This last time I was writing my blog I did a month long challenge to feed my four pack of a family for a month on 400$. I ended up spending over 500 but that was still a huge difference and I was pretty proud of myself. Now, a couple of years later, we're down to three as one is living large in NYC, and I want to rededicate myself to the process. So it's now 3 on 4. Sounds like a losing basketball game but a good way to keep an eye on the food costs.
We've just move so I tossed out a bunch of stuff from the larder so we're pretty lean and mean pantry wise right now except for dried beans. GOOD GOD YA'LL have I got dried beans! One of my objectives is to cook up the bean supply and regain an entire storage bin for other uses. I should probably take a picture and show you just how many beans we're talking about but it's embarrassing and I can tell you that it's easy 20 pounds plus.
This week I'm pretty on point for food. It's going to be a larder oriented week because I've got the stuff and I need the room. It's not cheating! Never ever have I cooked my house down to zero and then started off from scratch the next week.
What I have on hand
Canned Goods -
Tuna - cheap king 1.07 a can from Target
Progresso Lentil Soup. 1 can makes two lunches
Tomato products
Other random stuff
Meats
Chicken Breasts & Thighs
Produce
Apples
Salad fixings
Dry goods
BEANS
Rice
Pasta
We make a little food go a long way these days which is good. We've got maybe half of a grilled london Broil steak left from cooking out Friday. Brian will work on that for another two days which is when I'll do my mid week cook. I also have a big bowl of Quinoa Black Bean Salad. We'll have a tossed salad every night but I know I 'll need to refreshen the lettuce supply. There are a couple of odds and ends I know I'll need for what I'm planning on making. Breakfast as always is egg whites and I made buckwheat pancakes Sunday that will go another couple of days run through the toaster as a get up and go kind of carb. Lunches will be tuna salad and left overs for Brian. Soup and Quinoa Salad for me. If I get to the farmers market I'll pick up some additional things. Maybe a water melon and some more fruit. Will keep you posted on that.
I'm going to make Chicken Korma, an Indian curry dish, and Makhani, a lentil and kidney bean kind of curry that will use up some of both the black lentils and kidney beans I have on hand. Both are delicious and I'll fill out the plate with basmati rice and if I get really energized homemade naan (which by the way isn't hard to make at all so don't be intimidated!) It's a little starch heavy as I'm looking at it so I'll have to watch the portions and I might make a spinach curry too so we have something green other than romaine to eat. We'll see! But here is what I'm thinking about making. Most I have on hand. This amount of food will feed us for 3 or 4 nights (thank God for leftovers and maybe some lunchy stuff too)
Chicken Korma (I'm going to double this and use half on Tofu)
Marinade
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons Garam Masala
1/4 teaspoon turmeric powder
1 teaspoon coriander powder
1 teaspoon cumin powder
1 1/2 tablespoons chili powder
1 cups greek yogurt
2 Big chicken breasts, butterflied and cut into dice. Marinate for an hour. If using extra firm tofu, freeze over night, defrost and press for a half hour to get the liquids out before adding to the marinade)
1 Onion, diced
1 1/2 inch piece of ginger, minced
4 or 5 garlic cloves, or a big soup spoon
1/2 cup tomato sauce
1 1/2 cups heavy cream
Carmelize the onions, add the ginger and garlic and saute until tender, add the chicken (or tofu) with the marinade and cook over low heat until chicken is done. Add tomato sauce simmer for a few minutes. Add the cream and cook over low heat until well blended
Makhani
3/4 cup dried kidney beans soaked over night
1/4 cup black lentils soaked over night
1/4 cup dried chick peas soaked over night
1 in pieced of ginger, minced
2 – 3 garlic cloves minced
2 green chillies, minced
salt to taste
Seasonings
3 TB butter
1 Teas Cumin Seeds, toasted then groun
2 – 3 garlic cloves
pinch asafoetida powder
1/2 Tea Fenugreek
3/4 c tomato sauce
to finish
1/2 cup cream
1/2 tea or more chilli powder
1/2 tea garam masala
method
Soak all of the bean in water overnight. Drain. Put the beans in a crock pot with 5 cups of water. With the garlic, ginger and chilis.Cook on high until beans are really soft. Drain off excess water, it should be light a slightly soupy stew. Mash the lentils lightly with the back of a ladle.
