Picnic lunch & cleaning out the pantry, Feb 24

After my usual breakfast smoothie, I packed up a picnic lunch for the two of us. We'd been wanting to do some exploring along Lytle Creek Road -- every time we pass the Sierra Road exit on I-15, we comment that we should go for a drive back there, but we never had time to do it while we were thinking of it. Well, I thought of it last night and so we decided to go today since it was such a beautiful and sunny - but brisk! - day.

Into our insulated carry bag I packed:

• leafy green sprouts
• bread (for Brianne)
• low-carb tortilla (for me)
• cream cheese
• dried apricots
• homemade dilly beans
• dark chocolate-covered macadamia nuts 
• white seedless grapes
• a bamboo knife (to spread the cream cheese)
• chopsticks (to eat the dilly beans)
• collapsible bowls (that function as plates when collapsed)
• a big bottle of water

On the way out, we stopped at our local grocery store (Stater Bros) to pick up some lunch meat - turkey, ham, roast beef, and salami.

After driving and exploring for a bit, we stopped at the Applewhite Picnic Area in Scotland, California, right along the Lytle Creek. (Aside: I think it's funny that there's a Scotland in California, AND there's a California in Scotland!)

We took the long way home, going east rather than west on CA-138, and then took CA-178 into Hesperia, which helpfully let us off on Main Street, which we followed west as it turns into Phelan Road, and back home.

Things I also did today:

• rinsed and refreshed the water on my soaking green peas, Lady Cream peas, garbanzo beans
• started some almonds to soak
• started some wheat berries to soak

The wheat berries are soaking because I'm going to add them to brown rice that I'm going to cook, portion out, and freeze for Brianne. The best part is, I can cook it in the slow cooker! The reason I'm adding the wheat berries is because I only have about 1/2 cup of them and it seems silly to throw them out. I'm soaking the wheat berries to soften them but I'll only soak them until tomorrow morning, when I plan to make the rice, so it's not a full-on "sprout" just a soak. I also have some wild rice that I'll add into the crock pot with the rice and wheat berries. 

I also went through my pantry and gathered all the pasta so I can give it away to my local Buy Nothing group.

Tomorrow, I'll also take our recyclables in to our local recycling center. I'll post more about that when I do that.

Now it's almost 6pm and I need to make something for dinner! I'll post again later after dinner's done.

TTFN!

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Morning weight, Feb 24

 

Lunch and dinner, Feb 23

Today was a fun day. Went to my friend Linda's house in Glendale to meet with Keiko, a visiting handbell musician from Japan.

 

Linda and I had lunch at the Black Cow Café. I had this awesome salad with bleu cheese, avocado, apple, candied pecans, and mandarin oranges, with a balsamic vinaigrette dressing. I had passion fruit flavored ice tea to drink. 

 

I took the zucchini bread home for Brianne. 😄

After our meeting, we all went to dinner at Trattotia Alegria, an awesome Italian restaurant. The chef is from Parma, Italy. I had some carpaccio and calamari for appetizer and chicken Parmesan for dinner. Unfortunately I didn't get a picture; I was too busy eating the wonderful food! I had a glass of Pinot Noir from the Russian River Valley (California) with dinner. 

A fun day and great food! 👍

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Morning weight, Feb 23

 

Buying in bulk, Feb 22

Since this blog is more than just a food log, I wanted to write a bit about buying things in bulk. 

The reason we went to Sprouts today is because I thought I remembered the one down in San Marcos had green tea bags sold in bulk, rather than in a box. I may have been wrong, because the one we went to in Costa Mesa today didn't have that, though they had all the other things normally found in bulk at Sprouts. 

So, while I ended up buying a box of 100 green tea bags and a box of 20 Earl Grey tea bags, as well as a bag of Bob's Red Mill brand (employee-owned!) guar gum, and a bottle of Sprouts brand rice vinegar, those are all things I had hoped to buy in bulk. Sigh. 

