Dinner, etc., Feb 14

On Tuesday nights we have rehearsal in Pasadena, so we usually leave the house early enough to avoid the worst of the LA traffic & eat close to the rehearsal venue. Rehearsal was canceled tonight, though, so I had to figure out what to make for dinner at home. I didn't have any meat thawed because I wasn't planning to eat at home!  😳

Fortunately I had 2 pieces of frozen fish left in the package from CostCo:

 

So I put them in a baking pan and spooned some of the dill and oil mix I made last night over them. I had to spoon it because the oil hadn't frozen yet, even though it had been in the freezer overnight. It had thickened considerably but wasn't frozen. 

 I also put some fresh ground salt and pepper on them and then remembered that I had some Sale di Mari so I put some of that on them too. 

This is a mix of sea salt (85%), juniper, pink pepper, rosemary, cinnamon, & Bay leaves. The package says "This special mix works beautifully as the finishing touch to meats, chicken, sea food, and vegetables." I'm not a big fan of cinnamon myself, but used in moderation as it is in this mix, it added just a nice pop of taste. 

Don't eat it if you have a tree nut allergy, though, because pink pepper is not really pepper but is instead a member of the cashew family and can cause anaphylaxis in those allergic to cashews!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_peppercorn

 

After baking them until they were cooked through, I reheated the leftover veggies from Sunday night & dinner was served!

 

After dinner, I took my lentils and mung beans out of their sprouting trays and into a container for the fridge. Two 1/4 cups of dried beans yielded 8 oz of sprouted beans! 

 

The white and speckled beans were done this morning, so I put them into the fridge then. I'm pretty well stocked for the rest of the week as far as beans go!

I also watered my leafy greens. They're probably big enough that I could harvest them to the fridge, too, but I decided to let them grow for another night and harvest them in the morning. 

 

I finished all the prepared tea I had with dinner so I started another quart of tea and made a liter of fizzy water in our SodaStream machine. 

 

I like the SodaStream because it's so easy to make as much fizzy water as we want for much less money than buying bottles of it from the store. Not to mention far less waste! The places that sell the SodaStream machines also have an exchange program for the gas cylinders, so when we turn in our old empty cylinder, we get a discount on a new full one. Nice!

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Morning weight pic, Feb 14

 

Other stuff, Feb 13

Wow! Three posts in one day! What is the world coming to? But, I had a few food-related things to take care of this afternoon, so I decided to blog about them too. 

A couple of days ago, a good friend gave me a bunch of fresh basil and some fresh dill, so I asked my Facebook friends what to do with it. The overwhelming favorite for the basil was to make pesto, so that's what I did. 

Here's what I started with:

 

And I ended up with three 1/2 cup containers of pesto perfect for freezing:

 

I used this recipe from Food Network because I had all the stuff on hand: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/food-network-kitchen/basil-pesto-recipe2

The dill I just put in one of my smoothie cups with some oil and blended it up:

 

And as soon as my ice cube trays get out of the dishwasher, I will make dill ice cubes to use when cooking fish or whatever. 

I had a big #10 can of diced tomatoes from CostCo that was taking up counter space, so I opened it up and divided it into eleven 1 cup portions to freeze and use later:

 

I also rinsed & dried my sprouted garbanzo beans and put them into the fridge:

 

I rinsed the mixed white and speckled beans and set them to soak for another night. They should be ready to go into the fridge tomorrow morning. 

 

I rinsed the lentils and mung beans and put them into the sprouting trays. They'll probably be ready tomorrow evening or Wednesday morning at the latest. 

 

(The bottom layer is leafy green sprouts for use in salads and sandwiches this week.)

Not bad for an evening's work! 

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Lunch, Feb 13

Several times over the past couple of weeks I've had to pack my lunch when going somewhere (such as day-long rehearsals), so here's what I've done:

I take a low-carb tortilla and spread cream cheese on it. I then add sliced turkey and/or ham and top it off with green leafy sprouts. 