To make the seasoning, butter in a heavy pan until hot, and add the cumin seeds and fenugreek seeds, and stir until they crackle. Add the garlic and fry until beginning to colour. Add the asafoetida powder and tomato puree and stir for a minute. Add to the cooked beans, mixing well. Bring the beans to the boil again, adding the chilli powder garam masala and cream. Heat Through.
Basamati Rice
Naan
1 pkg Yeast
Pinch Sugar
1/2 cup warm water
2 - 3 cups flour
1/2 teas salt
1/4 cup vegetable oil plus 1 TB spoon
1/3 cup greek yogurt
1 egg
1 onion minced
2 TB rosemary crushed
Carmelize the onion in 1 tablespoon of oil. Add rosemary and stir for a minute or two. Let cool.
Combine the yeast, sugar an water in a bowl and let sit until nice and foamy. Add the oil, yogurt and egg and mix. Add the onion and rosemary to the dry ingredients, mix well and then add to the yeast mixing to form a ball. Turn out and kneed for a few minutes adding more flour as you need to to keep it from sticking. Let sit covered for an hour. Punch down divide into 8 or more balls depending on how big you want them. Working with one ball at a time, keeping the rest covered, roll out to 1/8 - 1/4 inch. Heat a heavy bottomed pan on med - med high heat, spray grease, add naan one at a time cook uptil bubbled on top and golden on the bottom, flip and let color on the bottom. DIVE IN!
Spinach curry
2 10oz bags of spinach
2 16 oz cans diced tomatoes with green chilis
1 large onion, diced and carmelized in 1 tb of Oil
1/4 C prepared Red Curry Sauce
1 can lite coconut milk
Combine everything and let simmer until the spinach is wilted. You can also add drained and diced extra firm tofu and some chick peas for a stand alone meal. I fix this all the time!
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Monday, July 30, 2012
Calories In. Calories Out. Blah, blah blah
Calories In Calories out, blah blah blah
It sounds like a simple enough equation doesn’t it, but to anyone who struggles with weight, the process of burning off a pound of blubber is way more complicated and hard. I am becoming convinced that much of this is because we have absolutely no idea what the caloric content of food is and we have over inflated ideas about how many calories our lardy little butts are actually burning. Walk for 15 minutes on a hot day and surely you’ve burnt off 500 calories, right? More like a 150 and that’s if you’re fleet like Mercury moving at a 15 mile an hour pace. Dog walking clearly doesn’t count for much which suggests that sofa sitting, even if you fluff the pillow once every now and again, really isn’t the aerobic calorie burning machine that most of us hope it is. CURSES!
This is weekend is a case in point. I’ve thrown away my home scales in an act of rebellion. The number never changes much (except upwards) and hopping on it every time I go to the bathroom, hoping that pee actually got rid of the forty pounds of “water weight” I’m carrying, became a cause of self flagellation and loathing that seemed counter productive. Now, I weigh on Fridays when I go to the Y. I picked Friday’s so that I can see how my Herculean levels of self discipline during the week have returned impressive results. So this past Friday, after a sin free week, I confidently strode onto the scales without even taking off my tennis shoes, ear rings, rings, clothes, or running my hands through my hair to shake off any hefty stragglers which is what I normally do in an attempt to be as “light” as possible. The scales rewarded me with a pathetic ½ pound over the previous week. That means that over the course of the entire 7 days I managed to burn a measly 250 calories a day more than I consumed. This sucks. Really it does. I work out EVERY DAY. Weights and walking (the fast kind) MWF and I run on Tues and Thurs. Plus with the move I’m working my tuckus off lifting, hauling and unpacking and all that effort only equals 250 calories a day? No wonder I’m still a Weeble. In my mind, all this effort, all this careful eating, no wine (sniffle, sniffle) working out, being mindful crap should at least count for 5 pounds. 3 at a minimum. Not even one? That’s just plain mean.