We did buy some bulk items, though, and I used reusable cotton bags to do it! We picked up raw almonds, roasted (but not salted) macadamia nuts, and white peaches and put them in the reusable bags. 

 

I wrote the PLU number on the bag using a Crayola washable marker. 

 

Once the bags are empty, I will wash them and they'll be ready for re-use! 

We also bought dark chocolate-covered macadamia nuts, cherries, and cranberries, but I used the disposable plastic bags to package them because of the chocolate. 

 

Maybe next time I'll bring some lightweight plastic containers for those things. I specify lightweight because Sprouts doesn't seem to have a way to note the tare weight of your bring-it-from-home reusable containers and while glass containers are more environmentally friendly, plastic weighs a lot less. I don't want to pay for the extra weight when it's just packaging!

There is a market closer to home that features a lot of bulk items and that is WinCo (also employee-owned!). Unfortunately, they have signage indicating that they don't want you to bring your own containers for the bulk items. I'm not sure why that is. It can't be a health department regulation because Sprouts allows it, so it must just be corporate policy. Maybe because they don't want to deal with the tare weight? I should call the headquarters and find out. 🤔

In other news, I had a bag of mixed beans in the pantry which I've been avoiding. It's one of those 14 bean soup mixes, I think. I'm sure that when I bought it, I didn't notice that it had kidney beans in it. I HATE kidney beans! 😤 To me, they taste mealy and yucky. It's why I don't like refried beans: the mouth-feel is like dirty mud. 😖

So, knowing that I would never use this bean mix for its intended purpose, and not wanting to discard it, I have begun to sort it. 

I am sorting out the kidney beans into one container, Lima beans into another, and garbanzo beans into a third. Then I am sorting non-sproutable beans such as red lentils and split peas (plus other broken beans) from sproutable beans such as white beans, Pinto beans, black beans, etc. There are some green lentils in there too, and while I normally sprout them, they are so small that I don't want to fuss with separating them out from the red lentils, so they are going into the container with the non-sproutable things. 

I have sprouted Lima beans before, but it's a big PITA because when you soak them, their seed coat comes loose, so you have to remove it from each. and. every. bean. 😩 which I don't want to do, so they get a separate container. Plus, Brianne confessed to me today that she feels about Lima beans as I do about kidney beans. I had no idea, after 15 years of marriage!  😳 but as she said, she is not given to complaining about things like that, so whatever. 💁 

Once I'm done sorting, I will sprout the mix of white, black, & Pinto beans, plus the separate garbanzo beans. I will use the non-sproutable beans in soup, or maybe stir fry, then I will give away the kidney and Lima beans (as well as some red and white quinoa I found in my pantry) to our local Buy Nothing group. I'm sure someone there would love to have them!

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Wednesday, Feb 22

As usual, breakfast was a smoothie. I really do enjoy them, even though Brianne makes faces at my hydrated chia & flax seeds because they're "goopy". 🙄

For lunch, at Brianne's request, I cut up a pound of beef pot roast meat and stir fried it along with the balsamic vinegar sauce from the other day:

4 cloves of garlic, minced

one small Onion, minced 

1/2 cup balsamic vinegar

1/2 cup rice vinegar

1 Tbsp Worchestershire sauce

2 Tbsp ponzu sauce

1/2 tsp pink Himalayan salt

and added a couple handfuls of frozen green beans and some sesame seeds. Yum!

 

The sauce was kind of thin, so I thought that there must be a low carb solution for thickeners. Corn starch has 7 g carb per Tbsp:

 

which is less than I expected, but still a bit high. So I googled and based on recommendations from this page: 

https://www.verywell.com/low-carb-thickeners-2241877

picked up some guar gum from Sprouts market. 

In other news, I ordered 2.5 lbs of dried green peas for sprouting, which arrived today. Can you say "over packaged"?!

 

 

Yes, that was all that was in the giant box! 🙆

I started some green peas for sprouting and realized that all I had ready was green leafy sprouts, so started some garbanzo beans and Lady Cream peas, too. 

