holy moly, is that in weeks or MONTHS?

jeez, time passes, doesn't it? it's been how long since i last posted? much has happened...i got laid off, rehired, miscarried, off the wagon, on the wagon, tried the Engine 2 diet and disappeared down a tiny little rabbit hole of veganism that landed me a side gig baking cookies for a teahouse. yeah, cookies. i know. not even the slightest bit diet-friendly.

you know you're not failing when you're still at it...and i'm still at it. still have 30 lbs or so to go, but i'm back to freezer bags. for me, they make sense, even though, yeah, jillian says not to heat food in plastic because it leaches nastiness. i get that...but it's probably not as unhealthy as being obese, KWIM?

cheers!

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?

fish joy

it's been a few days since my last post, so i wanted to make sure i reported back about my fish experiment. i sous-vided about a pound of monkfish with a hollandaise sauce, and packaged it up with roasted potatoes and brussel sprouts. very, very pleased! it had that bistro-poached-fish consistency, although it was "meatier" than the tilapia (i'm guessing because of the difference in fish, and the width.) mine were cut into pretty thick steaks, so i left them in the water a good long time. the sauce was great, too. i used wagner's sauce mix. turns out you don't really need a lot of sauce at all, maybe a teaspoon or two. basically, even if you used straight butter, it would be hard to make much of a caloric impact with a sauce. for the mix, i used the recommended amount of butter and skim milk - but we used it for six servings instead of the four on the package. worked out just fine and made plenty of sauce, which tasted nice with the brussel sprouts.

which, by the way, i'm loving - except that it takes a whole friggin' lot of them to make in any kind of bulk! they're so low in calories, you can use 6-8 ounces in a meal, easy. but some quick math shows how tough this is for those of us without commercial kitchen equipment. 12 servings of roasted brussel sprouts is about 6 POUNDS of raw veggies. i'd need at least 4 oven racks and nonstick sheets to cook them at the same time. yipes.

i put together a cheese ravioli meal too, but i haven't tried it yet. i'm a little nervous about it since i realized (too late) that i should have COOKED the ravioli and flash-frozen it before i vacuumed it. i'm just hoping that nuking with the sauce cooks it enough to make it acceptably al dente. fortunate that i only do a couple on the first round. :)

the taco soup didn't come out as fabulously as i would have liked, although el nino seemed enthralled by it and has already put away two whole servings. it's kind of fun - we feed him beans on a weeknight, then drop him off early the next morning at daycare before the inevitable. DH calls it "lobbing a pulled grenade over the wall." wheee! (and sorry, michelle. we love you!) i'm thinking that taco soup (black beans, fat free refried beans, TVP hydrated with taco seasoning, fat free sour cream, low fat shredded cheddar) might work better as the filling in a soft taco (maybe la tortilla factory) as a sort of faux taco bell chili cheese burrito (and MAN, do i love those.) so maybe that'll be the goal. will let you know how that works out.

the time commitment is still pretty high, although i'm bringing it down. i made about 35 meals over the course of 2 days, for a total effort of about 7-8 hours. i'm thinking that it might be more efficient to cook more food, every other week. not sure yet. we've got so much backed up now in both freezers that i've got no choice but to take a week off just so we can eat our way back to some freezer space! ironic, huh? :)

i've also come to realize that while there are a number of snacks that i just cannot make myself (ostrich jerky comes to mind) there are a quite a few that i can. that'll be the final frontier, i guess. baking my own protein cookies and bars. i know, i know. it's not really rocket science. i just need to figure out how to make it easy and tasty.

cheers all!

the training wheels are officially off

i finally did it. earlier this week, i put on my big girl pants, and cancelled my recurring bistro order. i can, of course, start again at any point if i feel like i need to, but i've lost the free shipping, so i hope i can get along without it. i had a tough time making that call. and, yeah, we've got about 3 dozen bistro meals piled up in the chest freezer, so it's not like i don't have any. i've only used one this week in total. and i'm probably making a bigger deal of this than it is...but somewhere in the back of my mind, there's the irrational thought that i lost weight on the bistro meals because they have magic skinny dust that they add just before flash freezing. dumb, i know. :)

did my shopping last night, and i've got a lot of meals to put together this weekend! we're going to try a few new things:

• taco soup
• cheese ravioli
• monkfish

and i also want to stock up on some previously-tested-and-YAY! items, like the indian meal. believe it or not, last night el nino ate most of my vindaloo chicken and was sticking his hands in the sauce so he could lick them. (gross, i know. he just turned 2 though so we cut him a little slack.) he also liked the mac and cheese (not a shocker) so we're going through the meals a little faster than i anticipated. this isn't a bad thing at all; in fact, i'm delighted that the whole family is happy to eat them. i just need to up the production a touch.

will also be roasting more potatoes and brussel sprouts, because those were really, really tasty. here's hoping i can find the energy for a major push!

vindaloo victory!

i'll admit it - my expectations for the indian meal weren't all that high. hoo boy was i surprised! this is another one for the heavy rotation list. it's AWESOME. this meal requires:

• flash-freezing the vindaloo sauce in 2 oz portions
• a chicken baggie. use 4 oz of breast cut into chunks (which makes it easier to measure and pack) and the frozen vindaloo sauce. sous vide as usual.
• a rice/pea baggie. i used basmati rice (3 oz) and 1 oz of frozen peas. it would be more authentic with a little tumeric mixed in, but that required mixing, which i didn't want to bother with
• curried spinach. for this, i threw about 1/2 a cup of diced onions and a spoonful of minced garlic (all bought prepped) into a big stockpot with some water, and cooked until the onions were soft and the water mostly gone. i added two bags of fresh baby spinach and put the lid on. it took maybe 4-6 minutes for all the spinach to wilt. i then mixed in about a tablespoon each of curry powder and cayenne. the last thing to go in was a cup of fat-free fage (greek yogurt.) turned the heat very low and steamed off some of the water. critical to flash freeze these babies, too - lots of liquid to screw up the vacuum sealer.

this made four portions. nutrition kicked butt! the numbers are for the entire meal.