Unfortunately, the adipose fairy is much kinder on the add not subtract side of the equation. I took my measly half pound and then when I got home Friday, I mowed the grass in 100+ degree temps, which took an hour and 15 minutes, was ridiculously hard because the self propelling action is not working on the mower so now all forward momentum is provided by yours truly, then I cleaned and scoured my bathrooms. Saturday morning I went for a three mile fun. I am a machine, I tell you, a Machine!! Surely I earned the bottle (small one) of wine I drank over the course of the whole weekend? Surely, the little teeny, hardly worth heating the oven up for, Totinos cheese pizza I ate (okay one on Saturday AND one on Sunday but they are SO SMALL!) can’t be counted against me in the face of such enormous physical activity? How can it possibly be fair that I can’t sit on the sofa and watch the Olympics and through osmosis lose weight and become one of the hard bodies (okay I’d be happy with firmer fat)? If you do in fact become what you think and I’ve been thinking “rail thin” for years, how is it right that it hasn’t made the least bit of difference? I ask myself this question all the time, but over the sound of crunching potato chips, I can never seem to hear the answer.
This morning, at the Y, I decided just for self satisfaction, to step on the scales and see just how much good all that activity did me and lo and behold, my half pound that I scoffed at? She’s back. In toto. Which means that in 2 days I ate 1750 calories more than I burned. And that my friends, tells you and me and everyone else, what the hell is actually going on in my fat fueled furnace of a life.
Sunday, July 29, 2012
TMI
Today campers we're going to talk about your Pancreas. We are going to do this is in whispered tones because your pancreas is an unreasonable bitch and if she hears us and gets mad, which is her only emotional note, there will be hell to pay! The pancreas produces insulin. Insulin is a fat maker of a hormone which is one of the reasons diabetics (that be me) have such a hard time losing weight. Either Madame Pancreas doesn't produce any insulin and we get fat because we can't process our food properly. Or she produces too much and we can't process it and we get fat because we can't process it.
Here's how it works. Let's say your blood sugar gets too low. Missy P wakes from her beauty rest, fires off a bunch of signals saying eat, eat eat. The message isn't eat lean meat or anything healthy. It's eat startchy tasty poison. Candy, chips, potatoes. Anything with a high sugar load will do because she's trying to raise your blood sugar to keep you from going into a coma or in less dramatic circumstances, to make sure you have enough energy to do whatever boring thing you're about to do. For a diabetic, this triggers a huge blood sugar spike and MP may or may not deliver insulin and you may or may not be able to process it so you end up with a hugely high blood sugar number and spend the rest of the day eating more and more and more trying to feel better. Nothing will work. You'll gain weight and the next day you'll have an insulin hangover that's very much like a more common type of hangover. Most if you, if you're honest will understand what I'm talking about because you've experienced the following. You have a glass or three of wine with dinner. You're full but the next thing you know you're face down in a bowl of chips looking for the salsa. Alcohol depresses your blood sugar which makes you want to eat even when you're full. So if you're trying to lose weight, and you're drinking, its like saying I want to run a marathon then cutting your feet off. Extremely self defeating. Do you have to give up booze? Probably not, but pay attention. If you can have one glass of wine and not feel like eating a water buffalo, great. If not, you're a grown up you decide. Just don't bitch when you eat nothing but salads all week then binge and have a bottle of wine over the weekend and show up at work on Monday 2 steps behind where you left off on Friday! If you wake your pancreas up, you will get and stay fat. Keeping her asleep is the only way this can work. So pay attention!
