whoa
Broke my blog again. Company’s coming in 15 minutes. ACK.
I’m looking for a theme with a bit more width in the main column so I can post larger pictures. I may be able to live with this theme if I can muck with the colours and widget placement a bit.
Tomorrow. Gottagodrinkbeernowkbye.
Edit to add: Well, I found a better theme, but it has so! many! options! (Good-bye green italics, etc.) But, as luck would have it…gottagodrinkbeernowbye.
she-ra
I didn’t take a picture of last night’s dinner because I made a whole chicken and butternut squash and quite frankly, you’ve all seen cooked chicken and squash before.
But maybe you’re looking for a recipe. OK then:
- Sprinkle some Mrs. Dash on a whole chicken (I used the one in with the teal coloured lid, I think it was garlic & herb? I have a few)
- Cut the squash in half
- Scoop out guts
- Throw butter in gut-hole
- Place in 350 degree oven
- Go fart around on the internet
- Have a bath
- Read
- Take it out in about an hour and 20 minutes.
- Eat
Not rocket science, right? Which is kind of the point of this post. It is not THAT HARD to eat well.
Oooh look at me on my second day of this diet, I’ve MASTERED THE EATING UNIVERSE ET CETERA!
Actually, I said it before – in general, we eat quite healthily. This dinner is nothing out of the norm for us. It’s what we consider healthy, affordable and it fits our schedules. We like to eat like this.
But dude(s), honestly, I like crap too. My favourite food groups are burgers, French fries, pizza and ice cream. I know I can’t eat that stuff every day and expect to feel good or look good or be healthy. But I am SO an “everything in moderation” girl. SO MUCH. I am eliminating these things from my world for a while, until I lose some weight, but will I eat them again? OH HELL YES. Life is too short not to.
That’s my philosophy (our philosophy, really. Andrew and I feel very similarly on this). Like I said earlier, we’ve fallen into some bad habits lately. Our dinners are usually fairly healthy but we do (oh boy do we) splurge occasionally. For the next few months, we need to splurge less and I need to concentrate on making my lunches and breakfasts as healthy as our dinners are. A little preparation on my part has made this seem almost effortless.
But back to my point. Our dinner could not have been easier. It was no harder to sprinkle some herbs on a chicken and throw it in the oven than it would have been to to wrestle a pizza out of the shrink wrap and throw it in the oven. And it was probably cheaper too. We found chicken on sale for $12 for a package of two*. The squash was about a buck. Factoring in butter and the herbs, our dinner cost less than $10 and there was enough chicken left over for Andrew to have for lunch today.
Easy. Not expensive.
We do have a food budget. We may spend more on food than others do, but that’s OK with us. We enjoy good food and it’s a priority to us. Sometimes it IS cheaper to eat crap and sometimes people don’t have a choice – that really bothers me. I’m not judging anyone who makes their food decisions based on economics, but this dinner wasn’t expensive, I hope by most people’s standards.
I also know I have a bit more time on my hands than a lot of people. I have no kids, a one bedroom apartment to take care of and I live five minutes from my office. But I also know there are some days when I would rather claw my own eyes out than figure out what to make, shop and then cook when I get home. The freezer section may call out in these situations, but I need to remind myself that the meal I prepared last night was no more difficult to make than throwing pre-made food into the oven is.
Anyway. I’m not writing this because I think I’ve solved the world’s eating and meal planning issues. Time, money and scheduling all play parts in it, I know. I’m not saying I’m right or anyone else is wrong. I ate a fucking chicken for dinner last night. It was good. It was easy. It was inexpensive. I liked it. I think you might too.
* Obviously not organic. More on that later. That shit is expensive, yo.
In: general · Tagged with: "primal eating"
coconut chicken and sesame spinach
Yesterday was our first official day eating primal style (Bam! Bam! Bambambam!) although, as I said earlier, we really do pretty much eat this way most nights anyway. We typically don’t eat pasta, rarely have bread and only occassionally have rice so it’s really not much of a shift for us.
What was a shift for me was looking up recipes with no consideration given at all to the fat and calories. I started with this recipe for Coconut Shrimp and quite honestly I have never, in my life, cooked with coconut. FATT-E-NING amirite? The primal eating style not only allows cooking with coconut, but recommends it. Yowza.
I would absolutely try this recipe as written (with shrimp, der) but we had a couple of boneless, skinless chicken breasts in the fridge that had to be eaten, so I tried it with chicken and it was great. Here are the non-meat ingredients, taken from the page linked above:
- 1 cup unsweetened coconut flakes
- 1/2 cup almond flour
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 2 eggs
- 1/4 – 1 cup organic virgin coconut oil for frying
(Coconut flakes AND coconut OIL OMG).
A couple of things:
- For two breasts (which I pounded out to flatten), I ended up with a little too much of the coconut/almond flour mixture.
- One egg would have been enough.
- I couldn’t find almond flour so I bought crushed (REALLY crushed) almonds. I’m not sure if there’s even a difference, but it worked just fine.
- I didn’t add the salt. I actually just forgot.
- There is no way, NO WAY, I used anywhere near a cup of the coconut oil. I purchased the oil for the first time yesterday and it came in a tub I found in the refrigerated section, so it was solid in the tub. I threw it in the pan about a teaspoon at a time and figure I used about three teaspoons.
The chicken browned up really quickly, but given that I never fry anything, I forgot that it would brown before it was fully cooked and the spinach was done and I was all “ACK NOW WHAT?” so I threw it in the oven at 350 for about 10 minutes and it may have been a tad overdone, but it was still really (REALLY) good.
