Also today I ate

Today I also made supper from the internet and it was SO YUMMY! It was kind of like Noodle Company's thai noodles but no store I went to had sprouts so I left them out. This recipe calls for green onions and cilantro but I replaced cilantro with parsley and would have replaced onions with sprouts but there were none so I just left them out and added more carrots. Being all clever and frugal I bought baby carrots because those get eaten faster in our house but once home I realized that I am an idiot and that shredding baby carrots with a potato peeler is really hard.  But anyway, here's the recipe, which I found on pinterest but will post the original link here:
http://asmallsnippet.blogspot.com/2011/03/spicy-thai-noodles.html

Also, I used 1T of pepper flake and it was so hot, so next time I'll probably halve that. In fact, it made a lot of sauce so I'll probably halve the whole sauce recipe and then take out still more pepper. This was a meal that required a lot of milk.

I like butterflies, he likes bones

Tom and I, trying to decide what to have for dinner.

Me: Well I know I'm making brussel sprouts.
Tom: Would you like pork chops or steak with them.
Me: Steak. I just, I don't like your pork chops. I don't understand them. You can either buy a butterfly pork chop, a full slab of meat, or you can buy one with a bone and connective tissue in the middle of it. Why would you get that kind?
Tom: Price. When you buy the butterfly chop, you're paying around $3.50 a pound.  When you get the regular pork chops you only pay $2.50 a pound.
Me: But you're paying for the bone!  And steak is my other option? Is steak cheaper than butterfly pork chops?
Tom: Well, no.
Me: Then I guess you just lost the "We can't afford butterfly pork chops" argument.

Happy Hanukkah!

Tonight, for the fist day of Hanukkah, I made latkes.  Ryan told me she looks forward to this all year, which made me all warm & fuzzy.  Since latkes do not a meal make, I made mac and cheese too but I made it from scratch, with roux and grated cheddar, just to try a new recipe.  Still a little grainy but so yummy!  Even Tom ate latkes and he's always told me he didn't care for them.  Tommy of course at nothing and yelled "I want circle crackers!" at the top of his lungs because he's decided to live off of Ritz crackers for the rest of his life.  He got no circle crackers, poor kid.
I love when I actually cook something people like.  It's so rare.

Plus she's a coke head, which totally kills the appetite anyway.

Kate Moss once said that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. But that bitch never tasted my mom's fudge, which I have recreated. I still swear it's a slightly different shade of brown, but it tastes the same. Yay for mommy fudge!

I'm lucky that they match that way.

My house smells like pot roast. I am infinitely fortunate that I happen to be cooking pot roast, because otherwise I'd spend all day wondering where that smell is coming from.

still yummy

I have decided that I loved my invention pasta dish so much that I am going to post the recipe. This would also be great with low carb pasta, especially Dreamfields.

one can diced tomatoes, drainied
one half polish sausage / kielbasa sliced into half inch sections
quarter cup fresh or frozen basil*
1T minced or chopped garlic
parsley to taste
salt & pepper
olive oil
spaghetti (I use thin spaghetti and I mix regular with whole wheat, but any kind would work.)

Cook spaghetti. When you put the pasta in the water, drizzle oil in a deep skillet (I use a chicken fryer) and brown sausage as evenly as possible, stirring occasionally.  Add tomatoes, garlic, basil, and parsley.  Warm through and turn heat to low/warm until pasta is done, stirring occasionally.  When done, strain pasta and stir together in skillet.  Serve hot.

yummy

Spaghetti pasta with tomatoes, garlic, sausage, and basil.  Roasted broccoli with salt and olive oil.  Tommy helped me stir everything and made sure the spaghetti water was salted every time I turned my back, and then he ate nothing.  Ryan ate the pasta, Danny ate/crumbled a little of everything and was carried directly from high chair to tub, and I stuffed myself.  Not a bad meal all in all.  At least, not until Danny sneezed in the tub and projectile spit a giant glob of chewed broccoli at me.

then stop eating crap

I just read a comment on this article about healthy eating, and it made me laugh. This is what it said:

to comment about "what's in your cart?"....all of those choices that the dietician made are definitely a better and healthier choice, but let's be realistic here. the cost of those foods is nearly double the cost of the other foods and, when you have a big family like mine, you simply cannot afford to buy half a package of something to feed the whole family. it is sad that, in today's society, healthy eating is so darn expensive, we are forced into buying cheaper junk foods for our families. maybe obamacare should start by making healthier food more readily available to families at an affordable price...maybe we wouldn't be in such a bad health crisis if we had the right resources....
lindawcb 8:53 AM