So what's a girl to do? Well, part of why the whole carb obcessiveness going on in America right now is spot on. High carb, Highly refined carbs at that tend to wake your pancreas up and cause the whole insulin triggering. But all carbs aren't created equally and there are two numbers you need to know. Glycemic Index and Glycemic Load. The GI is how much a food affects your blood sugar and the GL is how much you can have of it before that bitchy pancreas decides she's had enough of you and your annoying self. Green peas are a pretty good example, as are most beans for that matter. Most have low GI, so even on a low carb diet they are good things (especially if you're a vegetarian, where you gonna go for cheap protein if beans are now taboo?) but they have a high GL. You can eat them, you just can't sit down and scarf up a dinner plate of beans and think you've cheated the system. Oddly this is part of the problem with Chinese Food too and how you're super hungry an hour after you eat. It's two things. Almost all chinese sauces are loaded with sugar AND you're probably putting it over a copious amount of high GI rice or some o- and despite what you read, from a blood sugar issue, brown is just as bad as white - or some other evil grain. So you have this nice plate of moo shu wraped in grain based wraps and a side of fried rice, tsk tsk tsk, in an hour you're gonna want a Big Mac and fries and after another hour a Supreme pan pizza and so on and so forth until you fall into a food stupor and go to bed.
BUT I CAN'T LIVE WITH OUT GRAINS. And now I'm going to give you the solution. Enter the beautiful, wonderful, complete protein, low GI, low GL seed, Quinoa, that works like a grain, has a neutral taste, is cheap and easy to cook and you can use in place of all grains even for your breakfast porridge. What a wonderful thing! You still get that toothy mouth happy sensation of eating grains without all the nasty side effects. Try it you'll like it!
Today I'm going to be generous and give your two recipes. One, obviously a quinoa recipe because it's not fair to talk about it and not give you something to try and two, because I made a fantastic batch of low GI gluten free pancakes this morning that I want you to try so you'll stop thinking of wheat flour as your go to baking flour!
Quinoa Black Bean Salad
1 cup Quinoa, double rinsed, cooked like rice. Boiled in 2 cups of water, reduced heat, simmer for 15 minutes
2 cans black beans, rinsed. Pay attention to bean labels. If they have fat in them in all likelihood they've used lard to flavor them. Or 1 cup dry beans, soaked and cooked like you normally do
1 softball sized juicy wonderful summer tomato
1/2 bunch cilantro, rinsed and minced.
Combine all of the above (and if you want you can add a can of corn but this raises the GI level pretty quickly) And while the quinoa is hot, add the dressing
Dressing
1/2 cup olive oil
1/4 cup cider vinegar
2 TB water
1 tbs each, garlic powder, cumin, chili powder
Dash of red pepper flakes
Salt and pepper to taste.
Serves 10 -12. Great to take to a summer picnic because there's no mayo in it!
Buckwheat Pancakes
Buckwheat is actually a huge misnomer as Bucks (or more aptly, groats) aren't wheat at all, they are a vegetable that is first cousin to rhubarb of all things! Its gluten free and has a nice low GI
3/4 cup buckwheat flour
3/4 sorghum flour (a very low GI flour that's also gluten free)
2 cups buttermilk
3 TB melted butter
1/2 tea salt
1 tea baking soda
1 1/2 packets Stevia or 3 teas sugar
1 large egg or two egg whites, beaten
Mix it all together and then cook on a lightly greased griddle. Makes 12 1/4 cup sized pancakes. They freeze nicely to. To make completely cholesterol free uses a vegan butter substitute and egg whites only. To make vegan, use almond milk, 1/2 tea vinegar, and egg replacer, and you'll want to adjust your liquid volume up a bit to get the right texture.
