I find most of my meal planning revolves around whatever leftovers I happen to have in the fridge. On a typical day I am cooking for one person, which leaves me with the option to eat the same things for several days on end or reincorporate the leftovers into new dishes.
For lunch today I wanted to use up some leftover chicken I had grilled up earlier in the week, and I had some leftover tomato sauce from the 10 cheese pizza I made Friday. So I decided to make a chicken parmesan inspired wrap, healthified of course. (AKA leftover chicken, leftover sauce , NO cheese, on a Joseph’s middle east bakery low carb pita–seasoned up with salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, and dried parsley)
chicken parm wrap with roasted brussel sprouts
Aren’t Jarrod’s dishes lovely? 😉
After lunch we finished up the light tent. Now we just need to get some lights!
For my afternoon snack I had apples and some chocolate PB2.
Chocolate PB2 = fabulous! I need to work this into some shake recipes…
Tonight we visited our friends Tim and Jaci at their newly purchased, exquisitely decorated townhouse. Tim prepared a feast complimented with onions galore.
Roasted potatoes with onions and green peppers, seasoned grilled asparagus, and jerk marinated chicken:
Whenever I think of the word “Sunday” in my head, I automatically hear “Sunday, Sunday, SUNDAY!” (think football/race announcer guy Jan Gabriel).
When I woke up this Sunday, Sunday, SUNDAY! 😉 my body was begging for three things: Coffee. Eggs. Ham.
So after throwing some coffee on, I got to work on a 4 egg white scramble with leftover deli ham from the jewelry party I had last week.
4 egg whites, splash o' skim, salt, pepper, red pepper flakes
I also had some potatoes on the side. That’s one of the best things about being at the BF’s — he keeps a GIANT container of pre-baked potatoes in his fridge. 😀
Glorious!
Once the eggs were pretty much done scrambling, I threw the ham and potatoes into the pan to heat up. And breakfast was served!
Sunday morning breakfast
After breakfast, I hunkered down and finally posted the clothes I’ve been wanting to sell on ebay. I’m really glad to have that done with! All that ebaying made me hungry, so I decided to give the barley breakfast bowl a go.
My barley bowl consisted of 1/2 a serving of barley (cooked up last night and stuck in the fridge), 1 Chobani vanilla greek yogurt, and some blackberries and raspberries.
Barley Breakfast Bowl
I loved the barley in the yogurt! It was pretty filling too.
I must be honest though, and this may be blasphemy, but I actually prefer dannon’s vanilla greek yogurt to Chobani! I took a minute to compare the stats:
Tonight I was craving burgers and fries! Or at least a healthy version of them. So, we decided to cook up turkey burgers and turnip fries! That’s right, turnips.
I had a few snacks while shopping for groceries this afternoon:
This is my favorite of all the luna bars I have tried. Felt like I was eating dessert!
For the turkey burgers, I used this recipe as my guide but modified it slightly. Here’s what our burgers consisted of:
1 lb 97% Fat Free Ground Turkey Breast
1 small zucchini, grated
1/4 cup red onion, grated
1 clove garlic minced
Salt, black pepper, red pepper flakes
Now on to the fries! I don’t believe I’ve ever consumed a turnip before. I went to the local produce market to pick them up, and once I walked in the door I realized that I had no idea what I was looking for! After some deliberation, I picked up what I thought were turnips, and asked the nearest employee if they were, in fact, turnips. After a huge smile appeared on her face, she let loose a belly laugh, then told me I had picked up beets–which are not turnips for those who were wondering. 😛
Turnips (as opposed to beets)
With turnips (AKA not beets) in hand I headed to the kitchen to get to fry makin. We gave the turnips a good scrub, then cut then up into thin strips. We were hoping this would speed up the cooking process — next time I’ll go for bigger sticks (more like steak fries size) since the turnips shrink up considerably while cooking.
My arms sure are hairy 😉
We seasoned the turnip fries with salt, black pepper, and cajun seasoning. The first batch we cooked at 450 for about 40 minutes (again — hoping to get things mover fast since we were starving). These turned out good — but were not really crispy (even though some of them were burnt). The second batch we threw in at 350 degrees for 50 minutes.
The second batch didn’t really turn out crispy either–I’ll need to play around with the cooking temperature on these guys to get it right. Despite the lack of crisp, they were definitely tasty and definitely healthier than potatoes! They reminded me of the kind of fries you get in a big sack at Five Guys Burgers (minus the grease of course).
Early this morning I got a call from my dad saying he was on his way over to help me trim my trees in my backyard. So I quickly dove into the breakfast cookie I made yesterday. I think if you approach eating a breakfast cookie with the expectation that it will have the texture of an actual cookie you will be disappointed. I took two bites and put it back in the fridge–the moist texture just wasn’t doing it for me.
