Wed Aug 30

I had a shaker-smoothie for breakfast. "Shaker-smoothie" because when I travel I make it in a shaker cup and it only includes the dry ingredients I usually use, not any of the wet stuff like hydrated chia & flax seeds, or Greek yogurt, etc. Because of this, I picked up some probiotic supplement pills at the drug store yesterday. Using the pills is not the same as eating probiotic-filled foods, but it's better than nothing. 

For lunch, Mom & I stopped at an Asian Fusion restaurant. I had sesame chicken with broccoli and a cup of egg drop soup.

The sauce on the chicken was really sweet and I didn't finish it. 😕

For dinner, we went to the special staff party at Valley Vineyards. I had grilled steak, asparagus, and an ear of corn (which I also put on the grill for just a little bit). 

The winery is also a brewery, so I had a couple glasses of beer too!

Tues Aug 29

Breakfast at Deeny's with Sonos. I had 3 scrambled eggs with cheese and 4 slices of bacon. 

Napped a bit before we had to go to the theatre, then after the sound check, I snacked on the mixed nuts I brought from home. 

After the performance, and after finding my mom (who came to pick me up), we all went out to dinner at "The Happy Greek", where I had "Chicken Athena", breaded chicken breast covered with a tomato-wine sauce and feta cheese, with sides of broccoli, carrots. & green beans. I had a glass of wine with dinner. 

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Mon, Aug 28

No weight pic this morning because I totally forgot. 😕👎

Flying to Ohio today. ✈️ I picked up some string cheese and a bag of "protein power mix" mixed roasted soybeans, cashews, dried cranberries, etc. and I packed some mixed nuts from home to eat on the flight. 

Once I got to Columbus and all of Sonos checked into our hotel, we walked across the street to Applebee's for dinner. I had a grilled chicken breast with fried mozzarella sticks on top, plus sides of steamed broccoli and green beans with garlic and bacon. I had a beer with dinner. 

Sun, Aug 27

For breakfast, I stopped by McDonald's and had 2 Egg McMuffins with no muffins, plus a Diet Coke.

Then I played flute & bells at DL's church. Always love playing there. :-)

I had no lunch, but stopped at CostCo on the way home to pick up some stuff for Brianne's lunch sandwiches, and got a rotisserie chicken for dinner. Yum!

So now I need to pack -- I'm flying to Columbus tomorrow. Sonos is doing a showcase for Arts Midwest on Tuesday, and since my mom lives near there, I am staying with her for a few days after the showcase.

Which means I need to pack snacks for the long plane flight, as well as my dry stuff for my morning smoothies. And also means that it will be a bit challenging to eat the way I'm used to. I won't be able to take weight pics each morning, either.

Sigh.

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Sat Aug 26

No morning weight pic because I spent the night at Barbara's house and I didn't use her scale. 

For breakfast, Barbara made scrambled eggs and I had 2 small sausage links. I had iced green tea to drink. 

After bfast, I drove down to Escondido to conduct a "Back to Bells" workshop, after which DL took me out to lunch. I had a grilled chicken Cobb salad with avocado, bacon, egg, tomato, and blue cheese, with ranch dressing. The restaurant had a fountain soda machine with "Natural sodas" (I don't remember the brand name). I had half a glass of "Cherry Berry Açai" soda, topped off with plain water because it was sooooooo sweet! When I refilled, I got just a splash of the flavored soda and filled my glass the rest of the way with water. 

We went back to DL's condo and napped, then watched "The Queen" on Netflix (good movie, btw!).

After the movie, it was time for dinner. DL made small salads for each of us with romaine and tomatoes, and had made a crock pot full of spaghetti sauce with meatballs. He had it over noodles, but I just had a bowl of it with shredded jack and Parmesan cheese. Yum!

Now watching a Canadian series called "The Murdoch Mysteries", set in Toronto, which features Victorian forensics. I love forensics anyway and historical fiction is always fun! 👍❤️

Fri Aug 25

Breakfast: smoothie. 

After getting everything out to make my smoothie, I opened the fermentation jar of figs to taste it. I think I might have left it for just a couple hours too long because there's *just a hint* of an alcohol taste to it. No matter, though, as it's still mostly (90% or more?) just lacto-ferment and not yeast alcohol ferment, so still fine for my purposes! Next time I'll put it in the fridge the night before. Live and learn. 🤷‍♀️

I used 1 Tbsp of the figs and then added enough of the fermented strawberries to make 1/4 cup. (Instead of the usual 1/4 c fermented strawberries only.) It was really good! 👍

After breakfast, I transferred the figs from their fermentation jar to a storage jar. I like to save my actual canning jars for fermenting and canning since my fermentation lids and canning lids fit them, and use my other miscellaneous jars for storage. That's not always possible, of course, and there are several canning jars in my fridge right now! 😑

Here's what it looks like today in its new jar:

I put some water into the fermentation jar, swished it around to clean the sides, and drank it up - no sense wasting the probiotics or bits of fig stuck to the sides! 👍😄

Speaking of canning jars and fermentation jars. I have found that a 4 oz regular mouth jar will fit inside a wide mouth jar, which makes it a great weight to keep the fermenting stuff submerged in the liquid! And a baby food jar does the same in a regular mouth jar! Then I use a ReCap lid with a drilled #6 stopper and a water airlock on top. The ReCap is slightly domed, so there's room for the little jar to stick up a bit over the rim of the fermentation vessel. You can see this on my jar of mustard seeds:

You can't really see the small jar from the outside with the lid on:

This pic shows a baby food jar used as a weight in a little 4 oz regular mouth jar I used to soften and begin the ferment of some juniper berries:

I wanted to soften the berries so I could easily remove the hard seed before adding them to the jar of mustard seeds for further fermentation. Of course, this time I didn't use a lid, as you can see! Once they were soft enough to easily break open, I removed the seed and dumped the berries and their brine into the jar with the mustard seeds, along with some jalapeños. That's gonna be a spicy mustard!

