Southern Evening

I was in desperate need of some comfort food. It's been a rough week, people. Somehow though I'm still here and tonight was all about eating some good southern cookin'. I'm almost embarrassed to admit this, being a southerner and all, but until tonight I have never eaten collard greens, turnip greens, mustard greens. Nope. Not once. Seriously! I am a big fan now of cabbage and brussel sprouts so it seemed like the right time to try them.

In order to keep them true to their southern heritage, I followed a recipe that has you prepare them with ham hocks. Ok, y'all. I had never even seen a ham hock and I have to tell you - it freaked me out! This is what I saw when I opened the package:

YES! That is p-i-g hair on that thing. Hell, I didn't know what to do so I threw it in the pot anyway. I was freaked but not deterred. The ham hock had to simmer in 3 quarts of water for an hour, along with some salt and pepper. Once that time had passed, I added these:


I washed them really well because someone told me they are covered in grit, then I removed the thick stalk that runs down the center of each leaf. After that I chopped the leaves and then added them to the hairy ham hock water. Mmmmmm. Doesn't that sound good? Here is what the greens looked like after cooking for one hour:

A lot like spinach really. They were ok but I think they were a touch too salty. My fault because I forgot I was using a scaled down version of a recipe.

In addition to the greens, I also made biscuits today and let me tell you...they were unfreakingbelievably delicious. Best I have ever made in fact.



Let me tell you something. If you're going to make biscuits, do yourself a favor and get White Lily Self Rising Flour. It is by far the best flour to use for making biscuits and you will not regret buying it. Even if you have to order it online because you can't get it in your area, do it. They are amazing! I snuggled them close to one another in the pan which helped them rise a little. God, I can't wait for breakfast so I can have one with some butter and cherry preserves!

Okay, I'm calm now. I didn't take a picture of dinner because, frankly it was very unattractive. I sauteed some chicken, cooked a Paula Deen version of Mac and Cheese, and ate some of the collards. Not exactly what I was going for but it was ok. We'll have leftover mac and cheese tomorrow along with a turkey meatloaf I'm going to make.

Have you ever fixed greens? If so, how did you do it? Did you use a hairy ham hock, too? LOL I have to know!!!

Mini goals

I have been doing a lot of thinking and soul-searching lately. After finding myself at the center of a family drama (which I had a hand in) I turned away completely from my dietary/lifestyle objectives. All I wanted to do was wallow in self-pity. Well, enough is enough. I'm done feeling bad because that doesn't serve any purpose at all. It's time to get a grip and start making some positive changes, even if they're only small ones for now. Here are my goals for the immediate future:

1. This week, I am going to cook every meal my family eats. There won't be any fast food eaten by anyone in this house, except for Sean because he works outside of the home and I can't control that.
   
2. I'm going to prepare homemade snacks for my family as well. At the grocery store today I didn't buy any chips or yucky snacky things and am planning to fix some goodies instead.
3. This week, I'm going to start moving either by doing a workout video or going for a walk with the boys or both. My goal is to move my body in a directed fashion at least once a day.
4. Each month I would like to lose 5 lbs. I think that is a reasonable goal to set.
5. I am going to try at least one new recipe a week. Have already started that tonight by cooking collard greens.
6. I am going to be gentle with myself. If I fall down in my task of mindful eating, I will not beat myself up over it. I will just do better the next go round.

Right now, the greens are simmering on the stove, I cooked some fabulous biscuits earlier, and I'm getting ready to make some baked macaroni and cheese. I was craving a southern meal and tonight we're having Fried Chicken Breasts, Mac and Cheese, and Collards. The biscuits are for breakfast tomorrow. Of course, all of these things will have to be eaten in small portions because if I fill my plate with them, I will overeat and continue to be overweight. Tonight I begin practicing eating the right portion size.

I have already taken some pictures of the cooking I've done this afternoon and am coming back tonight to record it here.

Battling My Commitment

I have to be honest with you. The past two days haven't been fantastic. For some reason, I'm really fighting a battle within myself to get committed to eating right. On an academic level, I know that eating whole, unprocessed food is what's best for me and my family. But there is something holding me back from taking all the necessary steps to be successful at eating well. This morning I started out well with one egg and a cup of tea.



I ate it slowly and really enjoyed some quiet moments with my tea and a new book. It was truly delightful. A little while later, I walked into the kitchen and spied some cookies I'd made for the kids in the cookie jar. well, I felt like I HAD to have one. Errrr, two.



Hey! They were organic at least.

Then, at my sister's house later, I had a bit of the shepherd's pie she had made for dinner last night, which was delicious incidentally. After eating that, I felt certain that I would have no need for lunch. A little while later at home, I went into the kitchen and had some left over corned beef and cabbage.



