Curry II

Food:
Lunch: Leftover vegetarian curry. Hmm, hmm, good.
Afternoon snacks: Dried apricots and a large apple

Fitness:
55 minutes at the gym (stretching/abs/core/legs/some arms)

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Veggie tacos

Food:
Lunch: Two veggie tacos (unhealthy tortillas, fresh spinach, homemade salsa, grilled onions and peppers, brown rice)

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Where’d the food go?

My appetite is out of control this morning. I’m insatiable! I finished all my snacks and lunch before noon.

Food:
Mid-morning: 1 cup of Kashi GO LEAN Crunch! Honey Almond Flax cereal; 6 dried Cali figs
Lunch: Salad greens topped with leftover roasted veggies.

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Fresh

Mood:
Refreshed. Great night’s sleep! I fell asleep on the couch (again) after dinner…..crawled into a real bed around 10:00, woke up this morning at 9:00. Ahhhh!

Speaking of dinner….last night was amazing comfort food. More below…

Food:
Breakfast: A banana, and later a glass of fresh juice (3 oranges, 1 apple, some carrot, and a slice of ginger).

Recap of Yesterday:
Fitness:
Gym – 45 minutes of abs and strength training (focus on legs) and 30 minutes jogging on the treadmill

Food:
Snacks: Apple, banana
Dinner: Milanesa (a thin cut of breaded red meat), mashed potatoes, sauteed carrots & zucchini—-by Lucas. The milanesa and m’taters are the ultimate in comfort food!

Things to do today
-run 6.2 miles at Town Lake
-get truck we are borrowing for the alleged* move
-do a major apartment cleaning/purge before we move (*assuming we are moving! still not definite!)
-creative writing assignments

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Longest week ever? Quite possibly.

Hey, Thursday! You sure took your time getting here.

It has been a loooong week.

Ughh. I’m stressed. We still haven’t straightened things with the landlady of the duplex, so we haven’t signed a lease, so we don’t know if we are moving next weekend or not. I wanted to get a headstart on packing, but it doesn’t seem like a good idea in case things fall through.

But since we are hopeful that everything will work out with the duplex (and have been hopeful), we put our place up for rent on Craigslist. But no one has emailed (except for 1 guy that flaked. It’s been almost 2 weeks! 😦

Food:
Mid-morning snack: 2 dried cali figs and 4 dried medjool dates
Lunch: Leftover veggie souffle and brown rice

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Bake it

I like to bake. I’m not the best at it, so one of my 2010 resolutions was to bake more often (and get in better shape. How’s that for irony?)……  So, last night I joined an online baking group:

Sweet Melissa Patisserie is a bakery in Brooklyn.  Food & Wine hails it as “one of the best pastry shops in all of New York.”  The bakery’s owner/namesake, Melissa Murphy, has a book called The Sweet Melissa Baking Book. It’s from this book that SMS (Sweet Melissa Sundays) chooses a recipe, bakes it, and blogs about it.

Basically, I have to bake at least two of the recipes per month, and post my baking experiencing on the corresponding Sunday.  Get it? Sweet Melissa Sundays. If you’d like to join SMS, find details here. The one requirement is that you own the book.

Food:
Lunch: Leftover veggie quiche.
Dessert: A chocolate chip cookie from the batch I made this morning. I had to try at least one. I used the famous Neiman Marcus cookie recipe. I’m sure you heard the rumor about how a woman was charged $200 for the recipe? Well, it’s just a rumor. The recipe is available for  FREE online. 🙂

Did you notice the Green Heart violation in the above picture?

There’s a plastic fork. Eek! I took my real fork home last week for some reason, and I still haven’t remembered to bring it back. I’ve been re-using the one above, but still. Shame, shame.

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The Evening Post

Yawn. That 5:30 wake-up call is catching up to me.

Food:
Dinner: Lucas made a delicious vegetable quiche. Really, the man is amazing. He made the whole wheat dough from scratch! Am I lucky, or am I lucky?

The quiche had leeks, green onions, eggs, and corn (frozen).

I had 1/4 of the entire quiche. And I wolfed it down because I was anxious about something. When I’m anxious, I inhale my food. Not a good habit! But, it brought me one step closer to…

Dessert: I just finished off the milk chocolate bar from last night. I’ve been a dark chocolate girl for many years, but this milk chocolate is growing on me fast.

I’m on an ongoing quest for good chocolate—do you have any recommendations?

Fitness:
Combined my commute with my work-out today! I ran 4.5 miles home from work. A dog tried to bite me, but luckily he only managed to slobber on my shorts. Whew.

Green heart:
I took the last of the bottled waters out of the cabinet as I was setting up for a meeting at work. The bottles had been sitting in a cardboard box, which was wrapped in a big piece of plastic. I chunked the box into the recycling bin, and was about to trash the plastic, because I didn’t think it would be recyclable. But then I decided to check just in case, and it was! So I saved the plastic to take home to recycle, since I’m pretty sure they only recycle plastic bottles at work.