 

Fold it in half and it makes a great sandwich! You could add other flavors by adding mustard or a flavored mayo, or even flavored cream cheese. Of course, you can use whatever deli meat you want!

I've been using store-bought large low-carb tortillas which have about 6g net carbs. I buy them in a 20-pack (way cheaper!) and then divide them into 4 one-gallon ziplock bags (5 tortillas each) and freeze them. I do this because I never can seem to use up all 20 before they get stale or slimy. This seems to work for me!

Today, I found this recipe for an almost ZERO carb tortilla. I'm looking forward to trying it after I run out of the store-bought ones. 

http://www.lowcarbmaven.com/almost-zero-carb-wraps-tortillas-gluten-free-keto/

I'm also looking forward to perusing that website to see what other things I might learn. 

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Good morning, Feb 13

This morning I got dressed before I weighed myself and didn't feel like getting undressed to weigh myself again (and then REdressed after!), so this is me fully clothed:

 

Not bad considering I indulged a bit this weekend. I had a beer with dinner Saturday night and a couple glasses of dry red wine after dinner, so I expect to be "stalled" for a couple of days. No matter, ya gotta live. 

After my breakfast smoothie, I took care of my bean sprouts. What a difference! Here's the pic from last night:

 

And here's the pic from this morning:

 

They've really absorbed a lot of water! After taking this pic, I drained and rinsed the beans and am soaking them for another day. I think I might start soaking them in water kefir soon (at least for their first soak), as it looks like I'll have more than I can use just in my smoothies and for soaking chia & flax seeds. We'll see. 

My tea was also done steeping this morning:

 

So I put that into the fridge. Then I watered my green leafy sprouts (not pictured) and now we're off to class. Brianne & I are taking a Technical Theatre class (Light & Sound) at our local Community College and today's the first day of classes. Should be fun!

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Dinner tonight, etc.

I spent the night at a friend's house last night because I played Special Music at Westchester United Methodist Church this morning and since we were in Lake Elsinore all day yesterday, we didn't feel like getting up at even earlier o'dark-thirty than we already had to. All of that is to explain why I don't have a weigh-in pic today; I didn't have my scale with me! 

I also didn't have my Ninja blender with me, so I didn't have my breakfast smoothie, which makes me sad. (I love my smoothie!) Instead, we stopped at McDonald's and I had an Egg McMuffin with no muffin. So, basically just an egg covered with cheese and some bacon. Not awesome, but hey, I made do. 

After we got home - and after a nap! - I made dinner. I had a couple of chicken breasts thawed in the fridge, so I rinsed and dried them, then seasoned them with salt and pepper, and baked them at 450° for 20 minutes. 

Meanwhile, I sautéed some onions in a pan, added a crushed clove of garlic and once they were translucent, added some homemade chicken broth. I brought that to a boil and then added my sprouted white beans & speckled pinto beans. I covered the pan and let it cook for 5 minutes. While it was cooking, I used my Ninja food processor to slice up a small zucchini and a carrot. 

I have no commercial interest in Ninja, which is a shame because I love the blender/food processor/smoothie cup combo thingy we got last year at Costco! Every time I use it, I love it more! It's so well-designed, easy to use, easy to clean, sturdy, and super powerful. I am a happy Ninja customer! 👍

After slicing the veggies, I added my sprouted mung beans and lentils to the pan, covered it, and let it cook for a few minutes. 

When the timer for the chicken went off, I took it out of the oven and spooned about a teaspoon of my yummy Onion Jam onto each piece. No, my jam is not low-carb, which is why I use just a smidgen of it for flavor. I covered the chicken with a piece of foil and let it rest for about 10 minutes. I'll post my recipe in a future post. 

Back to the veggies! I added the zucchini and carrot to the pan, along with some salt and pepper, some marjoram, and some savory, stirred, covered the pan and cooked it for a couple of minutes, then added some frozen green onions I had on hand. Covered, and let cook on low until the chicken finished resting. 

