Ready or Not

Ready or not, Monday is here.

Yesterday I prepped, cleaned, and had dinner with the parental figures.  They made dairy free spaghetti and meatballs for me.  Yum.  I would have taken a picture, but I try to keep my cell phone put away during social engagements.

One of my biggest food obstacles has been bread.  I shop at Kroger which has a whole aisle of bread full of preservatives, additives, and food coloring in them.  There is also bread from the deli which still has some preservatives, but less additives and no food coloring.  Plus, there’s the health food bread with double to triple the sticker shock.  After buying Rudi’s $5 a loaf bread for a few months, I have gone back to the simple solution: making my own bread via my bread machine.

Bread Machine Quickie Recipe

Ingredients

1 Cup + 2 tbsp hot water

2 tbsp Oil

1 tbsp Sugar

Dash of Basil and Oregano

1 1/2 Cup Wheat Flour

1 1/2 Cup Bread Flour

5 tsp Yeast

In ingredient list order, add the ingredients to your bread pan making sure the agitator is already in place. Make sure the yeast only touches flour, no wet ingredients!

I set mine to Express Setting.  One hour later, I have 5 Ingredient Bread, no preservatives, additives, or food coloring.  Plus I have personally controlled salt (I don’t add any but feel free if you want) and sugar contents.

I feel great about eating it even if it’s another Sunday prep item.

Today I am grateful for home made meals!

Make It On Monday: Moroccan Chicken

Difficulty: Easy

Hands on Time: 10-15 minutes

Total Time: 30-35 minutes

Ingredients:

3-4 large carrots cut into bite sized pieces

1-2 Idaho potatoes or 3-4 Yukon gold or Red potatoes cut into bite sized pieces

1 sweet potato cut into bit sized pieces

2 tbsps olive oil

dash of salt

dash of pepper

4 chicken thighs

dash of cumin

dash of coriander

dash of cinnamon

dash of red pepper

Prep

1. Preheat oven to 450.

4. Chop up veggies and arrange on cookie sheet with a generous amount of EVOO and salt and pepper.  Feel free to change up the veggies to your liking.

3. Coat chicken with cumin, coriander, cinnamon, and red pepper.

Get Cooking.

1. Put the veggies in the oven at 450 for 10 minutes.

2. Heat a medium skillet at medium heat with a little EVOO.  Once the EVOO runs quickly in the skillet, add chicken, skin side down, and cook 5 minutes or until brown.

3. After veggies have cooked for 10 minutes, pull out cookie sheet and add browned chicken, skin side up, over the veggies.

4. Put back into oven for 20 minutes at 450 or until chicken is done and veggies are tender.

This is one of my husband’s favorite meals.  I like that it is rich in veggies.  Add a side of couscous or rice, and you’ll have a complete meal although I normally just eat this.

Ending the Erin Motz Do You Yoga 30 Day Challenge

I recently have completed the Erin Motz yoga for morning and bed time routines, and I immediately added them to my permanent playlists on YouTube.

I’ve also done them more than once already.

I am a little sad that today will be my last day with the Erin Motz Do You Yoga challenge, but I am looking forward to her projects in the works as well as some things Tara Stiles is teasing about.

In the meantime, I will probably get back to my yoga DVDs.  I would also like to try a new yoga YouTube video every week.

I tend to be a very self-reflective person who is constantly analyzing how things are going and what might work better.  Sometimes this trait drives me crazy like the fact that I can’t find a face wash that will clear my skin to my satisfaction.

This trait allows me to grow.  For that, I am grateful.  I want to take a minute to jot down some of the things I written about doing, how they’re going, and how maybe they’ve changed.

1. Yoga daily

This is going awesome!  I’ve been doing yoga daily for several months now, probably since January.  It started gently enough without any major time goals.  I was forgiving of myself when my schedule or body needed a day’s rest.  In February I really pushed myself by setting a 25 hour of yoga goal for the month.  I met it, and I loved what that amount of yoga did for me.  The time I practiced varied after that as I played with adding in cardio.  Several weeks ago, I set a personal goal of 1 hour 30 minutes of yoga a day with 1-2 rest days a week.  I rarely took a full day off from yoga, but I definately had restorative yoga days built in.  This practice took a back seat during my vacation and the subsequent issues I had upon my return.  The day before yesterday I finally took the plunge and recommitted to 1 hour and 30 minutes of exercise a day.  So far it’s just been yoga, but I want to be open to other forms of exercise my body might crave too.

2. Diet

This has suffered the most through my vacation time.  My goal is about 50% fruits and veggies, but mostly veggies.  I’d say I’m somewhere in the 40-45% range right now, but my body starts to feel gross when I dip below that.  Since I’m at home during the summer, I’m easing back on how much I eat and trying to listen to my body for hunger cues.  This is much tougher when I’m teaching as the consequences of gnawing hungry and lethargy are difficult to deal with, and I can’t just stop in the middle of everything and eat something.

3.  The Kind Diet

A lot of the recipes in the Kind Diet have ingredients that I just can’t get easily.  This has me a little stuck in that area.  Instead, I’m going to try to just experiment with a new recipe every week and share on here how it went.

Salad Dressings

There is a lot of junk in commercial salad dressings, and even the natural ones are lacking.  This week I took a pistachio sauce recipe I had from Cooking Light and used it as a salad dressing.  Yummy!

Grind 1/2 to 1 cup pistachios into paste.  I use EVOO as I grind to help the process along.

Splash of balsamic vinegarette.

Splash of maple syrup (or any sweetener if you like sweet things!).

Splash of mustard (I use honey mustard).

Garlic if you like.

Stir together and be very careful.  Otherwise I will eat it all!

Today I am grateful.