Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Good Days, Bad Nights

I find it so much easier to eat healthy foods during the day while I am at work and then things get so much harder once I get home. Things have been going okay and I am really working harder on not being so hard on myself. If I eat well the whole day and then have something junky at 9:00pm I don't want to totally beat myself up over it because at least I'm making strides forward.

QT agrees with my new policy and says "yea mom, don't be so hard on yourself."



I love peppers, just hate the price. This year I'm growing peppers in my garden and I have a couple of good ones going right now. Oddly, the plant is growing peppers but I swear it hasn't gotten any taller. So, it's a midget pepper plant with now big peppers weighing it down. Last year the actually plant grew super tall but I think I got all of two peppers from it the entire summer. Here are some beautiful red peppers that I got from Peapod.com. I sliced up an orange pepper and put it on a low-carb tortilla smothered with a wedge of Laughing Cow cheese along with some shaved turkey, tomato and a green pepper fresh from my garden.



On Sunday I decided to do some "real" cooking. I wanted to use up the peppers and I've had a bag of shrimp in my freezer for a long time now and so I decided to make shrimp stuffed peppers. I boiled the peppers for about ten minutes to help soften them and up and while they hung out in the water I made some rice. Next, I chopped an onion and cooked it in a little olive oil. To the onion I added a can of diced tomatoes and maybe a tablespoon or two of tomato paste and once that was all nice and hot I stirred in the cooked rice and some chopped shrimp. That whole mixture went into the peppers and then I just heated them through by putting them in a 350 degree oven for about ten-minute minutes.





The husband was super excited because he loves stuffed peppers and so to find them stuffed with shrimp seemed super special. I really think that the best part of the whole meal was when the husband did all the dishes afterwards!

Yesterday I made another turkey wrap for a quick, easy dinner. That lettuce was fresh picked from my garden. Lettuce is so easy to grow and this year mine has really been growing like mad. Normally that would be great news but I'm still on the Coumadin and thus still on a reduced Vitamin K diet. I ate my dinner off of SB's new monster plate. He likes monsters but he especially likes robots.



Tonight I stopped at KFC for dinner. I came home with the grilled chicken and am simply amazed at how good it is. Not only does it taste good but it's not horrible calorie-wise. I can have a leg, a thigh, some mashed potatoes and corn for right around 500 calories. Thinking ahead to tomorrow I made a salad with freshly picked lettuce and leftover chicken breast.



I also decided to make overnight oats to have for breakfast tomorrow. Overnight oats involve some good, old fashioned Quaker Oats, some vanilla soy milk (although you could use regular milk too) and then some kind of add-in. I chose dried cherries.



I dumped half a cup of oats into a container and then added about 3/4 cup of the soy milk. That will sit overnight and the oats will get all nice and mushy gushy and then tomorrow I will add the dried cherries. Yummy!



Well, that's enough about food. On to my super good news. No, I'm not pregnant. The husband has finally passed all of his preliminary exams for his PhD and now he only has to write his dissertation before I'll have to call him the doctor instead of the husband. I have been trying to figure out a good way to really celebrate this accomplishment and I'd love to take a vacation, either with the kids or just us two but I haven't been able to find anything yet that I would be excited about and that we can also afford. This would be the perfect fall for us to take a New England cruise since the husband isn't teaching until Spring but they are so pricey. I keep checking the last minute deals on all the cruise web sites hoping against hope that I can find one that is unbelievably cheap. We have both wanted to take a New England cruise since we had such a good time on our Alaskan honeymoon cruise. So, barring some mircacle in that area, where else could we get away to for a few days in October without spending too much money? Help me out here.