Here's the result:

 

My dinner beverage was cold tea, a mix of green tea and Earl Grey. I have 2 quart-sized mason jars that I use to steep tea. I fill the jar with water - sometimes I use cold, other times hot, but I can't tell the difference so I'll probably just use cold from now on - and let it steep overnight. I finished my jar with dinner, so I started a new one:

 

Tomorrow morning, I'll take out the tea bags (and throw them into the compost bin) and put the jar in the fridge. 

See that lid on the jar? That's a "recap" lid from a Kickstarter campaign I sponsored a few years ago. They come in both regular and wide-mouth sizes and I have a few of each. I use them for my tea and also when I ferment stuff in jars (with the addition of a rubber cork and a water trap - more on that in another post). 

Since I used up all my sprouted beans making dinner, I also started some new sprouts:

 

Left to right is garbanzo beans, a mix of white beans and speckled pinto beans, and a mix of green lentils and mung beans. I put about 1/3 cup of each bean in a jar and then cover them with water. I'll let them sit overnight and in the morning, I'll pour out the water, rinse the beans in a mesh strainer, and fill the jars with more water and let them sit for the day tomorrow, too. 

By that time, the garbanzo beans should be finished, so I'll rinse them and dry them and put them in the fridge to use this week. The lentils and mung beans (after rinsing) will go into my tray sprouter for another day. The pinto and white beans will probably need to soak overnight again. They are bigger and harder than the other beans, so take longer to soak - I soak them until none of them are wrinkly anymore. 

Another advantage to sprouting these beans before using them is that sprouting greatly reduces the amount of the sugars in the beans, which is great for those doing low carb, but also eliminates the flatulence associated with eating beans. Any amount of soaking is good for beans, but soaking them for 2 days seems to work best for me! 

Here's an interesting article I found about soaking beans:

http://www.squawkfox.com/how-to-soak-and-cook-dried-beans/

And an article from Whole Foods which lists different types of beans:

http://m.wholefoodsmarket.com/recipes/food-guides/beans

One word of caution: while most soaked & sprouted beans are ok to eat raw in salads or just by the handful, kidney beans contain a substance that can really upset your stomach if eaten raw, so be sure to cook them before eating. Here's an article about that:

http://www.living-foods.com/articles/largebeans.html

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Morning smoothie

Every morning I have a smoothie for breakfast. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day!  👍 Here's what I put in it:

Of course I start off with ice, then I put in 1/4 cup of hydrated mixed chia and flax seeds and 1/4 cup of Greek yogurt. 

 

What do I mean by "hydrated mixed chia and flax seeds"?  I put 1 Tbsp of dry chia seeds and 1 Tbsp of dry flax seeds into a jar and add one cup of water. Since I've started making water kefir (not pictured), I'm now using that for the hydrating liquid. 

What's water kefir? It's a probiotic food. Kefir is a mix of bacteria and yeast that eats sugar, and its waste products flavor the water and make it good for your gut. I make a quart at a time, using 2 Tbsp of plain white sugar and 1/2 Tbsp of brown sugar (for the added minerals), plus the water kefir grains. I let this sit at room temperature for 3 days then put the grains into a new jar of sugar water and let the previous batch sit out for another 2 days to finish fermenting. For more info about water kefir, go read here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibicos

Why hydrate the seeds? Chia and flax seeds are mucilagenous, which means that when they get wet, they surround themselves with a gel sack. They do this to keep the water close by so they can grow, but it's advantageous for us because it makes them good as a bulking fiber, which is good for your gut! 

Here's a pic of a chia seed with a gel sack:

 

Next comes the protein powders. 

 

I chose the EAS AdvantEDGE powder because not only is it low in carbs, but it's also got a ton of other vitamins in it than most other protein powders have. 

 

Ask check out the way some smart engineer designed to store the scoop so it's not buried in the powder! It's stored  in the lid!

 

The MCT in MCT oil powder stands for Multi-Chain Triglycerides and this powder helps make sure I get "good fats". 

