Cooking Frenzy

Hello all!

Since I last posted, I have completely cleaned up my diet, and have been on a cooking frenzy!  It’s crazy how much I’ve cooked over the last couple of days, and I have lots of pictures too!

Has it been hot where you are? Here in GA it’s been in the high 90′s every day!  I honestly feel like I can’t get cool.  Hence the digging in my backyard as of Monday morning at 7am:

The Big Hole

We’ve been working on getting this pool for a while now.  There were all sorts of issues to begin with but they’ve been resolved, as you can see!  Can’t wait for it to be finished!  I’m an instant gratification kind of person.  When I want something, I want it right away, and usually yesterday. LOL  I’m working on my patience.

On to the cooking frenzy. I’ve obviously been on a clean eating kick.  I am also on a 1200 calorie kick, also.  I’ve been eating a ton of food for that little calories.  Let me explain what I’ve been doing.  In a nutshell I’ve:

1.  Cut out preservatives

2.  Lowered sodium and fat

3.  Increased protein

4.  Lowered carbs

5.  No refined sugar

That leaves unprocessed, whole foods.  In a nutshell!

I guess I’ll start with breakfast, since it is obviously the first meal of the day.  After we got back from NY, I didn’t have anything in the fridge.  Including eggs.  The chicken farmer down the road told my husband that his chickens weren’t laying very many eggs.  I was so disappointed, because I love my fresh eggs.  Off to the grocery store I went, though, because I cannot not have eggs in the house!  I bought 2 cartons of 18 and commenced to hard-boil an entire carton:

and there were some omelets but they all look the same, LOL! This morning I made a 5 egg white omelet that had chipotle gouda cheese in it.  YUM!

I’ve been all about hot sauce and seafood this week. I’m giving you advance warning!

We did manage to get some homegrown beefsteak tomatoes from the chicken farmer and they were so great!

These became part of a sandwich I made with snow crab (that I took the time to crack out of the shell!) a preservative free “thin bun” and hot sauce for lunch one day:

I do not recommend the snow crab.  It took forever to shell them, and the end of the process (a total process, by the way) I got 4 ounces of meat from 2 bunches of crabs.  King crab all the way!!!

I also made some chicken tortilla soup this week and it was so good. It had veggies in it, chicken broth, chicken, and a ton of chipotle chili powder along with some cumin, onion, oregano, garlic….

Soup's On!

I ate that for lunch 2 days in a row!  I did find some tortilla chips at Publix (my local grocery store) that are clean so I had half an ounce of those with it today:

Yep, they're blue!

The end result.

Since I am going to be home until at least November, I decided to grow some lettuce in my Aerogarden.   I love my Aerogarden!  Since the pool is taking up most of the backyard I’m not sure we’re going to have room for much of a garden next year.  I really want to plant some herbs too…maybe an excuse to get another Aerogarden? Hmmmm!

My Aerogarden

Those are little pods that have seeds in them.  According to the directions, I should have spouts in 1- 3 days!  I will take progress pictures to share.

The POD

Well, back to the food.

I had purchased scallops along with the crab (I don’t know where this seafood kick came from!)  I’ve never actually cooked a scallop before.  I read how to do it online (broiling them) and made a little lemon juice and paprika sauce to eat along with them.  They were good, but I think I need practice at broiling. 

With some broccoliciousness on the side!

Dinner tonight was chicken.  Jeremy’s family recipe for Fireman’s Chicken.  Marinated, grilled chicken.  I had 4 ounces of sweet potato with cinnamon on it and a really large spinach salad on the side.  Fireman’s chicken, by the way, is when the Firemen raise money by selling their marinated, BBQ chicken.  They sometimes have tables where you can go and eat outside with the family, or you can get it to go.  It’s common up in Western New York and Northern NY.  Not sure where else.

BBQ Chicken

along with the sweet potato:

and salad make for a perfect meal.

The salad had tomatoes, banana peppers, red onion, mushrooms, goat cheese and Seeds of Change Organic Dressing.  I love goat cheese!  Absolutely one of my favorite cheeses.