I quickly threw together an eggwich (1 egg (yolk poked), multi grain english muffin, squirt o’ ketchup). As the eggwich was wrapping up, I decided to give the breakfast cookie a second go. I cleared my head of thoughts of chocolately cookies and approached it with an open mind. This actually worked! The breakfast cookie is moist and slightly chewy–and I think you could really play around with the things you mix in to make it an A+ breakfast. I think I might actually pop the rest of the cookie into the oven later — just to see if it would get me the texture of an actual cookie 😉
Breakfast cookie stats (stats are for whole cookie — I only ate 1/3): 303 calories, 31g carbs, 12g fat, 22g protien 8g fiber
Back to the yard — I don’t know what happened this year, but my yard hit a major growth spurt. It seemed over the course of one weekend all the plants and trees in my yard just exploded with new growth. The trees in the backyard were so overgrown that they were actually laying on the house. I couldn’t even see out the kitchen window! Slowly but surely, I’m getting the yard into shape for cookout season.
yard looks huge now that trees are trimmed up
After a couple of hours of work in the yard I was famished. My doctor tells me I am hypoglycemic, which basically means I have low blood sugar. There really isn’t anything you can do for low blood sugar–other than regulate your food intake and make sure you eat frequent nutritious meals.
Up until this year, I never really took the time to plan out my meals and snacks for the day. I would hardly eat anything in the mornings so that I could over indulge at lunch. If I hit a lull where my blood sugar bottomed out, I’d chug a can of coke to get it to spike back up quickly. Obviously, this is not the right approach and it was not good for my body.
Now I make sure to take the time to plan out what I am going to eat each day. I usually sit down the night before and enter everything into MyFitnessPal to make sure I’m not over or underdoing anything. Though I don’t always stick to the plan to a T, I at least have healthy foods on hand to keep me energized and my blood sugar stable throughout the day.
I don’t always do as good of a job eating regularly on the weekends. When I’m out and about, food sometimes gets pushed to the wayside. This is especially true when I am working on the yard.
By the time I stopped to eat today I was shaking so bad I could barely hold the camera! I quickly threw together a wrap using some leftover turkey and ham, tomato, onion, banana peppers, hot sauce, and 1/2 a Joseph’s lavash bread.
Yes, I even had to take a bite before taking the picture!
I think I’ll try out the turkey burger recipe I posted earlier in the week for dinner. I’m really craving a big juicy burger and some fries right now. We’ll see what I can whip up 🙂
Usually on Friday nights, my BF (AKA man candy) and I order up some Gionino’s pizza with hot sauce. This week, however, we’ve got big plans for dinner Sunday night ( 😉 😉 Tim), so we decided to go the healthy route tonight.
The BF follows a strict diet and workout plan, which I have declared the “Road-to-Ultimate Fitness.” He eats the same meals every day. Day in and day out. I would never succeed on the road to ultimate fitness. I love food far too much, and get bored far too easily to do such a thing.
Although the plan was to eat healthy tonight, there were no pizza sacrifices on my behalf! I whipped up a flat bread pizza using a Joseph’s Middle eastern Bakery Lavash bread, some Classico Fire Roasted Tomato & Garlic sauce, leftover grilled chicken, thinly sliced tomato and onion, and a random assortment of cheeses that have accumulated in my fridge.
pizza makin goods
It’s real easy to go over board on the cheese – so I made sure to measure everything out. 1 tbsp Kraft Italian Style Five cheese blend, 1 tbsp Athenos Reduced Fat Feta, 1 tbsp Digorno Shredded Three Cheese, and 2 tbsp fat free ricotta. That’s ten — count ’em — ten cheeses 😀
pizza into the oven
Some people hate ricotta cheese but I adore it. I feel it adds a layer of delicious decadence to any meal. (Which reminds me — I’ve been wanting to try out this recipe for Lemon Ricotta Cookies)
So back to the main event–THE PIZZA. I seasoned the pizza up with some garlic salt, black pepper, red pepper flakes, and some dried parsley and baked at 400 degrees for 15 minutes. Served up with some leftover cucumber salad.
For a person whose favorite part of a pizza is the crust, I was extremely happy with how this turned out! The flavors of the cheeses and seasonings were perfection! Only item to modify for next time will be to put the Lavash in the oven for a few minutes before topping it — that will give it time to crisp up so the sauce doesn’t make it soggy in the middle.
Stats for the whole lavash pizza (and I was only able to eat 2/3 of it): 431 calories, 35g carbs, 13g fat, 48g protein, 10g fiber
I do want to make side note of my afternoon snack — I had an afternoon meeting so I grabbed a Peanut Butter Cookie Luna bar to take with me. I’ve heard mixed reviews on this specific flavor, but I thought it was downright tasty! Though, it did remind me more of a peanut butter rice crispie treat than a cookie, but I’m content with that!
Luna on the keyboard so I wouldnt forget her 😉
After the pizza eatin’, I decided to mix up a breakfast cookie. I follow a few different food blogs, and I kept seeing this “breakfast cookie” popping up so I decided to look into it. According to her website, Fitnessista is the brains behind the breakfast cookie. I’m pumped to give this one a go!
My cookie consisted of oats, optimum nutrition chocolate whey, Trader Joe’s crunchy Almond butter, skim milk, some mashed up blackberries, and little brown sugar.