Hmmmm. Just not doing so well. Nevermind this is the THIRD meal I've had from this! Yesterday morning I made my own corned beef hash.



Last night for dinner I had two slices of White Pizza from a local pizza joint.

I think part of the problem is I'm feeling a little down. My husband has taken on the challenge of getting his MBA. We already don't get to see him very much because he works long hours. Now when he's home, he's very, very busy and it's going to be like that for at least the next two years. I want him to get his MBA and I support him wholeheartedly. It's something he's wanted to do for a really long time. It's just a tough adjustment and we're still trying to hit our stride with it. In the meantime, I'm just finishing up my 6th week of recovery after my hysterectomy, and have a lot of work ahead of me once I'm cleared by the doctor to do it. It doesn't take much walking around my house to make me feel overwhelmed by the scale of the task at hand. Every single room is a mess! Sometimes I feel like putting our most precious things in the car, walking out the front door and never looking back! It's that bad. I know that by doing a little bit at a time it will get done but as I've seen with my weight loss attempts, knowing and doing are two different things.

Sorry that this post is such a downer but I'm just trying to keep it real and honest. Eating right is not hard but making up your mind and totally committing to it seems to be very difficult for me right now. I'm not giving up though. Just venting my frustration about my current lack of willpower.

I WILL be back tomorrow. This blog is a blessing! I don't know what I'd do without a place to vent.

Weekend Eats

Well, it was a weekend filled with Corned Beef and Cabbage, my friends. My husband's family is Irish Catholic and we went to my MIL's house for her annual St. Patty's Day festivities. I really look forward to this because it's the one time of year I get to eat delicious corned beef. Every year, I make my own too, so we have leftovers, but it's just never as good as hers. In order to contribute something to the festivities, I made the adorable Green Beer Cookies that Bridget at Bake At 350 posted about last week. They weren't as professional looking as hers but she gave great directions on her blog and I thought they turned out really well for a newbie.



They were complimented a lot at the party, which is always nice!

Yesterday, I made my own corned beef and cabbage. One of these years, I will get it right!


I used these itty bitty potatoes and they looked so cute!


My sister and I have decided to pool our resources and go in together on a bunch of vegetable plants. We'll divvy them up between us and reap the benefits of fresh food. Also, I think I'm going to join a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). You pay a weekly fee to a local farm and every week they give you your share of freshly harvested produce. I'm excited about that!

I think as far as weekend eats go, I'm not going to post. It's hard to keep up two blogs, period, but the weekends are extra crazy. I will try and give a summary on Mondays though.

Come back tomorrow to see how today's eats go!

Happy St. Patty's Day everybody!!!

Yesterday's eats - Yikes!

Ok, I'm just going to be honest with you. Yesterday was a terrible eats day for me. I waited way too long to eat breakfast and as a result I was starving. We ran to the grocery store and when we got home I shoved a bologna sandwich down my gullet. Hey, it was good but not the right thing to eat. For lunch, I had....wait for it......another bologna sandwich! We had some friends over at lunchtime and, instead of eating in front of them , I waited until they left around four and I was again ravenous. It's so important to eat when you're hungry!

Then at a dinner I was just feeling plain old lazy and I took the boys to Chick-fil-a. I ate a sandwich, cole slaw, and drank an unsweetened tea. It could have been worse I guess!

Today is better and I'll report on that tomorrow!

I'm not going to freak out about my wandering off the path. I'm just going to keep going!

Yesterday's Eats

All in all, yesterday was a good eats day. Today hasn't started off well but I'm going to take hold of that now and eat well the rest of the day.

Yesterday I had my usual breakfast:



But I added grits and a clementine. One of my friends, MamaPodkayne, had wondered about my earlier complaint about clementines not being as flavorful as oranges. She will be happy to know that the one in this photo was full of juicy sweetness and worth every single bite. It was delicious!

A note about eggs. I try to get organic eggs. Lately I've had some bad luck with a brand sold here called "Be Family". The quality has not been consistent and many times I have cracked one only to be overwhelmed by the smell of fish. As a result, I've stopped buying that brand and now buy my grocery store's Cage Free eggs. For years, I have HATED to eat the yolk and would only eat the white when I fried an egg but the Cage Free and organic egg yolks taste amazing. There's no bite to them as in a mass-produced egg. Also, check this out:


Look how high that yolk sits. A regular egg yolk is much flatter. These are a gorgeous color, too!