Now, the lady has a point; healthy food costs more than crap. But I love the line about buying cheaper junk foods for the family, because they have to have junk food and it's just a matter of what junk food, right? Because it's a choice of high fat vs low fat empty calories. What about not buying junk food? What about making a sandwich instead of eating chips for a snack? And while we're at it, a bag of popped popcorn may cost as much as a bag of chips, but a bag of generic popcorn kernels is much cheaper, and goes much farther.

It tastes better than it sounds

You know that thing where you look up one thing (usually for me on wikipedia) and then click a related link to read something else, then click a related link, and on and on, until you end up on an unrelated or minimally related topic? Everyone does that, right? It's not just me. Anyway, I looked up the word hotdish (Minnesotan for a type of casserole), then had to compare hotdish to casserole (all hotdishes are casseroles but not all casseroles are hotdishes), then ended up looking up comfort food, and I realized that there is no specific list of comfort foods. It's very subjective.

I guess comfort food, as a general term, refers to things like meatloaf and pot roast and mac & cheese. But it also varies by region, by family, and by person. In my family, believe it or not, a biggie is macaroni milk & butter. That's what comes out of the depression when you have a chicken for eggs (to make noodles) and a cow (for milk and butter) and it literally is just cooked macaroni, a stick of butter melted on it, and then milk. Like a soup, but not. Odd, I know.

I like comfort food. I've never really been one to eat for comfort, but there's something about sitting down to a big plate of parsley noodles (it's what you eat for dinner when you can't stand Mom's stroganoff) or some Rice A Roni (fine, my mom sucked at cooking). I make more classic comfort food now, like baked mac and cheese where the top gets all brown and bubbly, and red wine pot roast, and every morning I sit down with a hot bowl of cinnamon oatmeal. But on nights when Tom's out on the road, I still fall back on the food from my family, the things I remember from when I was a kid. I still pour milk on my macaroni.

Yummy Sunday

Steel cut oats and cappuccino for breakfast.

Homemade poutine for lunch.

Pot roast and roasted brussel sprouts for dinner tonight.

I'm eating good but Ryan hates me.

So. Damn. Hungry!

Sitting here looking at the Schwan's catalog while trying to lose weight in a house without snacks. It's like porn to a man with no hands!

Just to clarify

I think I've mentioned before my latest attempt to eat healthier and hopefully lose some weight. We are not going to buy snack food or junk food any more. We can eat all we want, as long as we make it (Wafernusse gifts notwithstanding). I am trying to get away from processed foods because I am just not good at knowing which unpronouncables are okay and which are toxic additives. But either way, processed foods are full of sugar, salt, and preservatives, so hopefully this is a healthy strategy.

I asked a friend how to make tortilla chips and the instructions were basically to cut up and fry tortillas, which is what I was expecting but I didn't know if she baked them or not, or if she salted them or anything (Alton Brown rubs them with lime juice). So I suppose a stickler could say that since I'm buying the tortillas that I'm still using processed foods, but then again if I bought flour I'd be using processed foods. My strategy isn't just to avoid processed snacks but also to make it harder to snack. I can't tell you how many times in the past week I've wanted potato chips. But I didn't want to make potato chips so I didn't have any to eat. See how that works? Yay for me. Now, I need to go to sleep so I can wake up and make nachos, and possibly buy a slicer to make potato chips with.

And he wonders why I'm fat.

I know my husband love me. I know it intellectually and at times I know it in my gut too. Today was one of those days when Tom did so many absolutely sweet things for me that I wondered who he'd slept with. (just kidding)

First, he bought me oatmeal. But he bought me the good kind of oatmeal. I eat steel-cut oats every morning and McCann's Irish Oatmeal is supposed to be the best but I never bought it because it costs twice as much as the cheap stuff and really, how different could raw oats be? But last week the store was out of the cheap stuff so he bought the McCann's and let me tell you, raw oats can vary a lot. Oh these are good. And today, he bought me two big cans of the McCann's. Now I not only have the yummy oatmeal but I have the decorative cans as well. He loves me.