Let’s talk about working out for a minute.  I took class at the gym today (BodyStep) and burned 573 calories in 60 minutes.  KILLER!!! And I loved every.single.minute of it!

Question of the day:

What are you all cooking this summer?  I love trying new things!

Hope you all have a great weekend!

Detoxification

Howdy!

As you can ascertain from the title of this blog post, I have finally arrived back in GA with my family.  For those of you that don’t know, we took a trip to Northern NY for the week of July 4th and then went down to Rochester, NY (just my husband and myself, we left the kids with my in-laws) to begin packing up my parents house and tie up loose ends there.

The second part of our trip was long and arduous.

This is where I like to have a blog, to show how a real person (myself, of course) deals with everyday frustrations that may or may not be common situations for others.  I would also like to share with you, that honestly, I fell off of the clean eating bandwagon.  The second week, I ate out ever meal except for breakfast.  Toward the end of the week, I gave up and ate breakfast out too.  I began to feel physically awful.  I blew up like a balloon (really – 10 pounds) which I am more then certain that it was from the sodium, fried, and preservative laden foods that I was ingesting in the restaurants.

The great thing about clean eating is that even if you stop, for any amount of time, you can start making wiser decisions at your very next meal. I came home with a plan.  It’s a detox plan, but not detox in the traditional sense (um, anyone heard of the water with lemon and cayenne cleanse??) I’ve never tried it and probably never will.  (It sounds disgusting!)

Detox clean eating style is cutting out the sugar, the unhealthy fats, and bad carbs, while drinking boat-loads of water to get rid of excess sodium, which causes bloat. I try to drink 80-100 ounces a day.

I shall get off my soap box now!   I tried to make better choices at times, and wanted to share the better (and worse choices) that I made with you.

TGIFriday’s (which was incidentally next to the hotel):

This meal was under the “Right Portion, Right Price” part of the menu.  The description:  Parmesan Crusted Chicken: “A sautéed chicken breast basted with Caesar dressing, then finished with a Parmesan-crust topping. Served with three cheese tortelloni tossed in spinach Alfredo sauce and a side of our fresh tomato Mozzarella salad.”

The other meal that I had was a salmon meal: (called Dragonfire Salmon)

The description:  “Norwegian salmon fillet fire-grilled and glazed with spicy Chinese Kung Pao sauce. Served over jasmine rice with pineapple pico de gallo, Mandarin oranges and broccoli.”

Those two meals weren’t terrible.  It was all of the rest of the yuck that I ate that put my body over the edge! Like these:

Buffalo Chicken Wings.

Let the detoxing begin:

Boars Head preservative free chicken and low sodium cottage cheese with Mrs. Dash on a whole grain preservative free thin-bun.

Tortilla Soup in the Vitamix.  So as some of you remember, I can sometimes cook and sometimes not so much and this was one of those recipes that needs some doctoring (so I guess it wasn’t my fault, lol…it’s not my recipe!).  It kind of tasted like veggie soup with taco seasoning.  Hopefully I can fix it tomorrow with the addition of more taco seasoning (organic) and boneless, skinless chicken breast!!

3 ounces of steak, boiled cauliflower and roasted sweet potato.  (Can you believe that the potato is just over 100 calories? All of that potato is only 1 cup!!)

Rotisserie chicken breast eaten sans skin with broiled broccoli with Mrs. Dash.  On the side I had leftover greek salad with Newman’s Own Lighten Up Sun Dried Tomato Vinaigrette Dressing.

I was disappointed today because the farmer down the road from my house was out of fresh eggs.  He told my husband that his chicken’s weren’t laying that many.  We’re supposing because it’s been so hot.   I only have one egg for tomorrow!  I guess I need to stop at the grocery store.  Jeremy did come home with a boat load of tomatoes, though!

So it’s been a couple of weeks of ups and downs.  I was sad when I came home, but then my girlfriends all decided to stop by the night I got back:

They made my night!

on a mission…

I have decided that I am on a personal mission to get as fit as I can and clean up my diet as much as I can between now and June (when we go to the beach, haha!) and then carry on, of course, during and after my vacation. I am sooo looking forward to my vacation!

