The Bathroom Scale

I did something crazy.  I hid my bathroom scale under the bed.  Its been about a month and I think it was the best decision I could have made.  Lemme 'splain.

This year I decided to get healthy. After fad diets, diet pills, low carb, cheating on low carb, and then poorly following pretty much every diet on the planet, I started running.  And then doing some free weights. (I can do a pushup! A real one!)  And although my calories have been reasonable and I lost a percent of body fat, the scale did not move for 6 months.  Well actually, it did. It went up.

I know I know. "Muscle weighs more than fat." "Calorie deficit is how you lose weight" "Make better snack choices" "Don't eat after 5pm" "Eat breakfast". I. KNOW.

But it was still so discouraging. I couldn't be happy for the progress I had made. And then my friend somewhat offhandedly said, "You know I didn't even grow up with a bathroom scale. Not that I never had body image issues, but they were with the mirror, not that number."

Can I just tell you what a relief that has been for me? I still catch myself doing the mirror evaluation and I'm still keeping an eye on calories ... but that magical scale number has been out of my life for 4 weeks now!

I'm not dumb. I know when my workout hasn't happened in a week or that I ate a chocolate chip cookie (or 3... with ice cream...) today.  But I'm so sick of that number on the scale being an all consuming force in my life.  I have plenty of other things to worry about.

And I want to be healthy diva in body and mind.

Southwest Chicken Recipe

I saw this recipe on FrugalFlambe, which I *highly* recommend.  (click "FrugalFlambe" to go to the recipe) It's one of the food blogs I read regularly and the recipes are easy and tasty!  I have a few modifications and notes.

Firstly, this recipe really wasn't expensive.  We even used fresh pineapple and fresh cilantro but you could easily sub canned pineapple (which the original recipe actually calls for) and dry cilantro.

• Pineapple substitutes: Either 1 (15 oz) can of pineapple or one cup of fresh diced pineapple.
• Cilantro substitutes: 2 TBSP of fresh cilantro or 2 tsp of dry cilantro

Secondly, it was really tasty!  A really amazing combination of sweet salty and spicy.  Jacob rates my dinners on a scale of "once a week", "once a month", "occasionally" and "wasn't that a nice experiment".  This recipe got a "once a month" because he felt that the novelty of the combination would wear off if we ate it more often.

Thirdly, and this is very important in my house... no leftovers! Well, technically I had like one chicken tender left over but I ate very light tonight. Normally this would have been just perfect for us.  I will note, I would either half the chicken or double the salsa.  The full chicken recipe would yield 4 servings. Even with it halfed, I was still wishing I had just a LIIIIITLE more salsa. Yum!

Delicious pancakes

Jake and I love to do pancakes on Saturday mornings. I've been a Bisquick kinda girl, but I recently discovered this delightful product on the baking aisle of my Food Lion. Cultured Dry Buttermilk which keeps in my pantry, but only replaces the buttermilk in my recipes...

My pancake recipe has evolved over time but here is my current delicious recipe for
Saturday Morning Pancakes
Yields 6 large pancakes. (2 is a plenty for one person at our house)
Each pancake is: 130 calories, 2.8 g fat, 20g carbs, 2.2 g fiber, 4 g sugar, 6 g protein.

- 4 tablespoons of buttermilk substitute
- 1/2 cup of all purpose flour
- 1/2 cup of whole wheat flour
- 2 tablespoons flax seed (ground), optional
- 1 cup milk
- 1 egg
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1/4 tsp baking soda
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1 tsp Stevia (sugar substitute). If you use sugar, use 1 tablespoon. Stevia is much sweeter than sugar.

Make batter by mixing all ingredients. Make pancakes. Eat, yum!

Notes:

• Both the Flax Seed and the Stevia were purchased at Trader Joes.
• I have a bag of ground flax seed that I keep in the fridge to add whenever I'm baking. This is optional, but it adds protein, which helps the Glycemic Index of the recipe.
• The stevia was an experiment today. My husband, super taster that he is normally complains about anything that isn't sugar. Stevia is actually a plant extract and Jacob said "I can taste it but it's very mild." I couldn't taste a difference at all.
  
• I add chocolate chips to the pancakes as they are cooking. This is because 1- otherwise the chocolate chips don't get nicely spaced out and 2 - I don't eat chocolate chips in my pancakes, so I can make them to order... giving my husband extra calories and happiness, whereas I can keep the sugar low.
• And of course, I top my pancakes with low sugar syrup. :)

Weekend Warriors

We non-parent married kids tend to take the weekend warrior thing a little seriously. We have no soccer games, no play dates... and so we work!

Last weekend we spent all weekend doing yard work. There was a rented tiller, 6 yards of dirt, 5 yards of mulch, and 2 gallons of paint. We were exhausted! And if this sudden freeze tonight (it's been in the 70's for WEEKS!!) doesn't kill it all, we might actually have grass this year in our yard instead of clover! We also started the garden - potatoes and onions in the ground, and all the other vegetables are started inside.

But this weekend, I cooked. A LOT. I have 2 lasagnas, a double batch of daal, a crockpot of beef stew, and a prepped batch in the freezer ready for later. Oh, and I bought 6 pounds of clementines from Trader Joes. I don't intend to cook anything for at least 2 weeks. Mmmm, delicious homecooked meals.

Totally worth it though. Next weekend - laundry? Ha!

cake!

I would like to begin by explaining the fate of my previous 3 two-layer cakes.

Cake one was a mountain dew pineapple cake (yay Cake Doct0r) for my mom's birthday. The cake fell and so the pineapple topping was more like soup in a cake bowl. It tasted yummy though.

Cake two was a box birthday cake for my sweet husband. I had just gotten my icing tips and I wanted to make something beautiful. It ended up breaking in half, and while I was slathering icing over the crumbs to "put it back together" and sobbing, while occasionally falling in the middle of the floor.... Jacob finally took it from me and threw it away.

Cake three was another Cake Doctor attempt - this time at a Strawberry cake, for my mother in law's birthday. This one not only got the soup bowl effect, but it tasted like strawberry powdered milk. Not my best evening...

So onward to cake four. I decided to offer to bring a carrot cake to my grandmother's house for Easter, because I had seen this very cute decorating video on allrecipes.com that I wanted to try. Given the fate of my previous three cakes, I thought I'd do a trial run this weekend, and if it succeeded, take it to a friend's party later.

Yaaaaay!!! (Note, my husband has insinuated that objects in pictures may actually be less lovely than they appear.)

But I would just like to proudly state that this cake is totally covered in frosting, the carrots resemble carrots and there is no huge dip in the center. I win the cake making game. :)

And if you'd like them, here are the recipes for Carrot Cake, and colored frosting (although the frosting was a little slippery... and a how to decorate video.