Here's how it works. Let's say your blood sugar gets too low. Missy P wakes from her beauty rest, fires off a bunch of signals saying eat, eat eat. The message isn't eat lean meat or anything healthy. It's eat startchy tasty poison. Candy, chips, potatoes. Anything with a high sugar load will do because she's trying to raise your blood sugar to keep you from going into a coma or in less dramatic circumstances, to make sure you have enough energy to do whatever boring thing you're about to do. For a diabetic, this triggers a huge blood sugar spike and MP may or may not deliver insulin and you may or may not be able to process it so you end up with a hugely high blood sugar number and spend the rest of the day eating more and more and more trying to feel better. Nothing will work. You'll gain weight and the next day you'll have an insulin hangover that's very much like a more common type of hangover. Most if you, if you're honest will understand what I'm talking about because you've experienced the following. You have a glass or three of wine with dinner. You're full but the next thing you know you're face down in a bowl of chips looking for the salsa. Alcohol depresses your blood sugar which makes you want to eat even when you're full. So if you're trying to lose weight, and you're drinking, its like saying I want to run a marathon then cutting your feet off. Extremely self defeating. Do you have to give up booze? Probably not, but pay attention. If you can have one glass of wine and not feel like eating a water buffalo, great. If not, you're a grown up you decide. Just don't bitch when you eat nothing but salads all week then binge and have a bottle of wine over the weekend and show up at work on Monday 2 steps behind where you left off on Friday! If you wake your pancreas up, you will get and stay fat. Keeping her asleep is the only way this can work. So pay attention!
So what's a girl to do? Well, part of why the whole carb obcessiveness going on in America right now is spot on. High carb, Highly refined carbs at that tend to wake your pancreas up and cause the whole insulin triggering. But all carbs aren't created equally and there are two numbers you need to know. Glycemic Index and Glycemic Load. The GI is how much a food affects your blood sugar and the GL is how much you can have of it before that bitchy pancreas decides she's had enough of you and your annoying self. Green peas are a pretty good example, as are most beans for that matter. Most have low GI, so even on a low carb diet they are good things (especially if you're a vegetarian, where you gonna go for cheap protein if beans are now taboo?) but they have a high GL. You can eat them, you just can't sit down and scarf up a dinner plate of beans and think you've cheated the system. Oddly this is part of the problem with Chinese Food too and how you're super hungry an hour after you eat. It's two things. Almost all chinese sauces are loaded with sugar AND you're probably putting it over a copious amount of high GI rice or some o- and despite what you read, from a blood sugar issue, brown is just as bad as white - or some other evil grain. So you have this nice plate of moo shu wraped in grain based wraps and a side of fried rice, tsk tsk tsk, in an hour you're gonna want a Big Mac and fries and after another hour a Supreme pan pizza and so on and so forth until you fall into a food stupor and go to bed.
BUT I CAN'T LIVE WITH OUT GRAINS. And now I'm going to give you the solution. Enter the beautiful, wonderful, complete protein, low GI, low GL seed, Quinoa, that works like a grain, has a neutral taste, is cheap and easy to cook and you can use in place of all grains even for your breakfast porridge. What a wonderful thing! You still get that toothy mouth happy sensation of eating grains without all the nasty side effects. Try it you'll like it!
Today I'm going to be generous and give your two recipes. One, obviously a quinoa recipe because it's not fair to talk about it and not give you something to try and two, because I made a fantastic batch of low GI gluten free pancakes this morning that I want you to try so you'll stop thinking of wheat flour as your go to baking flour!
Quinoa Black Bean Salad
1 cup Quinoa, double rinsed, cooked like rice. Boiled in 2 cups of water, reduced heat, simmer for 15 minutes
2 cans black beans, rinsed. Pay attention to bean labels. If they have fat in them in all likelihood they've used lard to flavor them. Or 1 cup dry beans, soaked and cooked like you normally do
1 softball sized juicy wonderful summer tomato
1/2 bunch cilantro, rinsed and minced.
Combine all of the above (and if you want you can add a can of corn but this raises the GI level pretty quickly) And while the quinoa is hot, add the dressing
Dressing
1/2 cup olive oil
1/4 cup cider vinegar
2 TB water
1 tbs each, garlic powder, cumin, chili powder
Dash of red pepper flakes
Salt and pepper to taste.
Serves 10 -12. Great to take to a summer picnic because there's no mayo in it!