With that being said, I had a rockin’ workout today! I went to my BodyAttack class, which cheered me up considerably, then worked out on the floor with weights for another 45 minutes…today I did chest, shoulders and abs.  I was supposed to do triceps too, but I just didn’t have anything left.

• Machine chest press, 60 lbs. 3 sets of 8
• Machine chest fly, 60 lbs. 3 sets of 8
• Dumbbelll incline bench press 20 lbs. 3 sets of 10
• Bar military press 40 lbs. 3 sets of 8
• bar upright row 30 lbs. 3 sets of 10
• dumbbell lateral raise 8 lbs. 2 sets of 8 (uhhh, these are hard! Something to work on!)
• bench leg raise 40 reps
• incline reverse crunch 40 reps
• kettlebell side bend (15 pounds) 24 reps (12 each side)
• pulse ups 36 reps
• v-up 12 reps

I guess I did a lot today, I didn’t realize until I wrote it all out!

I have an instructor/national trainer at my gym who is eating clean and she’s been giving me a lot of food for thought lately.  It’s nice to know someone that you can bounce things off of and get ideas from in “real life”. Plus, it’s great for support!  I know a lot of people who don’t have that kind of support, either in real life or online…I ran into that myself when I first started eating clean from my “friends”.  They thought I was obsessive/compulsive and my eating habits were strange. Eventually, they came to accept it; but it was kind of a long road.  I persevered, though, and believe that I came out stronger because of it!  Strong-willed…that’s me!   Food for thought here….if it were easy, everyone would be doing it. Nothing is free.  You have to work at this like everything else.  The payoff is your health.  So eat clean, be healthy!!!

Enough talk today, I guess maybe you want to see what I ate? It wasn’t very exciting…but it was yummy…and I did manage to cut out sugars today, and felt a ton better and not so weighed down.

I got home from the gym and decided I was going to make cut up sweet potatoes, but I burned them.   Have you ever tried a burned sweet potato? YUCK. I really wanted to eat them, too.  In place of the burned potato, I had some foods that you’ve seen before but all together in one place for my lunch today:

Luuunch!

Leftover tuna fish from yesterday with the Santa Fe Marinade, cottage cheese (low sodium), raw peppers and Mary’s Gone Crackers.  Perfection in a bowl.

I must admit that I just didn’t know what else to eat today so I didn’t do the snacky-snacky thing.  Dinner was yummy and very filling:

Grilled pork chop, large sweet potato, and squash with craisins and fresh oregano.  Was fantastic!!!

I love the squash.  I think I like it better with basil instead of oregano.  It was still good, though!

MASSIVE sweet potato. With cinnamon.

I plan on having a banana boat for dessert….it might look something like this:

Banana, coconut, natural peanut butter, golden raisins, honey.

Or it might look something like this:

Banana, raisins, raw cashes, cacao nibs, nut butter.

Who knows? We shall see!

Have a wonderful and healthy hump day!

Jessica xoxo

Breakfast for Dinner

Hello friendlies!  I am in a fantastic mood tonight (you will see this post in the morning ) I finally got a good workout in this week! Whoo-hoo!  I didn’t go on Monday, Tuesday was interrupted during class for my kids early dismissal from school for the snowstorm (yes, I live in GA!), so I only got 3/4 of a class in and chest (weights).  I was actually sore this morning from the weights, because I decided to increase my weights and decrease my reps.

I’ve had enough, I really want to get toned before we leave for the family vacay in June! Remember, however, that being fit is 80% nutrition.  I think I’ve been cheating too much as of late, so have tightened up my eats, which you will hopefully see over the next few days.

With that being said, I just couldn’t decide what to eat for breakfast!  I decided on my staple as of late:

1 whole egg, 2 egg whites, mushrooms and herbs de provence.  One rock hard half of a blueberry bagel.  I could have broken a window with that thing!  I ate it anyway, just because it was really stale didn’t mean that it tasted bad, LOL!

