Recipes

Garbanzo Bean Salad

5 Comments

We’re having a family cookout today, and I wanted to bring a healthy side dish.  After some googling, I decided to go with this recipe for Greek Garbanzo Bean Salad.

My salad consisted of:

  • 2 HUGE seedless cucumbers
  • 2 HUGE green peppers
  • 1/2 of a HUGE red onion
  • 2 cans of garbanzo beans (AKA chick peas), drained and rinsed
  • a HUGE container of cherry tomatoes, halved
  • 1 3.5 ounce container Athenos Reduced fat Feta Cheese

Isn’t it weird how sometimes you can go to the grocery store and all the veggies are puney, then sometimes they all look like they are on steroids?

The dressing consisted of:

  • 1 cup Ken’s Steakhouse lite Italian Dressing
  • 1 tsp black pepper
  • 3 cloves of garlic
  • 1 tsp garlic salt
  • juice of 1/2 a lemon

All togetha nah:

All up in there:

Hope the family likes it!

Continue Reading

Recipes

Tropical POB Smoothie

2 Comments

I’m sure you all are very much aware of the fact that I’m attending the Healthy Living Summit next week!  Woot!

The attendees recently got an email inviting us to enter into a Stonyfield Farms Smoothie Contest.  The only requirements are that the recipe contact at least one cup of any Stonyfield Farms or Oikos yogurt and that there not be more than 5 ingredients in the recipe.  The more organic the better!

I have a smoothie nightcap several times a week, and my usual mix consists of strawberries, blueberries, and spinach.  Given that this is a competition, and I’m slightly competivie 😉 I wanted to make a smoothie that was different than the usual.

So, here’s what I got: 

  • 1 cup Stonyfield Organic Plain Yogurt
  • 2/3 cup chopped pineapple
  • 1 clementine orange (or half of a regular orange)
  • 1/2 cup chopped banana

I tossed all the ingredients into the blender and added a few ice cubes:

Blended everything up, poured into a glass, and then realized I had only used four ingredients (ice doesn’t count right?)… so I added a strawberry for garnish.

Check me out!

Disclosure: This entry is for the Healthy Living Summit Stonyfield Smoothie Contest.  Stonyfield is a sponsor of the Summit, but not this contest.

 

 

Continue Reading

Ramblings

Cool Blog Stuff!

3 Comments

I’m not exactly the most creative person in the world.  I am an accountant after all…  Lucky for me, I have some people in my framily who are really stinkin creative. 

Check out my birthday present from my sister:

Isn’t that awesome???  Check out Jennifer’s pottery on the JMNPottery website!  She does custom orders too, of course 😉

I wanted to get some business cards for the healthy living summit next week… but that didn’t pan out.  That’s ok though, my friend Jason made me some AWESOME t-shirts to wear at the summit:

I’m super pumped for the HLS!  You can check out Jason’s website here.

In foodie news, I found a new favorite cereal combination.  It consists of Cinnamon Honey Bunches of oats and Almond Breeze Unsweetened Vanilla Almond milk in a 2:1 ratio (who doesn’t love a good ratio in the morning 😉 ) then topped with sliced up strawberries. 

The key is to let the almond milk soak in to the cereal for a little bit before eating:

Yum-yum in my tum-tum 🙂

Continue Reading

My Favs, Ramblings

Sometimes, it’s not about the food

3 Comments

Sometimes, it’s not about the food.  Sometimes it’s about life!

I am extremely lucky to have an amazing family, and an amazing mom in particular.  My mom is good at LOTS of things, but she is specifically good with words.  Whether long or short, her words always touch you.  Given that I have a lot of words on this blog 😉 I wanted to share some words from a very wise woman with you all 🙂

Hey Mare–

I had a horrible day at work on Friday–tears, panic attacks, heart palpitations, you name it. My immediate supervisor gave me a list of things to accomplish that would require a rare and amazing feat of endurance. I only got through 85% of the list by quitting time. I tried to talk to my boss about how unrealistic it was to assign so much in one day and he said that it had to be done and that we’d all better get used to it.  Even after I got home, I felt traumatized by the day and couldn’t stop crying. But this morning, it made me think of you and how stressed you get about doing things right, doing them well, and doing them timely.  HERE’S WHAT I THINK:

1. For some reason, we both feel the need to push ourselves too hard sometimes–either because others expect it of us or we expect it of ourselves.

