whoa, been a few weeks!

hiya! looks like time got away from me, there. didn't realize it had been so long since i'd posted!

had a few things to report.

1) my new favorite breakfast: egg, bacon and cheese muffins. these are great and super easy. the lowdown:

spray a muffin tin with the non-stick stuff. take a slice of morningstar farms fake bacon and line each cup with it. pour about 2 oz of liquid egg white from a carton into each tin, then dump 1/2 oz of reduced fat cheddar in there too. bake at 325ish for around 30 minutes or so. let them cool and then freeze them. i re-nuke and put in a multi-grain english muffin for about 200 calories. nice! super easy! tasty too!

2) haven't been doing much cooking at all lately, because we're still working through the 8 dozen meals i made during the initial sous vide frenzy. but the short version is that yes, you can pretty much cook and freeze everything, and from a veggie standpoint it's hard to mess it up. i did a batch of fantasy cabbage rolls and they thawed and reheated pretty nicely. let me know if anyone's interested in the recipe.

3) found that the amount of buffalo sauce i was using in the buffalo chicken dish was just plain inadequate, and the general tso chicken also benefitted from extra sauce. am now wondering if it makes sense to flash freeze and seal portions of sauce separately from the chicken, and make about a million servings of plain chicken to pair with whatever sauce strikes my fancy. hmm.

4) i'm currently way into putting things in tortilla wraps, like my latest update on the taco soup. it was ho-hum at the time, but an absolute lifesaver when i was craving a taco bell chili cheese burrito over the weekend. i used about half a serving of it with the aforementioned reduced fat shredded cheddar in a tortilla, and voila! a pretty darned good approximation of the taco bell calorie bomb, with two servings for the same calories as their one. i'd love to do something with a tortilla wrap and buffalo chicken. basically, i need to figure out how to freeze and wrap them so they don't shatter or get gross upon reheating. ideas?

5) my other new favorite breakfast: the breakfast burrito. same tortilla wrap, stuffed with egg whites, cheddar, and the same slice of morningstar farms bacon. i guess i'm just into that combination.

i know jillian michaels has come out strongly against processed soy foods. apparently they can contribute to breast cancer and a whole lot of ickies. i may, MAY, may think about using small amounts of real bacon. not sure which of the two evils is worse, but i'm unwilling to live without the flavor of bacon. i had a side of brussel sprouts cooked with pancetta from this amazing restaurant in columbus this past saturday, and man, i'm telling you, they were crazy good. like french fry good. except they were brussel sprouts. blanched and finished in a reduction of bacon fat, essentially. CRIMINY they were good. so maybe i'll have to make room in my calorie allowance for a little more of the real thing. thoughts?