I went to pick up Biscuit, it was a wonderful, sun-shiny day today and 41 degrees!  Biscuit is doing really well, although the vet put a pain patch on her which is making her tired.  Happy to have her home, though!

After the 2 hour drive, I got home finally and it was already lunch time!  I decided on leftovers:

Leftover clean baked chicken with Frank’s Red Hot (completely clean!!) and half a sweet potato.  Spicy but not too hot, what they make Buffalo Chicken Wings from! (Remember, I lived in Buffalo for many years, so I know.)  It was sooo good, and I totally recommend it if you like some spice in your lunch.

I knew I was going to need a snack this afternoon before going to the gym tonight for BodyCombat…so I chose a Luna Bar:

Blueberry Bliss.  LOVE it!

Those bars are decadent.  Again, the sugar is high (I think 12 grams).  FYI.

I dragged myself to the car after having a large cup of coffee and ROCKED it in Combat!  Whoo-hoo!  I love when I take class and it all falls into place!   Where you feel like you really got a good workout in, that burned lots of calories, and made you more fit all at the same time.  Unfortunately, my Polar heart rate monitor is on the fritz, so I had to hand it back in…so no actual numbers for the calorie burn.  I can only use my Garmin one outside when I run because it needs a satellite signal.

During my workout I’ve been drinking tea, just to have something different with water.  I am not a fan of sports drinks or flavored what-not, because generally they are not clean and have a lot of calories in them and/or chemicals.

This is what I’ve been drinking:

I’ve been drinking this as well:

I love Yogi teas.  They are very mild, all natural ingredients…they make me feel like I’m putting good things into my body!

I came home starving.  Another sign of a kick-butt workout! Except I didn’t feel like chicken…or turkey.  I used my last 3 eggs and made this:

Looks like breakfast!  1 whole egg, 2 egg whites with herbs de Provence, caramelized onions, mushrooms, roasted broccoli and toast (x2).

Well, I have to sign off.  All of the driving, working out and eating has left me exhausted!  Hope y’all have a fantastic Thursday…the weekend is almost here! YAY!!!

Jessica xoxo

Super Survivor Thursday!

Yes, it’s Thursday. YES, Survivor was on.  I love my Survivor.  I won’t post anything about the show, because there may be some west-coasters out there and I don’t want to ruin it for them!   Go Boston Rob!!! I am so glad it is Thursday!  Whoo-hoo!

I decided a big breaky was in order since I was going to BodyStep this morning.  It was soooo good! One meal I don’t normally mess up is breakfast!

Eggs. Bagel. Yumminess!!!

What we have here is one whole egg, 2 egg whites, mushrooms and herbs de provence.  My carb was a blueberry bagel with blueberry jam.  Approximately 310 calories.

Then I had my workout session, and I kicked it hard. In BodyStep I burned 488 calories at 22% fat.  After BodyStep I decided I wanted to run a few miles instead of weights.  I just don’t see the point in lifting until the 1/2 marathon is done.  I believe that it’s tremendously hard to gain muscle when doing so much cardio.  Just as a side note, I do get some body-weight resistance training (about 15 minutes worth, plus abs) in my classes so I will not lose my muscle tone.

With that being said, I ran 2.75 miles after class and burned 335 calories at 21% fat.  This is a grand total of: 823 calories. Whoo-hoo!   This would also explain why I was soooo hungry today and craving carbs (along with the usual cheese and chocolate cravings of late).

Let’s talk lunch.  Lunch consisted of one of these @ 100 calories (and clean, which is why I wanted to try them):

It was good.  Definitely had a different texture than a burger, but I wasn’t expecting a burger, either.  I smothered it in cheese and added some sides:

Gardenburger, 1/4 cup low-fat cottage cheese, yellow bell pepper.  All of this = happy, happy, me! Oh, and 1 slice mozzarella cheese.  Approximately 240 calories.

By the way, I am calorie-ing out my foods today because I was curious.  It does not include the chocolate I ate, LOL!

Then I had a cheese stick with Sophia, approximately 90 calories.  And this is where I give up with the calorie counting.  It’s just so tedious. I try to listen to my body, and I was super hungry today. So be it!!