I also cycled my water kefir this morning:

BTW, in addition to using finished water kefir in my smoothies, I use it as a culture starter for my ferments - just 1 Tbsp per quart - and it seems to really help!

I stopped at Burger King for lunch: chicken nuggets and a Diet Coke. 

Dinner at my friend Barbara's house. I had baked chicken seasoned with bouquet garni, half an ear of corn with butter, salt, & cotija cheese, some fresh sliced tomatoes, and some sausage-and-cheese stuffed zucchini. Then we went to a baseball game with fireworks! I had 2 beers. When we got back home, we all did a 40 second plank, then had birthday brownie sundaes. 

Happy birthday to me!

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Morning weight, Fri, Aug 25

Happy birthday to me! 🎂

Thurs, Aug 24

Breakfast was a smoothie. 

In my "catching up" posts I said I had started adding hemp protein to the smoothie. When I finished the bag of it I got from Marshall's, I got a proper container of it via Amazon. Here's the brand and nutrition info:

Lots of protein, fiber, and amino acids! I only use 1 tsp, rather than the 4 Tbsp serving size indicated. 

I also have started using fermented strawberries - 1/4 cup each day. Not fermented to the point of being alcoholic, but just enough to break down most of the sugars and leave the fiber and other nutrients intact, plus of course add all sorts of good probiotics. Here's a link to a page from Cultures For Health talking about fermenting fruit:

https://www.culturesforhealth.com/learn/natural-fermentation/introduction-culturing-fermenting-fruit/

I use finished water kefir as the starter and have been adding a spoonful of honey, as per a recipe I found here:

http://nourishedkitchen.com/fermented-mixed-berries/

But I think I'm going to leave the honey out of the next batch just to see what happens. 🤷‍♀️

Anyway, here's a pic of my finished strawberries. They are tart and delicious in my smoothie! I bet they'd be awesome mixed into yogurt or served over ice cream! 

I also mentioned that I was fermenting some figs. Brianne got a small bag of small figs from a customer on her training mail route, so I cut them up and puréed them along with an apple I had. They were bubbling happily away today!

I will leave them to bubble overnight, then put them in the fridge tomorrow. I might use them in tomorrow's smoothie!

I had a light lunch today, just some cheese and mixed nuts, and I didn't feel like eating dinner. It's not good that I didn't eat dinner because now my tummy is growling while I'm getting ready to go to bed. 😕

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Morning weight, Aug 24

Aug 1 - Aug 23, 2017

 My weight pics for Aug 1 - Aug 23. Again, I don't have them from every day, but here's what I've got:

I made some ferments & sprouts.

black mustard seeds on the right, juniper berries on the left (to add to the finished mustard)

beans soaking for sprouts

2 jars of jicama, fermented strawberries, and a jar of figs + an apple

fresh home-grown figs with one apple

leafy green sprouts, carrots + daikon, another attempt at garlic-dill cucumber pickles (turned out yummy!), and water kefir

water kefir and strawberries

water kefir, strawberries, and beans soaking

 I made dinner:

turkey medallions, carrots, dilly green beans, peas, zucchini, in chicken broth

crock pot pork roast (shredded), with carrots, sprouted beans (soy, peas, black-eye peas), konbudashi-pickled mushrooms, plus some bouquet garni herbs

beef with carrots, sprouted beans, and sesame seeds

Our house is not very big, so storage is at a premium. I was getting frustrated with all my jars just sitting out on the counter, so Brianne got me a set of shelves to store them on.

I bought some of that new-fangled charcoal tooth powder and it does seem to make a difference!

I replaced our Canada flag - the old one was faded and torn up by the wind.

We took in our recycling. One of the items we brought in was a 10-foot long section of copper tubing for one of our swamp coolers. It had split over the winter (guess we didn't get it drained in time). Copper is valuable and it brought in almost $5.00, which helps offset the cost of the new one we had to buy. :-/ 

I watched the eclipse from inside the camera obscura that Brianne made for me.

I picked some juniper berries from the backyard bush.

One of the things I love about the desert is the wildlife.

This is the lizard that lives on our front porch. 

4-foot long gopher snake in our backyard. The first one we've seen in the yard since we moved up here 2.5 years ago!

A close-up of the snake.

a hawk in our front yard tree, scaring the bunnies away

BUT, we've had entirely TOO MUCH wildlife in our house recently!!

found this huntsman in a box of pencils in the office

pencil-box huntsman 

found *this* huntsman in the bathtub!!

bathtub huntsman again

This Yellow Sac Spider fell into my aquarium and drowned. Was NOT expecting to see this! LOL

Roof rat (Rattus rattus) that was in our house for a few days. Used an electronic trap to electrocute it. Put it outside over the fence onto the undeveloped portion of our property. It was gone a few hours later. (I suspect the ravens ate it.)

a comparison of a roof rat (Rattus rattus) and a Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus).

Hopefully I'll start remembering to take morning weight pics and posting regularly again!

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