Buckwheat Pancakes
Buckwheat is actually a huge misnomer as Bucks (or more aptly, groats) aren't wheat at all, they are a vegetable that is first cousin to rhubarb of all things! Its gluten free and has a nice low GI
3/4 cup buckwheat flour
3/4 sorghum flour (a very low GI flour that's also gluten free)
2 cups buttermilk
3 TB melted butter
1/2 tea salt
1 tea baking soda
1 1/2 packets Stevia or 3 teas sugar
1 large egg or two egg whites, beaten
Mix it all together and then cook on a lightly greased griddle. Makes 12 1/4 cup sized pancakes. They freeze nicely to. To make completely cholesterol free uses a vegan butter substitute and egg whites only. To make vegan, use almond milk, 1/2 tea vinegar, and egg replacer, and you'll want to adjust your liquid volume up a bit to get the right texture.
Thursday, July 26, 2012
Is it Ground Hogs Day?
So a cousin of mine asked me today on Facebook if I had the link to my blog because she has family members who are trying vegetarian recipes and she thought they'd like to use my blog to get some ideas. My first thought, was, no lie, what blog? Sifting through the miasma of a middle age mind, I recalled that I had, with great honesty and gusto, written a blog about losing weight and life a couple of years back and I even remembered the blogs name with only a little bit of headscratching. Are you sick enough of it yet? Well, duh, that's why I wrote the thing in the first place. Evidently though I got unsick enough of it because when I opened the blog and began reading what I'd written two years ago, it was almost exactly what I'd be writing today. Hello face slapping reality check.
The absurdity of the human condition is that real and permanent change is so incredibly difficult to accomplish. We start off with great intentions and then some little slip up becomes this giant careening snowball rolling down hill, crashing into us and derailing all of our well conceived and fervently wished for hopes and dreams.
I did good for a long time. I did. Slowly, though old habits reappeared. I stopped writing because that was going to mean confession and while it may be good for the soul, the mea culpa is hard on the ego. So I ran away. I'm so glad my cousin brought it up because the truth is, when I was writing the blog I was making better choices. I did feel more accountable. I also think I probably stood a better chance of succeeding had I kept it up, so hiatus over. I'm back.
Updates abound. Bryn moved to NYC in October. Caylyn moved home a year and a half ago which was a drama but in the end a right choice for her and she's doing well. Brian and I are good. We're both employed. Have our own business on the side and truly believe we are destined to win the lottery. Live as a big picture is much better than it was and I have great hope that the future will continue in that vein.
What hasn't changed ONE IOTA is my weight. My struggle with it. Nothing. Nada. Zip. So it really does feel in many ways like ground hogs day, deja vue, how am I still fucking here retarded. What's funny though and the timing on this is rather interesting is that we moved 2 weeks ago and moving always triggers within me this sense of wiping the slate clean, starting over, doing over, being different and I've been feeling that way since the movers drove off leaving us with a million boxes to unpack.
Unpacking. Now there's a word. How much crap does one really need and I don't just mean this in the physical tangible sense but in the emotional sense as well. I have been hauling both kinds of baggage around with me for years without every stopping to sort through it to see what still works, what do I want or need to ditch, what is a permanent fixture. They are big questions and not just about what silly coffee cups to keep or pitch but also what parts of me is it time to deep six?
I'm 53. There are parts of me that I really value. There are other sections though that I am just sick to death of hauling around. I'm sick of my lack of self discipline, which I can manage in fits and starts but then boom my inner two year old arrives on the scene wanting what she wants when she wants it and up and over goes the apple cart of maturity. I've decided I don't want to BE HER ANYMORE. Who I'm going to be though is kind of a mystery. I hope you'll stick around for the trip.
AND I have a recipe for you. My friend Caroline just went on this fantastic personal quest and is transformed. Somewhere along the way she also had a fry bread taco and it sounded so delish that I had to try so here goes. It's chicken but super easy to vegetarian/veganize. We had it for dinner the other night and the ooohing and aaahhhing from Brian, Carolina and I was pretty ridiculous. Let me know what you think.
Fry Bread
4 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup instant skim milk
1 Tb. Baking powder
Salt
1 1/2 - 2 cups warm water.