2. We are largely the source of the suffering we experience in those situations.

3. We would suffer less if we could acknowledge that we expect too much of ourselves, that we force ourselves to rise to unreasonable demands–those placed on us and, more often, those we place on ourselves.

4. Life is too short, too precious, to get so worked up over most of the stuff we get worked up about. It’s not healthy emotionally or physically. After all, what’s the worst thing that could happen if we don’t try to do too much? Really? What could possibly be worth having a stroke or a nervous breakdown over?

Did I get fired because I didn’t finish the tasks I’d been given? NO,

Did I feel like a failure at the end of the day? YES. Why? Because I am way too hard on myself.

What actually might happen is, since my bosses KNOW what a hard worker I am, they will, when we bring this up at the next department meeting, HAVE to listen to us when we tell them they were unfair and unreasonable to put us through what they did.  If I had worked through lunch, I probably would have completed my list, but I forced myself to take at least that much time to detox as best I could; it didn’t help much, but god only knows how much worse I would have felt if I hadn’t done that.

Okay, I hope all of this makes sense and makes you think. Think about your mom having a meltdown because she expects too much from herself the next time you’re in the same kind of situation–maybe you can feel more empathy for me than for yourself, which may help you slow your ass down and give yourself a break!

I love you, girly.

Mom.

Continue Reading

Recipes

Turkey Meatball Sub

3 Comments

The other day I made some jokes about how crazy people get about the meat sale in my hometown.  But this really is no laughing matter.  It’s a serious matter, well a matter of serious savings that is!  Check out this post from my friend Allison–make that posts.  One post was not enough for the meat sale 🙂

 

I was thinking about the meat sale last night when I pulled the frozen ground turkey out of the freezer to defrost.  I had bought it at the LAST meat sale (was that back in tax season??), and conveniently froze up individual servings of the ground turkey for future  use.  I’m so dang smart sometimes 😉

I decided to make a meatball sub for dinner.  I didn’t have a recipe in mind, I just sort of started adding things to a bowl.  Here’s what I ended up with:

  • 1/4 package of 99% lean ground turkey breast (about 5 ounces)
  • 1 egg white
  • 1/4 cup chopped white onion
  • S&P
  • 1 sprig fresh oregano (shout-out to the backyard garden 🙂 )
  • 1 sprig fresh rosemary
  • Sprinkling of marjoram
  • 1 clove garlic
  • 1 tbsp quick oats

Meatball mixins:

 

I mixed everything together, then used a small cookie dough scooper to scoop out 6 meatballs.  I placed the meatballs on a cookie sheet sprayed with cooking spray, and popped them into a 350 degree oven for 15 minutes.  Then I flipped the meatballs over and cooked for an additional 5 minutes.

Meat-a-ball-ay:

Next, I cranked the oven up to 415 degrees, and prepped some brussel sprouts for roasting.  I swear I must have bought the never-ending basket of brussel sprouts last weekend.  I feel like I’ve eaten them every night, yet haven’t made a dent in the basket!  Check out this post for how I roast brussel sprouts. 

While the brussel sprouts were cooking, I stacked up the turkey meatballs on a Joseph’s Low Carb pita, topped them with 1/4 cup Classico Fire Roasted Tomato & Garlic sauce, and sprinkled with S&P and Red Pepper Flakes. 

Then I wrapped it all up in some foil, and tossed into the ovenfor the last 5 minutes or so of the brussel sprouts cooking time.  Anytime I’m trying to make a healthified sub, I make sure to do this step.  It gives all the flavors a chance to marry and the pita gets nice and warm and soft.

Brussel sprouts make a comeback:

Altogether now:

Delish!  I love when I can make a healthier version of a food that’s typically on the do-not-eat list!

Stats on dinner:  369 calories, 36g carbs, 6g fat, 51g protein, 14g fiber

Continue Reading