Anyway, my stomach was really hurting while we were there but it calmed down. When I got home, it got upset again and I really think it was because of the food we ate the night before. I didn't eat much yesterday but I did make a couple of the Pioneer Woman's recipes. One thing on her site that I've been eying for a while is the Olive Cheese Bread. I goofed up and bought olives with pits in them so it took me a long time to chop the green olives, and then I had to open a can of roasted red pepper in order to supplement the pimientos that I was missing in the olives but once I got through that it was o-kay!

Here is what it looked like:



This was actually our dinner plate but for lunch I had 3 slices of this bread. It was yummy but there are a couple of things I would do differently. First, she has you mix up the ingredients and then cut a french baguette in half, piling the mixture thickly on both halves and baking it in the oven. An easier and less messy way to do this is to cut the bread into round slices. You will have a lot but this way you can just put a teaspoon or so on each slice and they are much more manageable. Second, instead of the monterey jack cheese she calls for in her recipe, I would use pepper jack. You could leave the olives out or in, your choice. I'm sure it would be great either way. All in all, this is a great party food but it would be better for people to eat if you cut the round slices I suggested. My sister and I actually make the peppr jack version all the time because our local grocery store makes their own pepper jack pimiento cheese and suggested it be served on the rounds. It is fabulous and I recommend you try it ASAP.

For the wings I just baked some drumettes that I bought at the store that I seasoned with a little garlic salt and pepper. In the meantime, I took 2 Tbs butter and melted it in a saucepan and added to that 3 Tbs of Texas Pete hot sauce and 2 Tbs of honey. Once the wings were pretty much done, I tossed them in the sauce and then popped them back in the oven for a few minutes to get them nice and crispy. For dinner, I had 3 wings and 2 slices of cheese bread. Here's another picture of our plate:



After dinner, I wanted to make the Pioneer Woman's Oatmeal Crispies. They were pretty easy and the only change I made to these was to add chocolate chips. Yum! These are really tasty! I wanted the boys to have a homemade snack for this week. Take a look:



Hey, Stephanie! Sometimes I make cookies and they actually turn out! LOL

I've already taken a picture of my breakfast so later today there will be a post with today's eats. Sorry for not posting over the weekend!

Today's Eats

Had a late breakfast this morning. Well, late considering I had been up since 7am. I ate around 9am. Got busy puttering around and then I decided to clean the kitchen. I was halfway through when my stomach said, "Enough!" So I acquiesced and fed it this:



Two pieces of natural bacon, a fried egg, and 3 strawmatos. Strawmatos? You say. Yes, that's no typo. They are tomatoes that are shaped like strawberries and I paid top dollar for them. $4 for about 15. I'm a sucker for something different, obviously. They tasted like grape tomatoes so unless you're trying to do something visually don't waste your money!

Several hours went by before I began to feel the pangs of hunger and around 2:30 I decided to have lunch. I fixed a peanut butter and cherry jelly sandwich, a glass of tea and a small bowl of salt and pepper chips (about 8).

See?





Hit the spot!!

Dinner is a big question mark tonight because I think we're going to a rugby game so I'm not sure if we'll go out to eat or come home. I will still try and update it tonight before I go to bed.

Dinner: If you can call it that....

Well, we went to the rugby game and it was 8:30 when we left so dinner was drive-thru city. The kids wanted Wendy's and let me tell you, it was hard to resist getting the Spicy Chicken Sandwich. That one is my all-time favorite! But, I was strong and only ordered a plain baked potato. When we got home, I threw away the "Buttery-Best Spread" and the chemcially enhanced sour cream they they included and instead used my own organic butter and sour cream. Not exciting but it'll do in a pinch.



I only had the baked potato so I ate the whole thing. Like I said, not an interesting dinner but it was late. It worked out all right!