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An Alternative to Chinese Take-Out

Looking back over my weekend posts, I saw I had a lot of pleasure food (donuts, waffles, cheese, potatoes) and not much else. So tonight I whipped up some Happy Rice and stir-fried veggies. (If you ever get a craving for Chinese but want to avoid the grease, this is a great alternative).  It’s still tasty, but better for me.

Happy Rice:
1) Slice 5 cloves of garlic. (Slice across the width, not the length, so pieces should be round).
2) Heat 1/4 to 1/2 of olive oil in a medium sauce pan on medium heat for several minutes.
3) Add garlic slices. Shake the pot back and forth so the garlic doesn’t stick.
4) Let sit for 40 seconds or so. Once the garlic becomes the slightest bit brown, add 1 and 1/2 cups of basmati rice.
5) Stir well, then let sit for about 1/2 minute. Repeat this until the rice becomes loses its transparent color and becomes white.
6) Add salt and pepper.
7) Once rice has whitened, add 2 and 1/4 cups of boiling water. (Pour slowly and stand back…the oil might splash a bit).
8) Cover and reduce heat to low. Heat for about 15 minutes, then check on the rice. Once all of the water has been absorbed, it’s ready!

Stir-Fry Veggies
1) Chop vegetables of your choice.
2) In a wok or in a frying pan, add a few tbs of olive oil. Heat on medium for a few minutes.
3) Add veggies. Stir ocassionally.
4) Add salt and pepper once the veggies have achieved the texture you want (either crispy or tender).
5) Remove from heat. Ready to serve.

Fitness:
Day off.

Green heart:
Rather than tossing an empty wine bottle into the recycling bin, I’m saving it to convert it into an olive oil dispenser. We have already have one made from an old wine bottle. You can buy the dispenser piece at any place that sells kitchen ware (i.e. Crate & Barrel) for just a few bucks.

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Short and sweet

Food:
Lunch: Homemade soup with butternut squash, carrots, spinach, celery, green onions, leeks, and onions
Post-lunch: 4 dried figs

Homemade soup is SOUPER easy to make. You don’t need to buy broth. All you need is veggies (or whatever you want in the soup), water, and a big pot.
1) Chop your veggies.
2) Throw the veggies in a big pot.
3) Add water until it covers veggies halfway.
4) Heat on high until water boils.
5) Season as desired.
6) Simmer on medium to low heat.
7) When veggies are tender, soup is ready! Let it cool a bit first unless you want to burn off your tastebuds.

I’m off to the gym…

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Happy Meal

Do I need to say it? What a perfect day. I spent hours reading in bed. For the record, can I just say how freaking amazing Barbara Kingsolver is? Oh my wow. Animal Vegetable Miracle is a must-read. In the very least it will open your eyes to the backwards ways in which we are consuming and eating food. Even better, it could inspire you to buy and eat local foods. At best, it will turn you into an Amish farmer! Seriously, this is a good, good book, whether or not you care about food and where it comes from. (‘Cause after, you will!)

Back to my perfect day…I ended it with a delicious, fairly healthy meal and a glass of vino by the fire.

Food:
Snack: 3 chocolates from a box of Whitman’s Assorted Chocolates. HFCS? Probably. But the chocoholic in me is known to make exceptions….often…

Dinner: Happy Rice and Spring Rolls, Malbec wine.

I will have to post on Happy Rice one day. It is THE best sidekick to any meal. In a nutshell: sautee slices of garlic in olive oil, add bastmati rice, heat until rice turns white, add boiling water, cover and simmer for about 15 minutes or until water has been absorbed.

It was my first time to make spring rolls, it was a bit tricky at first, as the rice paper in which you wrap the vegetables is very thin and tears easily. But I got the hang of it (more or less), and we each ate about 6 or 7 rolls, each filled with cabbage, carrots, bean sprouts, and green onions. Totally healthy, if you don’t count the fact that they were ever so slightly fried in olive oil…Lucas made a superb dipping sauce, inspired by a Shallot Ginger Sauce recipe from Z Tejas. He scaled the portion size way back and used fewer ingredients; it’s tangy and added much flavor to the rolls.

For the filling: 2 carrots sliced into fine strips; 1/4 of a small green cabbage, shredded; a handful of chopped green onion; 1/2 package of bean sprouts

Before:

Fry, baby, fry!

Dinner is served…

…with a side of Happy Rice!

We enjoyed half a bottle of Malbec by the fire. (The other half of the bottle is being preserved by my new Wine Houdini, a gift from Liz and Jill!)

(Sorry the photos are so dark…I’m working on that.)

Fitness:
60 minutes of toning exercises. Focus on abs, core, and arms.

Green heart:
I cut down on carbon dioxide emissions by skipping the drive to the gym and working out at home instead. Laziness does have its advantages!

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