Dinner was leftovers tonight.  While the kids had spaghetti and meatballs, and Jeremy had chili with toasted rolls (I partook in 1/2 a buttered hamburger roll), and a couple of spoonfuls of his chili (homemade, yum!)  I had leftover Delmonico Steak (approx. 3 ounces) 1/2 of a huge sweet potato with a garlic yogurt sauce, and my squash with cranberries and basil.  I dipped the steak in the hot pepper salsa I’ve been all about.  Scrumptious and filling (after I ate all of mine and some of Jeremy’s dinner…glad he likes to share )

Dinner of Champions!

Oh, and a pic of the largest sweet potato I’ve ever seen:

Here are some more pics of the potato, LOL:

Sweet Potato with yogurt garlic sauce. HEAVEN!

Also, a pic of the squash:

Cranberry Basil Butternut Squash

Then there was another cheese stick, chocolate…I think that was it for dessert.  I was starving during Survivor again, so I decided I needed more cheese (this time havarti) and half of a honey wheat bagel that I toasted and had melty, cheesy goodness:

WOW! I think I ate a lot of food today…but with the calorie burn, it was completely justified.  Tomorrow is the day I run the 7 miler.  I swear!  I know I’ve been putting it off.  I think I should have put my long runs on the weekend, instead of Wednesdays, because I’m dreading how sore I’m going to be.  An ice bath may be the order of the day tomorrow when I get home   Sad thing is, I could’ve done it today, I got into a zone while reading my new Oxygen magazine on the treadmill, but had the kids with me at the gym and didn’t want to starve them to death as it was almost lunchtime!

Hope you all have good clean eats and a fantastic night.  See you after the run tomorrow!

Jessica xoxo

new eats Monday!

Good evening my friends!  Hope you’re having a great day.  Today was slow going.  Eventually I made it out of the house and to Walmart with Sophia for some more groceries (we go through a LOT of groceries, LOL!)

I woke this morning to the kids jumping around and the dog barking.  We are on February break this week, so there wasn’t really any reason for me to get up super early.  After I tended to the puppy, and the cats, the goldfish, and the lizards, I was finally ready to make my own breakfast.

I was starving at that point!  I decided on some pancakes in short order!  I made a stack of them, but the ones I made for myself were decidedly thinner than a normal…as I was trying to make crepes.  They weren’t that thin, but it’s a work in progress!

Thin pancake

So I took my newfound cottage cheese that I bought the other day and hadn’t eaten in forever:

and mixed it in with some salsa that Jeremy bought me as a surprise the other day:

resulting in the following picture which I have yet to name: (and thinking of calling it a panoli…what do you think?)

It was spicy and yummy.  WOW! I actually made something that tastes good, LOL!

I was really, really missing my veggies for lunch today.  In light of that, I decided to eat the following and it was so good:

There was actually a lot more broccoli.  I ate the whole steamfresh bag! LOL!  I had put some Braggs Amino’s on it.  That other blob is a sweet potato that I made in my *new* convection oven that Jeremy got me for Christmas, and then sprinkled it with cinnamon.  I was full for hours.

I ate a PB&J Larabar for a snack after Sophia and I got home from Target.  That’s the only flavor that I even kind of like:

Jeremy’s home working this week so it makes dinner interesting, because sometimes, I just don’t want to eat what he and the kids are having, although most of the time I give in.

Tonight, we decided on spaghetti with meatballs for Jeremy and the kids.  My dinner was a variation.  Instead of semolina (regular spaghetti) I ate Quinoa Spaghetti.  I loved this spaghetti.  It doesn’t have the funky texture of whole wheat or whole grain pasta, and tasted just like regular spaghetti!

The nutrition information:

I only had 1 oz. dry…2 ounces would have been an entire plate full!

So instead of the meatballs, (which I snagged a couple anyway ) I ate the marinaded chicken from the other day (sans skin).  I also ate the squash with basil and craisins.  A complete meal!