 

I mentioned that we went to Sprouts today. I picked up some more bags of green tea and Earl Grey, plus some macadamia nuts for snackage. Brianne insisted on getting some dark chocolate-covered macadamia nuts, too, and how could I resist? 🤷‍♀️ I also got some raw almonds for sprouting, which is one of my favorite nuts to Sprout! 👍

After Sprouts, we headed to Costa Mesa for our semi-monthly vocal therapy support group and instead of sitting in the therapist's office, we all went to a nearby Nouveau Industrial Hipster Bohemian Café to hang out and chat. Since lunch had been 5 hours ago, I got a Caprese salad. I forgot to get a pic before I started eating, but this was about halfway through:

 

OMG so good! I indulged and had two bottles of beer with dinner:

 

So that was it for today. 😉

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Morning weight, Feb 22

 

Typical Tuesday dinner, Feb 21

Breakfast was my usual smoothie, but I got distracted by work I had to do this morning so I didn't actually have it until almost noon. Oops. So it was breakfast AND lunch. 

Brianne had a church council meeting tonight, but I did the usual Tuesday thing and drove down to Pasadena for Crown City Ringers rehearsal. And as usual, I went to Chipotle for dinner. 

I had a bowl with lettuce, carnitas, salsa, and cheese. No rice, no beans, and sadly no guacamole. I love guacamole, but there's something in Chipotle's guac that upsets my stomach, so I don't have it. 😞

I'm allergic to vegetable peppers such as bell peppers and other sweet varieties. Poblano peppers are sometimes ok, sometimes not. It depends on the individual pepper. Ditto with jalapeños. Hot peppers seem to be ok, but I don't like them very much. For some reason Chipotle's mild salsa - really more of a pico de gallo - is ok for me, as are some store-bought varieities. Whatever.  🤷‍♀️

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Morning weight, Feb 21

14 lbs over the course of 6 weeks (42 days) is an average of 1/3 lb per day, which is a nice slow healthy rate. Yay!

 

Lunch & Dinner, Feb 20

Today I realized I hadn't left the house since last Monday when I came down with that head cold. So we decided to go for a drive to check out the damage from Friday's storm. Omg! As if the Cajon Valley hadn't suffered enough from the Blue Cut fire this summer, the valley was practically scoured from flood waters! We could see where they'd had to plow mucho mounds of mud off of the road so that traffic could get through.  Repair crews were out to fix the interstate where it had collapsed. 

While out, we decided to stop at McDonald's for lunch. I had their Chicken Bacon Ranch salad with grilled chicken. 

 

Not bad, but not awesome. I think the salads at Wendy's are better, but that's faint praise, indeed. 

On to dinner:

The Lady Cream peas I've been sprouting this week are not peas in the sense of English green peas. They are instead a variety of African beans brought to the US during the slave trade known as cowpeas or Southern peas and are varieties of the same species that includes black eyed peas and purple hull peas. You can read more about them here:

http://www.camelliabrand.com/about-the-bean/about-lady-cream-peas/

So for dinner tonight I did a variation on a traditional Southern field pea dish, the basics of which I found here:

http://www.mommyskitchen.net/2010/05/farmers-market-find-southern-cream-peas.html

My variations included adding 2 medium carrots after the bacon, onions, and garlic had cooked down, plus 1/2 cup of store-bought vegetable broth. After letting that cook until the carrots were tender, I added the rest of my lentils and mung bean sprouts in with the Lady Cream peas, plus another 1/2 cup of vegetable broth, which used that up. 

 

Since my beans were already tender from sprouting, I didn't have to cook them for an hour and a half, only about 5 minutes or so. That's another benefit to soaking the peas for 48 hours or more: drastically reduced cooking time!

Finally, I added some beet greens to the pot and let them steam for 2 minutes before stirring them in and seasoning with fresh ground salt and pepper. I topped each bowl with some fresh grated pecorino Romano cheese. 

 

Soooo good! I definitely think this will be a permanent part of my dinner repertoire!

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Morning weight, Feb 20