Mix it all together until it starts to form a ball. Let sit covered for an hour to relax the gluten. Divide the dough into 14 -16 pieces and roll out as flat as you can get it. Fry until brown on one side in vegetable oil, flip brown it up. Drain on paper towels.
On top of that. I butterflied 2 big chicken breasts then cut them into strips and sauted them in olive oil, seasoned with salt, pepper, red pepper, garlic powder, cumin and chili powder.
Take a fry bread, smear it with heated vegetarian refried beans, cheese, chicken or other topping, salsa, guacamole and sour cream. The fry bread is chewy. The whole thing is great. You can make the fry bread several days in advance. We've been eating this all week and it hasn't lost its allure.
It maybe groundhogs day but at least the recipe is new!
The absurdity of the human condition is that real and permanent change is so incredibly difficult to accomplish. We start off with great intentions and then some little slip up becomes this giant careening snowball rolling down hill, crashing into us and derailing all of our well conceived and fervently wished for hopes and dreams.
I did good for a long time. I did. Slowly, though old habits reappeared. I stopped writing because that was going to mean confession and while it may be good for the soul, the mea culpa is hard on the ego. So I ran away. I'm so glad my cousin brought it up because the truth is, when I was writing the blog I was making better choices. I did feel more accountable. I also think I probably stood a better chance of succeeding had I kept it up, so hiatus over. I'm back.
Updates abound. Bryn moved to NYC in October. Caylyn moved home a year and a half ago which was a drama but in the end a right choice for her and she's doing well. Brian and I are good. We're both employed. Have our own business on the side and truly believe we are destined to win the lottery. Live as a big picture is much better than it was and I have great hope that the future will continue in that vein.
What hasn't changed ONE IOTA is my weight. My struggle with it. Nothing. Nada. Zip. So it really does feel in many ways like ground hogs day, deja vue, how am I still fucking here retarded. What's funny though and the timing on this is rather interesting is that we moved 2 weeks ago and moving always triggers within me this sense of wiping the slate clean, starting over, doing over, being different and I've been feeling that way since the movers drove off leaving us with a million boxes to unpack.
Unpacking. Now there's a word. How much crap does one really need and I don't just mean this in the physical tangible sense but in the emotional sense as well. I have been hauling both kinds of baggage around with me for years without every stopping to sort through it to see what still works, what do I want or need to ditch, what is a permanent fixture. They are big questions and not just about what silly coffee cups to keep or pitch but also what parts of me is it time to deep six?
I'm 53. There are parts of me that I really value. There are other sections though that I am just sick to death of hauling around. I'm sick of my lack of self discipline, which I can manage in fits and starts but then boom my inner two year old arrives on the scene wanting what she wants when she wants it and up and over goes the apple cart of maturity. I've decided I don't want to BE HER ANYMORE. Who I'm going to be though is kind of a mystery. I hope you'll stick around for the trip.
AND I have a recipe for you. My friend Caroline just went on this fantastic personal quest and is transformed. Somewhere along the way she also had a fry bread taco and it sounded so delish that I had to try so here goes. It's chicken but super easy to vegetarian/veganize. We had it for dinner the other night and the ooohing and aaahhhing from Brian, Carolina and I was pretty ridiculous. Let me know what you think.
Fry Bread
4 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup instant skim milk
1 Tb. Baking powder
Salt
1 1/2 - 2 cups warm water.
Mix it all together until it starts to form a ball. Let sit covered for an hour to relax the gluten. Divide the dough into 14 -16 pieces and roll out as flat as you can get it. Fry until brown on one side in vegetable oil, flip brown it up. Drain on paper towels.
On top of that. I butterflied 2 big chicken breasts then cut them into strips and sauted them in olive oil, seasoned with salt, pepper, red pepper, garlic powder, cumin and chili powder.
Take a fry bread, smear it with heated vegetarian refried beans, cheese, chicken or other topping, salsa, guacamole and sour cream. The fry bread is chewy. The whole thing is great. You can make the fry bread several days in advance. We've been eating this all week and it hasn't lost its allure.
It maybe groundhogs day but at least the recipe is new!
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