My confession today is that I didn’t go to the gym as I planned.  I am trying to be so conscious of over-training. As many of you know, I’m training for a half marathon at the end of March, but I refuse to give up my aerobics classes to do it.  Yesterday after my run, my body completely rebelled against me…I woke up this morning really sore behind my right knee, and I must have slept funny because I could barely move my neck all day.  So no class for me!

I am really looking forward to my BodyAttack class tomorrow…my fave class….I’ve been missing it for 3 weeks!

So see you tomorrow night, my friends.  Hope the rest of your night is heavenly!

Jessica xoxo

Finally. TGIF!!

Hello all!  It is finally Friday! Jeremy finally got home last night, and I couldn’t even stay awake until he got home! It was only midnight! I just talked to Jeremy and he said it was 2am.  It took him 9 hours to get home from Ohio!  Holy cow!  I did wake up briefly to say “hi”, then rolled over and went back to sleep.  At some point during the night Sophia came down and got in bed too but I have no idea when., it was actually 3:45am.  I was just that exhausted!

Today is a very busy day for me as I have a lot going on.  In the following order:

1. long run at the gym (5 miles or so)
2. figure out dinner
3. clean
4. pack

I am taking a trip to my hometown of Rochester, NY, to help my parents out who aren’t feeling well.  Should be back in a few weeks–we have my husband and in-laws taking the kids.  Please keep us in your thoughts (and if you pray, in your prayers). Thanks!  Rest assured I will be bringing my laptop…so the show must go on! My personal training book is also being lugged with me, so maybe at night I can get some studying done.

What did you all think of the top 10 list?  A lot of the things on the list are inexpensive, or not very expensive.  You don’t have to spend a lot of money to eat clean.  When I get back home, I think it would be a good idea to add up what I spend on the clean eating foods.  All bets are off with anything else.

This morning breakfast was usual and unusual.  It started with oats in a gigantic jar:

The Jar.

This is the big jar of peanut butter, not the little normal one.  It had oats, maple syrup, peanut butter, cinnamon and half of a granny smith apple:

The jar was soon empty:

Yes, I ate the peanut butter.   As we all know, clean eating is pairing a complex carb with a lean protein.  Even though the peanut butter has protein, apparently it wasn’t enough for me, because an hour later I was ravenous. So I ate the last one of these:

Bison burger with 2% cheddar cheese. Pure protein.  I am now full!

Yesterday, as usual, I has some of this, some of that, and some leftovers that I forgot to “pictureize”:

Sushi.  I had half a salmon roll and half a spicy tuna roll for lunch.  Before lunch and after my step workout (350 calories, which is awful for me but I was just so darn tired I took all the lower options and didn’t really work hard) I had a protein shake…Sun Warrior chocolate protein powder, unsweetened cocoa powder, maca, banana. The usual suspects! Oh, and my snack, Emerald Cocoa Roast Almonds with some raisins.

The next meal that I did take a picture of was dinner, and it wasn’t until 9pm:

Chicken breast, broccoli with real Parmesan cheese and a squirt of lemon juice, spring mix salad with yellow bell peppers and Goddess Dressing, and an honest-to-goodness normal sweet potato with cinnamon.  Wonderful!

There was some snacky-snacky in the form of Purely Decadent Ice Cream and peanut butter yet again:

Mmmm. Mocha Almond Fudge.

When you clean eat you’re not supposed to count calories, but I was curious as to where I was at.  So yesterday, I took the time to enter all of my foods into the Livestrong.com web site…called The Daily Plate.  It’s a fantastic web site, designed well, easy to use, and free.  It also has an iphone app that a person could sync to the site if they wanted to.  (That’s me, “Miss Technical”)

At any rate, my total calories = 1946 with everything I ate.  1946-352 (calorie expenditure) = 1594. My fat was awful high though, because of the nut butters and nuts…so I think I need to be watching that.  My protein was on the low side, also..so I need to increase that.  Easy Peasy! Starting today Well, starting now, since breakfast is already over by more than an hour!

Have a GREAT TGIF.  See you when I get to NY!

Jessica xoxo