• cals: 375
• fat: 7 g
• chol: 66
• sodium: 523 mg (low!)
• carb: 40
• fiber: 7
• protein: 39
• cal: 27%

if you like indian food and missed it on bistro, this will definitely hit the spot.

also a quick shout out to renita for the frozen ravioli tip! i'll be looking for it!

cutting the cord...

hi everyone! i had a long talk with myself the other night, and i'm making it official: as of next week, i'm cancelling my recurring order with bistro MD. this means that i lose the free-shipping promotion i've had going for a few months now, which probably means that bistro will be priced beyond what i can reasonably justify. which means that i'd be cutting the cord, most likely for good. i get this little jump of fear just typing that...even though i'm getting better at making my own meals, even though we've got about 2 dozen bistro meals backed up in the deep freeze, even though there's another week still coming, i have this completely irrational feeling that there's some magical powder they put in their meals that make me lose weight, without which i'll stall out permanently. i'm also just a little freaked out by the prospect of REALLY having to cook. with all the experimenting, i've been spending upwards of 4-5 hours a week on food prep, which is lots more than i wanted. i know that it's ramp-up time on the learning curve, but i hate the idea of having to do it forever. so, maybe, that's what i'm really afraid of. having to do more work to make on-plan food the easiest thing to eat. it's gonna happen sooner or later, so i guess i ought to suck it up and call them to cancel.

in other news, i may have found a ready-made substitute for the pasta. the nutrition profile for mama rosie's low fat ravioli (http://www.mamarosies.com/products.php) looks like it could do the trick. if not, i'll try penne lane (http://www.pennelanepasta.com/) before attempting to make it myself. does anyone know what brand of spaghetti sauce bistro uses? i love it and haven't found one i like quite as much. i hope they don't make it themselves. it seems that there's not really that much that they do, which is both wonderful and a little disheartening, given the cost.

my fabulous in-laws are taking el nino for most of the weekend, so i'll be bagging and tagging some BBQ pork with corn and green beans, and doing a trial run of my indian meal - chicken vindaloo (store-bought sauce, hopes not incredibly high), curried spinach, and basmati rice with peas. i'll definitely start the timer on this one, since i'll need to seal a TON of bags to get everything together. should put some serious hurt on the cheapie foodsaver - we'll see how it holds up!

have a great weekend, everyone!

the pasta challenge

so, the bistro MD cheese-stuffed tortellini and ravioli are two of my absolute favorites. i've been all over the web trying to find substitutes, and no dice. (unless someone out there reading this knows something i don't - PLEASE TELL ME!) because otherwise, i will have to...deep breath...make my own pasta from scratch.

heading deep into PITA territory here. or at least i think so...maybe it won't be that bad?

this will involve:

1. finding a good, whole-wheat pasta recipe
2. buying and working in a small percentage of inulin (more about that later)
3. making the cheese filling
4. finding a sauce that's as good as the bistro vodka sauce (any ideas on that?)
5. making the pasta, stuffing, cooking and bagging (not bad)

i've got a great KA mixer with a dough attachment, and a hand-crank pasta roller, so steps 4 and 5 should be fairly low-impact. and i guess that steps 1 and 2 only need to be performed until i get it right, and then they're done. so, okay. i could use some clarity on recipe amounts v. actual cooked portions in terms of calories, because i have no idea how much cheese mixture i should make, and how much you actually put in a piece of ravioli. i guess i'll figure it out, though, huh?

for the pasta recipe, i've found a bunch online, and will work them out. the thing though is that i also came across a fiber supplement called inulin, which is made from chicory root, and is supposed to lower significantly the GI rating of pasta. it's also a pre-biotic, and i quickly got in over my head since i am neither a nutritionist nor an applied chemist. i will, however, buy some at the hippie food store near my house, and see what happens. my real hope is that i once i get a good formula, i can make freakin' boatloads of stuffed pasta dinners so i don't have to go to all this trouble too often.

also had a serious "doh!" moment making white chicken chili yesterday. figuring out what a portion weighs is tricky indeed. my kitchen scale only measures up to 11 lbs, and a full crockpot weighs way more than that. i may try weighing uncooked ingredients before putting them in the pot, but i don't know how to account for water loss, and the bits and pieces that get stuck to the pan or the spoon, or get a little burnt, or eaten by my kid when he's "helping" me cook. maybe i'm just being too anal... the chicken chili is probably somewhere in the 10-11 oz per serving area. here's what i threw in the crockpot:

• 48 oz jar of great northern beans, rinsed
• 3 lbs diced boneless, skinless chicken breast
• 16 oz jar medium salsa
• 4 oz reduced-fat pepper jack cheese
• 12 oz 50% light cheddar
• 16 oz fat free sour cream

incidentally, this recipe ROCKS and i have it courtesy of my former roomie and beloved friend liz. thanks again, liz! nutrition as follows for 12 servings:

• calorie: 346
• fat: 4 g (saturated 2 g)
• sodium: 550
• carbs: 33
• fiber: 6
• protein: 43

nice, huh? and pretty easy. sorry if i mentioned this before - but i'm really learning that it's worth the time to flash freeze liquids like soups and stews. i tried to sidestep this and put some stirfry sauce at the bottom of a bag, and attempted to load strips of beef on top to sort of "seal" it from getting sucked by the vacuum, and it kinda sorta worked. i'll probably do it again. but not soups - for sure freeze it in plastic gladware-type bowls and THEN seal.