Ok, back to what I ate yesterday. For lunch I hit the rotisserie chicken again for what I think is the last meal I'm going to get out of it. After tearing some romaine leaves, I topped them with some chicken, grapes, green olives, and a few chopped pecan pieces. Add to that some bacon bits and a touch of ranch dressing and you have the salad I ate for lunch. With it I had some of those tiny toasts you can buy at the store spread with some herbed goat cheese. My god, that was so good. The cheese was mild and so incredibly creamy. It was a very sensory lunch!


Now, that lunch lasted for a while but by late afternoon I needed a little something so I fixed this:


Hot tea and a Le Petit Ecolier cookie. I think that means "schoolboy" in French. THey're really good. Crisp cookie, not too sweet, topped with milk, dark, or white chocolate. Yum!

By Dinnertime, I was tired and decided to heat up one of the frozen meals my mom had prepared for me, Beef Stroganoff.


I had to cook the noodles but the oven did all the work on the rest!

I splurged a bit and induglged a desire for something buttery and had a cherry turnover with a tiny bit of vanilla ice cream.

Truth be told, I shouldn't have eaten all of it. Half would have been more than enough. Next time, I'll split one with my hubby, but this is all about learning how to eat in proper portions. Now I know better for next time!

Today's going to be kind of crazy because we're having a play date during my normal lunchtime so I may have to eat something earlier than normal but check back tomorrow to see!

Yesterday's Eats

For those of you who are new, let me give a brief refresher on what I'm doing. I read a book called, The Fat Fallacy by Will Clower and it completely changed the way I look at the food I eat. GET THIS BOOK or get the updated version. You won't be sorry. It's all about looking at the French model of eating. Good quality ingredients, rich meals, in small portions. We eat too much and we eat poor quality food and it's really taking a toll on our health. So much of our food is filled with chemicals and we need to take control of what we eat and give our bodies as organic and as wholesome food as we possibly can. This is not easy by any means. With the economy in its current state, food prices have soared which makes organic food that much more expensive. Also, it can be difficult to find time to prepare things from scratch when one leads a busy life. But I say this to you, isn't it worth it to make the time in order to live a better quality life? Isn't it worth the extra expense to buy organic when you can? Start small and pick a few things to buy organic. Work your way into it gradually. Another book I'd like to recommend is To Buy or Not To Buy Organic by Cindy Burke. She has done a lot of research and has comprised a helpful list of the things that are important to buy in their organic form. It's a wonderful guide to organic shopping and I highly recommend you purchase it!

Okay!! Now that I've gotten that out of the way, on to what I ate yesterday! It was a much better day for me eatswise. Breakfast was very simple, a French roll and an egg, served alongside a glass of whole milk. Mmmmmm. Whole milk is the only way to go!



After breakfast, my sister and I dropped our kids off with our mom and went hunting for a cookie cutter in the shape of a beer mug. Bridget at Bake at 350 made some freaking adorable cookies for St. Patty's Day and I thought it would be fun to make them to take to my mother-in-law's party on Saturday. Well, Greensboro, NC is not a hotbed of baking fanatics apparently because I couldn't find one. We had rhinos but no beer mugs. Go figure. After all that walking I was tired and just wanted to fix an easy lunch. There was still some rotisserie chicken in the fridge so I cut off some breast meat and put it between two slices of whole wheat bread and mayonnaise. Easy Peasy.



Later in the afternoon, I did snack on some baked pita chips and roasted red pepper hummus. Yum!

Dinner was delicious. I was finally feeling really good yesterday and I was able to get in the kitchen and cook an entire meal. We had some pork chops that had to be cooked or frozen yesterday and it had been so long since we'd had pork that I decided to cook them. They were loin chops, thick cut, on the bone. I seasoned them with a touch of Lawry's seasoned salt and some fresh ground pepper on both sides and then placed them in a skillet with about 1 Tbs of olive oil. While these were cooking, I boiled some yukon gold potatoes that I had earlier chopped and placed in a boiler with some salted water. When the pork chops were done, I placed them on a plate and covered them with a tent of aluminum foil to keep them warm while I prepared a sauce to go with them. First, I poured about a 1/2 cup of chicken broth into the pan to deglaze it. White wine would be another good choice for that but I didn't have any. Once all the brown bits had been released from the bottom of the pan, I added a tsp of butter, some salt and pepper, a 1/4 cup of cream, and 1 or 2 Tbs of capers. I let this come together over Low heat while I mashed the potatoes. With the pork and potatoes I also served some romaine lettuce topped with a vinaigrette. It was DEEE-lish!



One thing I'm going to have to concentrate on is small portion sizes and eating slowly. I got out of the habit while I was recovering and now it's a challenge. But! I did it once and I know I can again.

Thanks for reading!