I started a journey toward a healthier, happier, thinner, more balanced me exactly two weeks ago. This is supposed to be yesterday’s post, but…. alas time slipped away from me. I’m a bad blogger!! But I digress.
I wanted Saturdays to be a day of checking in and updating, mostly for my own sake, so I can look back and see my progress week after week, but I’m up to almost 20 followers in two weeks so I guess those of you following get an update as well!
I started at 275 pounds. That’s a lot. It’s too much. So, being thoroughly upset with myself for letting myself get there, I made some dramatic changes. I haven’t eaten out in two weeks. I haven’t drank anything but water, milk, or a smoothie in two weeks. I’ve cooked, mixed, or made all my food (well except for things like yogurt and whatever..)
And I go to the grocery store legit every other day at least haha. It’s kind of insane. I’ll work on the “planning ahead” aspect of this later, for right now, I’m just thrilled that I’m learning how to cook for myself. And things that are not just nutritious but also delicious!
As of yesterday morning, I checked in at 266.8 pounds. In two weeks, I’d say that’s a pretty good drop! So as planned, here’s my Check in, including my favourite smoothie, my favourite recipe, and my favourite moment.
Favourite Smoothie
This is reigning in at a solid peanut butter banana. I am out of cherries, so last week’s favourite with the almond butter and the cherries has fallen to the wayside until I run out of some more fruit and then clearly will just buy more cherries and less of the other things. Live and learn… but I don’t want to buy more cherries and leave the other fruits just sitting in the freezer.
SO
1 C Almond Milk
1 TBSP Peanut Butter (I use the one with honey in it cuz yum)
1 TBSP Ground Flax Seed
1 C frozen baby spinach
1 frozen banana, sliced
1 TBSP cocoa powder
Throw it all in the blender, liquify, and enjoy.
My favourite recipe…
This is a hard one, and you’ll understand why when you get to my favourite moment….
I have three awesome things to share with you that I found around the internet this week! Turns out, all that time I’ve spent learning the ins and outs of Pinterest has not been in vain! Pinterest is my new best friend. Follow me on Pinterest if you’d like some Pinspiration 😉
1. Cauliflower Pizza Crust
I had a friend over on Tuesday and was determined to make this for us. I had to use a few different pins (other people’s blogs) in order to get this to turn out, and I made slight variations in each, but here’s what I did.
I took a head of cauliflower, riced it in my food processor (which is small and will only do 1 cup at a time so it took FOREVER…. half an hour), then I wasn’t ready to make this til the next day so I dumped the riced Cauliflower into a large ziploc bag, pressed out all the air, and tossed it in the fridge. Your whole fridge will smell like cauliflower until you cook it. You’ve been warned.
The next day I dumped all the riced cauliflower into a glass baking dish, and put it in the microwave on high for 7 minutes.
In the meantime, I had grated about half a brick of marble cheddar cheese, chopped a red pepper and some broccoli, and lined my cookie sheet with parchment paper — because who likes washing cookie sheets??
I used this recipe.… but had to make a few substitutions. Not thinking on Monday, after I’d riced my cauliflower, I hard boiled all my eggs to take to work for lunches…. So my crust had no egg whites and I threw in an extra 1/4 cup of marble cheddar cheese to hold it together. Whether that worked or not is debatable… it was pretty crumbly, I’ll have to try again. But it was delicious. I also could have waited longer for the crust to cook… it didn’t really go golden brown. But I was hungry.
I used basil and italian seasoning instead of oregano and garlic because I didn’t have either and don’t really like garlic.
It turned out delicious! Hard to serve, but, delicious! I’ll try again another time with the egg whites and see what kind of difference that makes…. PLUS did you know you can make pizza crusts out of spinach, and carrots too? I kid you not. Thanks Pinterest!
Tip: When rolling your crust out, I put parchment paper on top of the cauliflower cheese mixture as well, cuz then I don’t have to wash my rolling pin. I’m all about NOT washing dishes!
Toppings: Broccoli, Red Pepper, Bacon Bits, Classico Four Cheese sauce, marble cheese
I found… you can tell it’s cauliflower… but it’s still absolutely delicious.
Next up in my 3 part series on favourite recipes is Parmesan Crusted Chicken with Bacon.
Whoa.
Amazing.
My variations: I had pretty much a whole brick of marble cheddar cheese at home already (it’s my favourite, I’m pretty picky about cheese). I didn’t want to have to buy Asiago AND Parmesan because I had neither, so for the coating I used a Parmesan-Romano-Asiago blend, already shredded, and for the topping I used marble cheddar. I used sunflower oil because that is what I have. The recipe wasn’t specific, but just so you know what I did… And lastly, I used bacon bits instead of real bacon because I thought I had bacon in the fridge, but it turned out it’d expired January 1st and it was nasty… sooo…. bacon bits.
This was my first EVER attempt at frying anything in oil on the stove. I’ve always been too afraid to burn the house down. And was it ever a smoky endeavour. I placed the first chicken breast in the oil and the smoke went everywhere. I took it out and yanked my smoke detector off the wall, pulling the battery out, and opened some windows (at -15 degrees Celsius…) … but it wasn’t enough. I dunked my next piece of chicken in the oil and it got so smoky that my alarm I can’t shut off, the one connected to my security system, it started going off too.
And it’s LOUD.
So ADT called to make sure my house wasn’t on fire and to walk my panicked self through how to disarm the system.
If you’ve done this frying in oil thing before — did I do something wrong? Can the oil be too hot? I don’t have a range hood so I’m sure that would have helped. I didn’t burn anything though, and it was delicious!
I served it with steamed spicy green beans. PS Whoever first thought “I should put this metal rack on my cookie sheet so I don’t lose my crispiness of my chicken on the bottom”? Genius. I will never skip the rack again.
Third and finally on the recipe list…. Roasted Spiced Sweet Potatoes.
Oh my goodness.
I don’t even have words.
Here’s the recipe. I did exactly what it said. Except if it called for a specific kind oil, I used sunflower.
Unbelievable.
I forgot to take pictures, sorry…. but they look every bit as delightful as the picture on the blog I linked to shows that they do. They’re so good… I just can’t even… I miss them already.
Anyway I’ve gotten rambly here… One last thought — I’ve gotten kind of tired of smoothies after having one every morning for breakfast for two weeks straight. I decided to switch it up and made crustless quiche cups. A few of these will be great breakfast, too! I followed the recipe but added some spinach and green pepper chopped in the food processor, and put basil in instead of salt and pepper. I also added bacon bits… which was probably overkill with all the ham (I used honey maple smoked ham slices), but oh well, overkill or not they’re awesome. I’m excited for breakfast!
Lastly, my favourite moment this week was when I realized that no matter how hungry I am, I’d rather eat at home than run through a drive thru because I can cook better than any fast food place going. I feel like this is a monumental step for me… I was half way through making the sweet potatoes last night when I realized I didn’t have ginger or nutmeg (thankfully the grocery store is 1:45 away), and it was already 7 o’clock and I was hungry, but I wasn’t the least bit tempted to run through the Wendy’s in the same parking lot, because I knew that my leftover parmesan crusted chicken with bacon, paired with steamed green beans and roasted spiced sweet potatoes were going to be way better than anything Wendy’s could possibly offer, so I waited patiently for dinner until 8 pm and it was a great decision.
125 Pounds to Freedom 