Great football, cool air and cold beers. Yesterday, we had two of the three, at least, down on the Plains for the Auburn - Ole Miss game. The air might have been a bit warmer than expected for early October, but we made the most of the day with our family trip to cheer on the Tigers as they faced the Rebels!
What a fun day! This was my dad and brother's first Auburn game, and the hubs had fun showing them around the campus and reliving his glory days as an undergrad. We grabbed a spot in the shade to tailgate for the afternoon, right near the Auburn Hotel. Brad's dad, one of his friends and my brother's girlfriend joined us for the fun. I took advantage of the tailgating occasion to try out a few new desserts. The Pumpkin Cheesecake Bars had fantastic flavor, but the crust was troublesome to cut -- I am going to try these again with a graham cracker or gingersnap crust. Recipe to come once I perfect it :)
Then I also made Tiger Tails -- white chocolate-covered marshmallow sticks, with a chocolate drizzle on top. Hello, sugar rush! These were fun to look at AND eat!
We saw an exciting, big win before a late night caravan home to Atlanta, and so today, we are all a bit slow moving. The cloudy sky-outskirts of Tropical Storm Karen are setting the perfect weather mood for a snuggly afternoon on the couch. I made a pot of Bacon Cheeseburger Soup to top off the weekend as we settle in for some pro football hangout time tonight. This one of my own recipes that is just too good not to share. Enjoy, friends, and have a great week ahead! War Eagle!
Bacon Cheeseburger Soup Serves 5-7
1-1.5 lbs. lean ground beef
6-8 slices turkey bacon, diced in large pieces
1 jalapeno, seeds removed and diced
15.25 can corn, undrained
14.5 can diced tomatoes, undrained
15 oz. can red kidney beans, undrained
1 lb. 2% milk Velveeta Cheese, cubed
1 Tbsp. steak seasoning or seasoning of choice
Corn chips, such as Fritos
Cook ground beef and bacon over high heat in a Dutch oven until cooked through, about 5-10 minutes. Add jalapenos halfway through cooking time, stirring with meat to soften the pepper. Add remaining ingredients, bringing to a boil before reducing heat. Cook over low heat for 30-45 minutes, stirring occasionally to prevent the cheese from sticking on the bottom. Serve with corn chips on top.
Note: can also be made in the slow cooker. Prepare beef and bacon on stovetop first. Add all ingredients other than corn chips to a greased slow cooker. Cook on High for 3 hours, or on Low 5-6 hours. Top with chips.
It's so easy to fall right into food traps. For me, when I am trying to be on good eating behavior, I have a few solid standbys. Slim-fast chocolate shakes make for a great, fast snack, as do bananas with some peanut butter or a yogurt. I stick with healthy cereal and fruit for breakfast, and I do my best if I have soup in the freezer to pull out on that day where we are short on leftovers to bring for lunch.
One week into our Challenge, and I am already getting antsy, though. And this, my friends, is why we were in such a bad spot this summer. It gets all too easy to call the local pizza place on a lazy Monday like today.
That's the key word – lazy. We went grocery shopping this week already. We have a fridge stocked with dinners for all the nights of the week. And yet, here I am, hungry in the late afternoon (my own fault for not packing a snack) and I am already thinking, "oh man, pizza would be sooo good tonight."
NO! I am not letting myself succumb quite yet. We have too many things coming up this Fall where I can let loose a bit if I want. Football games, weddings and trips take precedence over laziness if I want to splurge. So today, on this lazy random Monday, I am trying to focus on our pre-planned, healthy meal we have ready to make tonight. I am pretty excited for this, too -- Tilapia packets with carrots, peppers, onions, potatoes, lemon and herbs. Julia Child easy yet chic French cooking style.
From one healthy-wannabe to another :) Let's keep up the good food mojo! Here are some of the other healthy, WW and budget-friendly recipes on my radar.
Pork tenderloin in the crock-pot – I grabbed apples from the store to use in this Fall-inspired dish this week. I am a crock-pot lover. This is going to be clutch for both dinner and lunch leftovers, since tenderloins come in packs of two. Plus, how good will this smell as it cooks?!
Homemade enchilada sauce – We made this last week and it was. SO. GOOD. I honestly probably won't buy the canned stuff again, unless I am strapped for time. This took about 20 minutes to make, and you can flavor it to your liking. I am going to cut the cumin in half, since it was a bit much for me, and we might add some more heat. This topped shredded chicken, spinach and mushroom enchiladas. We threw the onions from the sauce into the filling, too.
