Fun Food Day

Had another late night with Tyler but oh well.  He's just a hungry hungry man.  I made up for it with a fun food day.  I know sometimes I get in a rut and have the same thing over and over, which is fine as long as it's healthy.  It's just boring for you guys.

So for breakfast I had an old favorite that I usually do almost every day, except when I don't have fresh blueberries or Greek yogurt- I had a power smoothie.  I have a little mixer that is quite similar to the Silver Bullet that you see on TV.  I fill up the bottom with frozen strawberries and blueberries then added one scoop of protein powder and filled the rest up with an organic yogurt product that is made locally.  It makes smoothies taste about 50 times better.  I usually just use water but went with this because it's soo good.

For lunch I used a leftover smart chicken breast- cut-up and reheated, threw it with some instant brown rice and dumped some homemade salsa over it.  It reminded me of doing the Standard Process cleansing program during my days at chiropractic school.  You could only have chicken or fish, brown rice and fruits/veggies.  So this meal was a staple.  I threw some black beans over mine for some extra fiber.

Should mention I had half a MOJO bar for a snack and some trail mix to get me through the afternoon.

Now for the grand showcase... grilled pizza for supper!  We haven't ever done this, so we were pretty excited to try since we both love pizza.  It's definitely going to need more experimentation, but it was delicious.

I just used a tube of thin crust pizza dough by Pillsbury, since I knew I would never get home in time to make it from scratch.    Make sure you prepare all the toppings before you get ready to grill, because you have to move fast.  I cut up 1 and 1/2 red onion and sauteed them in olive oil until they got all nice and caramel-ly.

For a protein I used an all natural chicken sausage.  It was a little too sweet, definitely go the Italian route next time.

For tomato sauce, just used the rest of a jar of spaghetti sauce that was in the fridge- it doesn't take much.  And cheese was just a pizza blend from Hy-Vee.  Sorry- no pictures of those items.

We packed everything up (including Tyler) and headed down to the grill.  We heated the grill up nice and hot, then sprayed it down with some PAM.  We decided to one at a time so we didn't screw up both.  That works well, because like I said, you have to move fast.

Tyler sat in his Bumbo (away from the grill) while we worked.  I caught him with a handful of grass in his mouth.  So he'll eat grass but not rice cereal.  Go figure.

So how did we create these masterpieces?  Throw the dough on the grill, and let it heat up.  It takes approximately 3 minutes to crisp up, if you start getting bubbles on the top it's ready to flip.  Then when you flip it, immediately place the toppings on because the other side doesn't take nearly as long.  For the second pizza, I pulled the dough off the grill then loaded the toppings before I put it back on.  That worked better.

Attempt #1

Attempt #2

You get such a nice crunchy crust... it's totally worth the hassle.  We learned you can't really load on the toppings, keeping it simple is the way to go.  The first one we made we put the cheese on last, and the second one we put the cheese on after the sauce then put the toppings on.  I liked it better the first way.

We will be revisiting this idea soon, needless to say.

That's all for today... looking forward to a productive Thursday!!

Hello incredibly long week!

This is going to be a tough week.  Our front desk girl is gone this week until Friday which means lots of work for the hubby and I.  I just got done working on charts, and there is a huge long list of things I still need to do tomorrow in the clinic.  No morning off for me tomorrow.  So needless to say, posts might be kind of short this week.

Breakfast was an energy bar from the Hy-Vee healthmart, I'm using a recycled picture here.

Lunch- I didn't have any chicken for a salad, so I had an open-faced roast beef and sharp cheddar sandwich.  Added some jalapeno mustard and spinach.  I also had a couple Doritos on the side since hubby opened a bag of those. Darn it!  Stupid salty weaknesses.  I did count though, and had less than the serving size, which was 11.  Go me.  And for dessert I had an awesome organic Fuji apple with a touch of peanut butter.

Hubby made supper- delicious grilled smart chicken (marinated in Italian dressing), steamed broccoli, and garlic rice.  Charts, blogging, pumping, bedtime.  Sorry that's all folks!

Rum for breakfast?

Thank you hubby, for letting me sleep in today!  I was so energized I decided to finally use those brown bananas.  So I made coconut banana bread with a lime glaze.  And yes the recipe calls for rum, so I broke out the Captain.  While I was making it, I had a piece of toast (with Ezekial bread) and some crunchy peanut butter and a drizzle of honey.

I found this recipe on a blog I read, Our Best Bites.  It was taken from a recipe that was originally found in Cooking Light.  The original didn't have the glaze, and it had rum instead of apple juice or milk.  I thought it'd be fun to use rum.  Here's the recipe:

Coconut Banana Bread with Lime Glaze

2 C flour
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 C sugar
1/4 C (4 Tbs) real butter, softened
2 large eggs
1 1/2 C mashed ripe bananas (about 3 large bananas)
1/4 C sour cream or plain yogurt (I used plain Chobani)
3 Tbs dark rum
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 C coconut

Topping: 2 Tbs additional coconut
Glaze: 1/2 C powdered sugar whisked with 1 1/2 Tbs fresh lime juice (I used concentrate)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Whisk flour, baking soda, and salt together and set aside.

In a large mixing bowl, beat butter and sugar until blended. Add eggs and beat to combine. Add banana, sour cream or yogurt, rum, and vanilla. Beat until blended.
Add flour mixture and beat at a low speed until just combined. Stir in 1/2 C coconut.

Pour batter into a 9×5″ loaf pan that has been sprayed with non-stick spray. Sprinkle additional 2 Tbs coconut on top.

Bake in the oven for about 1 hour or until a knife or skewer inserted in center comes out clean. Note:Check bread after about 40 minutes. If the top has browned and the coconut pieces are looking toasty, cover top of bread lightly with a piece of foil. Continue baking until done.

When done, remove pan from oven. Let cool on a cooling rack for about 10 minutes and then carefully remove from pan. Whisk powdered sugar and lime juice together for the glaze and then drizzle over top. Cool for another 15 minutes before slicing.




Here's a before pic:

The batter tasted pretty good, and I didn't get a buzz in case you were wondering

And here's an after pic:

Forgot the whole part about checking at 40 minutes and covering with foil

And here's a close-up of the awesomeness:

This is a little different than my normal "healthy" banana bread that uses whole wheat flour and flax seed meal. I'll post that one someday.  This recipe is definitely chock full of sugar.  Think each slice is maybe around 200 calories.  It's pretty worth it though.  One tip: when measuring out the sugar, I almost always use just a little less than what the recipe calls for.  Chances are, you don't really need all of that sugar.  It's not one of the chemical necessities in a recipe like baking soda or eggs or oil.  Try it and see what you think.


Moving on, I did not get a picture of lunch because I ate it so fast.  Just another spinach salad with chicken, toasted walnuts and blueberries.  And my fav dressing.

Checked a bunch of stuff of the to-do list today, which felt good.  Supper was a grilled chicken breast (marinated in Italian dressing I think- hubby prepared din din) and some pasta.  Chicken was soooo good, since we stocked up on smart chicken when we were at the big city grocery store.

Definitely lacking some greenage... need to stock up on broccoli!

Had our second to last softball game tonight and sweated buckets. We won. We're doing much better than we thought we would!  We did stick around for one beer since we had a babysitter tonight.

That's all for tonight... get pumped, tomorrow's Friday!!