He also bought me Wafernusse, which is my favorite candy. It's only a dollar at Aldi but still, he thought of me. If you haven't had Wafernusse I highly suggest trying it. It's like a kit kat but not as hard, and with hazelnut flavor in it.

Then he went uptown tonight to buy chicken breasts, because he has a thing for chicken breasts, and when he came home he made supper and wouldn't let me in the kitchen. When supper was ready I was surprised because it was fish and rice, which is nothing special. I mean, I love Tom's fish and rice, but we have it fairly often and it's not really a secret-worthy meal. But there was a dish on the table with a paper towel on it so I went and peeked and . . . . he made me mussels! I didn't even know you could buy mussles in town here, and he made them. In garlic butter! And they are my favorite food and I love them so much and he made them for me and I ate them all. And in the fridge, for me to make possible tomorrow, is a brisket. I have wanted to make a brisket for a while now and apparently today was the day I get all the food related things I've ever wanted, is there it is atop the chicken breasts.

On a serious note, though, I really do wonder if he slept with somebody.

Chicken Stock Day!

Today is my third favorite day of winter. Next to Christmas and Christmas Eve, Chicken Stock Day is my favorite cold weather day. I wake up and put a whole year's worth of chicken carcasses in a pot of water and spend the day stirring and cooking. This year I have a gallon bag of chicken legs we never got around to eating, Thanksgiving's turkey bones, the carcass of a rotisserie chicken we ate one day, and the skins of all the chicken breasts we have eaten all year. That, 3 carrots, 3 celery stalks, an onion, herbs and a head of garlic, and now my house smells like soup. The reason this is a cold weather activity is because A) it will heat your house (it's not the heat, it's the chicken-scented humidity!) and B) you can't put the finished stock right in the fridge or you'll heat up and spoil everything else in there so instead of buying or making tons of ice we just bring in tons of snow to pack around the stock pot in the sink. And no matter how long any recipe says this is going to take, plan on at least 12 hours. It takes time to simmer everything down enough (you'll know it's done when you can take out a leg bone and it snaps like chalk) and then cool it enough to put it in the fridge. And then the next day you skim the fat disc off the top and divide the stock between quart freezer bags and store them in the basement freezer. All year, when anyone in my house gets sick, I cut open a bag or two of stock and boil noodles in it. We all get healthy (no bubonic plague yet!) and eat yummy stock that is NOT msg and artificial flavoring. Win-win!

still hungry so still thinking about food

One hundred years ago we weren't a fat nation. We also weren't a nation of cake mixes, refrigerated pre-made cookie dough, and marshmallows in a bag. If you wanted a marshmallow, you had to make a marshmallow. I don't even know if you could do that 100 years ago. Was there gelatin, or is that only in the newer recipes. I don't know! But you couldn't just run down to the store and get potato chips and frozen hot wings and a self-rising pizza. I want to go back to that time, but in a health food Democrat way, not a Constitutionalist Republican way (a future rant, can you tell?). I want to live in a house without candy and cookies and junk food. I would love to live in a house where everything was homemade. I would wake up and make my own bread if Tom would buy me the ingredients. (Would he really buy a bag or more of flour every week?). I would love to do all I could to eliminate preservatives and artificial flavors if I could. It's not realistic to think I could do it all, but why not do as much as possible?
No, I will not eat potato chips! Not until I get a thin slicer, at least. And sour cream. mmmmmm, sour cream.

I'm a gluttonous pig!

I want to eat healthy, I really do. I want to feel superior in the way that gluten-free vegans do. But I have a weakness, a horrible gluttonous weakness: beer and potato chips. I drink a beer*, and then I want to eat Ruffles chips dipped in straight sour cream. I crave it. I want crunchy, greasy, fatty foods. I know it's bad and horrible and I can visualize the grease and oil literally settling in my aorta, yet I crave it anyway. I want to commit suicide by potato chip. I try to pacify myself with popcorn (crunchy and salty) but it's not the same. And you know what's even better, but no amount of beer can break down my defenses enough to eat it? Hostess Suzy Q's and then Ruffles chips.
Damn I'm hungry.





*Alcohol is considered a drug compatible with breastfeeding, if used in moderation. [source]