The final two ingredients are cocoa and fiber. 

 

I only use 1/2 - 1 teaspoon of the cocoa powder. It adds some nice flavor and is low carb, too, especially since I don't use a full "serving" size. 

 

The Benefiber is nice because it's not gritty and non-bulking (which means it doesn't swell up when wet like the chia and flax seeds do), plus it's flavorless. It can be added to anything, but this works for me. 

Finally, I top up the blender cup to the fill line with water kefir and blend! 

It's yummy and keeps me feeling full for several hours and makes sure I get adequate nutrition, so win-win!

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Starting over

It's been a couple of years since I blogged here. Many things have happened since then, but the main reason I'm back is because I've been on a "diet" and have lost 11.5 pounds since January 10th. Yay!  

Several friends on Facebook have asked me for specifics about what I've been doing so I figured since I already have this blog in place, I'll post that stuff here. 

I'll try to post at least a little something every day, even if it's just my daily weigh-in pic. Speaking of which... 

Here's my weight pic from January 10:

 

And from February 10:

 

Woo-hoo!

My travel kit

When I fly, I try to do it with only a carry-on suitcase and a backpack, no checked luggage. That means that I have to deal with the TSA and their rules on liquids, etc. At first, I did what most people do and limited myself to 4oz containers of my shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste, etc., stuffed in a quart-sized zipper bag. But even the best little containers can and often do leak after being subjected to the back-and-forth pressurized/depressurized of just a few plane trips. There had to be a better way!

So I started investigating ways I could reduce the number of liquid products I needed to bring along with me.

I started with my hair products.  I bought a few bars of J.R. Ligget's Old Fashioned Shampoo as well as their Natural Traveler set. This worked great! I love the container that came with the NT set. However, J.R. Ligget's is all the way on the East Coast, and thus has a large carbon footprint, so I started looking for something more local. Dr. Bronner to the rescue! Their bar soap works just as well as the Ligget's shampoo bars, and their factory warehouse is only a few miles from my house. Dr B's has the added bonus of being Certified Fair Trade and Organic.

JR Ligget's Shampoo bar & Natural Traveler,
plus a bar of Dr. Bronner's soap.

Next up was my hair gel. Those little travel size tubes of hair gel are convenient, but are very expensive compared to buying hair gel by the gallon from the beauty supply store. Not to mention the waste! (The tubes are wasteful, plus you can never get all the gel out of it!) I started using hair paste or putty instead. The TSA does not consider it a liquid -- according to them, a liquid is anything that "pours" - so I don't need to put it in a 311 bag. I just buy the whatever brand is on sale.

Hair Putty, plus a folding brush from Japan

For my teeth, things are a bit complicated. I am allergic to SLS, an ingredient in most toothpastes, so I have to buy special toothpastes that do not have SLS or even ALS in them. Fortunately, this gets easier every year, but special toothpaste can be expensive. When I am traveling over just one or two nights, I usually forgo the toothpaste and make sure to be extra vigilant with flossing. When traveling more than that, I suck it up and put a tube of toothpaste in my 311 bag. I thought about just taking some baking powder or other special tooth powder along, but the TSA gets antsy about anonymous white powder in your luggage. Go figure. This picture is of my travel toothbrush, plus some floss made from organic silk -- because it can be composted and regular tooth floss cannot. I am experimenting with the use of a miswak stick, but have only been using it a couple of days & so haven't formulated a real opinion about it yet. If I end up using it - even if I only use it for travel - it would eliminate the need for toothbrush and paste or powder. Not pictured is my Listerine Pocket-Pak - obviously I am out of them and need to get some more! - which is meant to be used as a breath freshener through the day, but I have found that one or two strips on the tongue, plus a mouthful of water makes an acceptable substitute for mouthwash while traveling.

travel toothbrush plus compostable silk floss

Then of course, there's the usual deoderant and q-tips. I only cotton swabs that have a paper stick, never plastic. With the paper stick, they are compostable. I used to keep the q-tips in the special plastic box for travel that they sell, but the lid kept getting broken, or I could never get them all back into the box so the lid wouldn't close, whatever, so now I just keep them in a small plastic bag. I buy whatever deo is cheapest.