My Taste Buds Are A Changin'

Interestingly, when I embarked on this whole food journey, one thing I did not think to anticipate was the changing of my taste buds. Well, maybe I expected it to happen just not this quickly. Last night as we were eating the "natural" rice that had come in a package with a seasoning packet I was struck by how incredibly salty it was. Nothing was added by me, I only followed the instructions on the box and man! It was very, very salty to me. In addition to that, I made sweet tea last night and I've never considered my tea to be uber-sweet. But last night it was bordering on syrupy sweet and at first I was confused about that. I actually went and pulled out the measuring cup I had used to pour in the sugar because it seemed that I may have accidentally used a 1cup measure instead of 1/2. Nope. I had used a 1/2 cup of sugar for 2 quarts of tea and it tasted too sweet.

Today I'm going to experiment and use 1/4 cup of sugar and see what the taste difference is there. I think my palette is just so clean of gunk that I'm actually able to really taste my food now. It's kind of like how smokers palettes get dull over time and how all that changes once they quit.

Sorry if you're sitting there thinking, "Big Deal. So what?" but it was really striking to me the difference in the taste of food! It will be interesting to see what else tastes different.

Today's Eats - Won't You Take Me to Twinkietown?

If you read over at my other blog then you already know about my homemade twinkie calamity. I'll try and give a brief summary. Since we've decided not to eat any processed or chemical laden foods, we've had to put the kibosh on snacky foods like twinkies. A couple of days ago, my youngest was positively begging for some in the grocery store and was difficult to console when I told him no. He calmed down when I said we could make our own twinkies....little did he know that the first batch would be a disaster. Thankfully though, he was able to find another use for them and if you follow the link above, you will see what I'm talkin' about. Well this morning I decided to give it another go and, using a different recipe, made a beautiful yellow cake and filled it with cream. Not exactly like twinkies but much better for you and pretty damn good, if I may say so myself.



After doing that all morning, I still had to get ready for my lunch with Krista. Thankfully, I had planned something simple so once I had the kitchen cleaned up it was ready for me to destroy it all over again. I sauteed some chicken breasts in olive oil having seasoned them beforehand with garlic salt and black pepper. Along with it I fixed my trusty mashed potatoes and haricot verts. I meant to make tea but just didn't have time to do it and wouldn't you know it's the one thing Krista requested?! Anyway, here is my plate from lunch today:



You might look at that plate and say, "Wow, that is A LOT of food!" But it's not. It's half of a chicken breast, 1/2 cup of mashed potatoes, and about 15 green beans and that was plenty of food. The plate I used makes it look like a lot of food. It's an antique dinner plate and it's 7" in diameter. Okay, wait. I'm lying to you because I don't know for sure. Hang on and I'll go measure it.

Good thing I went and checked because I don't want to mislead anybody. It's actually 8" in diameter. Just for kicks I measured one of my current dinner plates and it's 11". That's a huge difference and it really illustrates the point that it's easy to overload yourself when you use a plate that big.

Krista and I really took our time getting through lunch today and probably took an hour to eat. It was a nice, slow lunch filled with good conversation. She and I only see each other about once a month so we always have a lot to catch up on when we get together. I really enjoy her friendship!

Not sure what dinner's going to be tonight but I have a whole breast leftover from lunch so I'll probably fix that with some rice and a veggie. You know what I'm going to say...come back and check for the dinner update!!

DINNER

Leftover chicken from lunch, Long grain and wild rice, and yellow squash and zucchini. I forgot to take a picture before I started and by the time I remembered my plate looked like this:



The rice was a prepackaged "natural" product. The squash was cooked in olive oil, butter, chopped onion, sage, thyme, and Jane's Krazy Mixed Up Salt. Tasty! I also had one of the heart biscuits that was leftover from the chicken stew from a few nights ago along with a glass of iced tea.

It feels like another good eating day!

Weight Down A Little More!

Got up this morning and weighed 189. Yeah baby!! It has been a good while since that number popped up on the scale. I'm feeling really good about losing weight and getting healthy following Will Clower's method. I've been feeling better, sharper mentally, and just plain good! Now with starting yoga as well I expect to feel even more energetic as things progress.

Thanks for staying with me, friends!