As a side dish, I wanted to make spinach. I LOVE SPINACH a whole lot and I had it in my head to try something gomae’ish, but warm. Believe it or not, I actually had tahini in the cupboard (I think I once had an illusion I would make homemade humous HAHAHA YA RIGHT that happened).
I found this recipe for Spinach with Tahini – doesn’t get much easier than that. And yet I overcooked it when I misjudged the time it would take to fry+bake the chicken. That is your first warning about the picture I’m about to post. The second is that it’s just a shitty picture.
I told Andrew that I wanted to take a picture of our dinner, but he was starving, dinner was late, I am not yet a “quick on my feet” photographer and the lightening in the kitchen is horrible for photography (“photo-graph-ee”) apparently, so long story short, the photo sucks.
But, here it is: Coconut Chicken with Sesame Spinach (pretend the spinach is in focus, please).
I’ve just realized this theme doesn’t work super well with photos – it re-sizes them in a weird way, so I have to make them quite small. Time for a new theme, perhaps…
In: ramsay's recipes · Tagged with: "winner winner chicken dinner" "primal"
going primal
Hola, nobody!
You know how I always say I’m going to start writing again – posting recipes, writing in general, and then I never do?
Hi, I’m back.
This time I’m here because of food. Again. But with a slightly different focus. Andrew and I have recently decided to give a new way of eating a try and I’m hopeful it’s something we can stick with and see results from.
For months now, Andrew has been suggesting we try a paleo diet. I took one look at it and said “NO SALT? OH HELL NO.” But the fact of the matter is, I need to do SOMETHING and he’s recently talked me into trying a diet way of eating called primal eating instead, which is a little less restrictive than the paleo plan.
The truth is, we already eat quite healthily. We were both raised on healthy, non-processed, non-packaged food but we’ve fallen into sloppier eating habits of late, as many do, and we need to correct that.
(I had a whole ranting ranty rant written in my head against the evils of processed food and how they’re SO! BAD! and why are so many people KILLING! THEMSELVES! with them? Then I realized that if I substituted “processed food” with “meat”, I automatically had to hate myself. I won’t go there, but I think it’s fair to say many processed foods are terribly unhealthy and it wouldn’t hurt anyone to eat less of them. I’ll stop now).
I weigh more than I should. Probably 30lbs more than I should, although if I lost 20 I’d probably be happy. My BMI tells me I’m Overweight and I don’t like that label, oh no, I do not. I know many people take issue with the BMI scale in general and I wholeheartedly agree that for people with large builds and heavily muscled athletes it is pretty unfair. However, c’mon – I am neither large boned nor heavily muscled so it’s pretty fair for me and I’d like to see my BMI back in the Normal range.
Andrew is convinced of the health benefits of primal eating, and being in the health and wellness industry, he does know a thing or two (or a million) about the way the body works. I’ve done some research too and believe that we’re already pretty close to this way of eating – with one caveat: at dinner only.
My downfalls are breakfast and lunch. I’m on the go all day. I don’t bring breakfast or lunch to the office, which of course leads to muffins (Bran or Egg Mc) for breakfast and Subway sandwiches or cafeteria pasta for lunch. This is going to change.
This weekend I prepared a big pot full of soup to take for lunch. It took me very little time to brown some lean ground beef and season it with chili spices (NOT the packaged stuff – have you SEEN the sodium in that? 1/6 of the package is 22% of your daily recommended sodium intake. 1/6!!) and throw it in the crockpot with a bunch of veggies. And it’s totally delicious – better than anything I’d pick up in the caf and I know what’s in it.
I also made some breakfast frittata thingies (in a muffin tray) that were insanely easy and are really tasty. I’ll try to post the recipe and pictures the next time I make them.
Today, the first day on the diet way of eating went incredibly well. I ate my egg muffin frittata thingy for breakfast and had the soup for lunch. I also had a couple of small snacks and I’m happy to say I’m not hungry at all right now – really. Our dinner will be chicken breasts and spinach, which isn’t really any different than it normally is, other than I’m trying a recipe with coconut, which kind of scares the crap out of my trained by Weight Watchers brain (fat! calories! eeee!)
ANYWAY. I’m going to make an effort to post recipes and pictures of our meals here, which will also give me an opportunity to play around with my new camera (yay).
As someone who’s had her weight fluctuate over the years, one thing I’ve always wished when I got to my happy weight was that I’d taken some Before photos. I have done that this time although I’m not ready to share them until I have the Afters to go with them.
Wish me luck.
In: ramsay's recipes · Tagged with: primal
recipes
I’ve been sharing recipes I find around the web via my Google Reader shared items, but I find I’m losing track of them and they’re getting inter-mingled with other things I share in Google Reader. No inter-mingling!
I’ve created a Posterous site strictly for sharing recipes, you’ll find it here http://purplelara.posterous.com/
I’ve also un-shared (!) the recipes previously shared in Google Reader, so if you were relying on finding them there, please either subscribe to my Posterous feed (by becoming a Posterous user yourself) or by grabbing the feed http://purplelara.posterous.com/rss.xml for your favorite reader.
And yes, sorry, I’m going to “Share” my own post in Google Reader (how déclassé!), just so anyone who was following my feed via Google Reader or RSS can update their feeds.
I’m excited about the new (again) recipes on my Posterous site, so check it out!