Also in my travel kit are some items that are not daily use, but I have found if I *don't* have them with me, I wish I had brought them!  

Towels. The one on the left is a travel towel in a little pocket holder like you can get from REI or any other camping store, while the one on the right is a compressed towel that opens to 10"x10". To use it, I just have to take it out of the wrapper and pull it open.

towelage

Tide To-Go Pen and Dr Bronner's lip balm. Tide To-Go, or a similar product, is a MUST HAVE for traveling, especially if you don't know where/when your next laundry stop is.  My lips get very dry, so I often have 3 or 4 tubes of lip balm stashed about my person.

Tide To Go and Dr B's organic lip balm

Speaking of laundry, on longer trips when I know I'll have access to laundry machines (not just a sink) I take along some of these Purex 3-in-1 laundry sheets -- detergent, softener, and dryer sheet all in one. My friend Barbara turned me on to these - all 3 of her boys were Boy Scouts, so she understands about packing! Unfortunately, I see now that Purex has discontinued these things. Mutter. Hopefully, they'll either bring them back or someone else will start selling something similar. For trips in which I'll be washing in the sink, I have some powdered detergent that I put into a bag and take along. TSA is ok with laundry detergent powder. Also pictured is a stretchy laundry rope thingy to hang wet clothes on.

3-in-1 sheets and Flexo-Line clothesline

When one travels, one doesn't always know what state of cleanliness the toilet facilities will be in, so I also carry a set of Whizzies with me. There are a lot of products along these lines to help women out in this kind of situation, but I like the Whizzy because it's just manilla paper and can be composted. Reusable products are great, but if water is in short supply, how do you clean them? or keep their case/bag clean? These are great when camping, hiking, or just stopping at a highway rest stop!

Whizzy!!

And of course, what travel kit would be complete without tweezers, a combo nail clipper/bottle opener, and a wine opener?  I keep these in my 311 bag because TSA likes to have a look at my corkscrew. It does NOT have a knife on it, so they let me keep it, but they always have to pick it up and look at it, so I make it easy for them to do that.

The essentials!

So, the only things pictured above that go in my 311 bag are the opener, clipper, and tweezers. Everything else here can be packed into whatever nook & cranny can be found in my carry on bag - though I do usually keep them all together in one clear rectangular zippered bag for ease of use. 

Someday I'll write a post showing how I pack a carryon suitcase for a 5 week trip. It's easier than you might think!

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Your basic green bean casserole

Tonigh I took the rice mix from the previous post, added a can of cream of mushroom soup, plus a can of chicken breast, plus the leftover frozen green beans, some salt & pepper, mixed them all up, then topped them with some sourdough bread crumbs (which I keep in the freezer -- from our free sourdough loaves from being in the Boudin Bread Club).  Baked it at 350 for 30 minutes and YUM! Green bean casserole.

There's enough leftover that we will probably have it for lunch tomorrow, too.

So much meal value from that little effort on Friday....

Still here

It's been a long time since I've posted anything here. Since the last post, I've had spinal fusion surgery, a trip to the emergency room for what we thought was a heart attack but turned out to be a gall bladder attack for which I need more surgery, attended a conference in Portland, and finished a semester of grad school.

In short, I've been busy and I have neglected this blog. Sorry.

We are still here. Brian is still unemployed. We have used up all of his severence pay and have nearly depleted our savings. Things are really really tight.

Just last week, I "discovered" -- in quotes because duh, I really should have been paying attention to this! -- that we were still making large payments to our credit cards. We started this last year to pay them down quicker, which was good because we have more room on them now, but not good because that was a large chunk of cash that we could still have to use for things like, oh medical bills, health insurance, tuition, etc. I stopped the extra payments, but do plan to restart them once we get back on our feet.

Added up our medical bills and if insurance had not paid a large chunk of it, my spinal surgery would have cost us over $100,000. As it is, our portion of it comes to something like $8000. Could we have waited and had the surgery later, after we're back to normal? No. My injury was such that time was of the essence; the longer we wait, the more damage to my nerves. We are waiting on the gall bladder surgery as that is not an emergency. Of course, if I have another attack, it will be an emergency, so we are gambling a bit here. Wish us luck.

I have applied for a job at CostCo and plan to apply for other retail positions such as PetCo, PetSmart, etc. While not what I *want* to do, even a minimum wage job will help us at this point. Brian has applied for unemployment insurance and applies for multiple jobs every week. Today he told me that he is branching out into other fields (for example, a photography position). I hope he finds something he likes to do and pays reasonably well!

I am not so worried about the health insurance aspect of whatever job he gets. I've done some research into California's upcoming health insurance exchange as part of the Affordable Care Act and we can get something fairly close to what we have for approximately $300 less per month than we are paying for COBRA now, and with a MUCH lower yearly deductible! We can register in the exchange starting October 1 and coverage begins January 1. This means that Brian has an opportunity now to pursue employment doing something he loves without worrying about the health benefits package of that job. If I can find part-time employment to fill in some gaps, plus ramp up my music business again, then maybe we'll be ok.

I have been trying to be creative in the kitchen. I stocked up on components to use to build meals. For instance, I have cans of tomato paste, chicken stock (more on that later), cream of mushroom soup, diced tomatoes, different kinds of dry pasta, beans, herbs & spices, etc., as well as canned roast beef, salmon, tuna, and chicken. These things can be made into a number of different meals fairly quickly -- which is great because I often forget to plan out a meal and get things thawed out or otherwise ready in time to make dinner. I need to work on the planning thing. *sigh*

Chicken stock -- I buy cans by the case from CostCo, but on those occasions when we have bought a roasted chicken, I have saved the carcass and put it in my crock pot covered with water, plus a half cup of white vinegar, and made my own stock. I use this up first, but if I don't have any on hand -- or all I have is frozen because I forgot to thaw it out, which has happened numerous times -- then I have the canned stuff.

Tonight, I am making rice, etc., in my crock pot. I started with the recipe from "A Year of Slow Cooking"but instead of following it exactly, I doubled the water to 4 cups and used 1 cup of mixed white and brown rice, plus another cup of combined wild rice, pearl barley, and green lentils. I also forgot to butter the inside of my crock; hopefully it'll be ok.

Once this is done, I plan to stir fry the rice mixture with green beans (frozen, thawing now), eggs, and some canned salmon. I'll add some granulated garlic and dried onions, plus rice wine, soy sauce, lemon juice, etc. I'll update this post (hopefully with a picture and everything!) when it's finished to let you know how it turned out!

This weekend we'll be up in the LA area for my music group's retreat. We are working with a handbell friend who also does team building. Should be fun! But I won't have time to post anything, unless it's just a quicky because I've found something worth sharing while there. (Hey, it could happen!)

Meanwhile, have a great weekend!

UPDATE #1: It was yummy! It looks a bit woodgy because I just broke the eggs into the rice mix instead of cooking them separately then adding them, plus the canned salmon is in itty bitty pieces like canned tuna, but it really did taste quite nice. We'll do it again!  I have enough rice mix and green beans left over that on Monday night, I will make green bean casserole with chicken. Yum!


UPDATE #2: Again regarding chicken broth -- a roasted chicken is less than $5 at CostCo, so I don't feel guilty buying one when it's been "one of those days" and I don't feel like cooking. It makes multiple meals, especially once you've made broth from it, and it's yummy. However, a whole frozen or fresh chicken costs even less than the roasted one and I can roast it myself in either the oven or crock pot and then I get the giblets to use for fish food, too. (My fish LOVE frozen pureed chicken livers. They're not too wild about gizzards, though.)


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