Sandwiches – these are one of my favorite standbys for lazy nights. Plus, they are super cheap to make. Tuna salad BLTs top my list - add a sliced egg for an indulgent feel! These other options from Martha sound delicious, too. Ham, brie and apple, yum!
Flank steak steakhouse salad – This cut of meat was
on sale this week, so I am making the most of it with a "fancy" salad, restaurant-style with minimal effort. I love salads because I can "wing" it and usually end up with a satisfying mix with whatever ingredients we have on hand.
What have you made recently that helped keep you on track with healthy eating?
My fellow Atlantans know that we have been plagued with a seriously wet summer. Usually by this time of the year, we are all desperate for cooler temperatures. This year, though, we are all just ready for some sunshine! It has rained here more already this year than our usual entire yearly average. I am pretty sure the entire city is Vitamin D deprived right now. We aren't even totally sick of the heat yet either, since the rain has kept things here pretty low-temp (knock on wood). While I am definitely ready for the cooler weather ahead, I will take some sunshine alone for a bit right now.
But of course, I hope that cooler temps are still right around the corner! There's nothing worse than hot, humid days in October!
I can thank the season change for us starting back with serious meal planning this past weekend. Fall means back to school for the hubs, so evenings will be quiet at the homestead a few nights per week. If I don't have a menu planned for myself to cook solo, that can mean takeout orders and frequent grocery store stops. Now that we are back in regular, post-wedding, school season life mode, we are hoping to cut back on our food spending. A quick synopsis of the budgets revealed that we have been buying double the amount we normally would at the store … but somehow also eating out double as well. It doesn't take a genius (thankfully, since I am no math whiz) to realize some seriously wasted funds. Even just a few small changes can help us out here.
Polenta with Roasted Vegetables and Fontina; Source: Pinterest / Williams Sonoma
So we set a weekly budget for food at the store, as well as a weekly budget for eating out. Our "eating out" budget includes expensive lunches, too – another common side effect of not meal planning. My lunch in-town, for example, can easily be $12 if I opt for my fav Pad Thai. Ridiculous!
We are … three (ha) days into our budget, and so far, so good. I haven't bought anything outside the budget yet, and we have a TON of food at home ready to take to work, with supplies for more meals this week. We made already BBQ in the slow cooker, and WW soup on the stove. It feels good knowing I can go home tonight and already have a dinner there waiting for me.
Even though pizza sounds divine tonight, too. That's just my hunger talking, I guess ;)
What is your Fall routine or ritual? My next step is to inch back into regular work-outs before any "winter weight" has a chance to start hanging around. With these low-humidity late summer days we are having, evening walks are my new fav!
I've got a winner of a crock-pot soup for you today!
I have been rocking through the recipes in my Fix It and Forget It cookbook, which features TONS of recipes made just for a slow cooker. A lot of the recipes are similar and most often can serve simply as inspiration for you as you learn how to best throw things together for a slow cooked meal. The beauty of crock pot meals are that they are also extremely flexible beyond the variable cooking time. Don't like that vegetable? Skip it! Want a cheesier soup? Add two cans of the cheese-based condensed soup instead of one.
This recipe was just one of those meals for me. I wanted a basic minestrone soup, so I found and used a recipe for inspiration. I skipped the usual pasta and instead used the suggested barley, which kept things really low-calorie but super hearty. You could add in or substitute red kidney beans, zucchini and many other veggies.
My key to maintaining my weight during the week most often depends on healthy lunches, and soup is my go-to for a quickie lunch that fills me up. I made this crock-pot meal overnight, dealt out servings in individual containers the next morning, and took one with me for lunch while freezing the rest. Then, throughout upcoming days and weeks, I have a supply of healthy soups to grab in the morning, no defrost required. I just let the soup sit through the morning at my desk before heating the container for four-five minutes in the microwave for lunch.
2 boxes of Tuscany-blend chicken broth
3 carrots, peeled and diced
1 Spanish onion, chopped
4 ribs celery, chopped
3 garlic cloves, minced
3/4 dry barley
1 can chickpeas, drained
1 Tbsp. parsley
1/2 tsp. dried thyme
1 tsp. dried oregano
1 Tbsp. rosemary
28 oz. can diced Italian tomatoes
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. pepper
Combine all ingredients in slow cooker. Cover and cook on Low 6-8 hours or until vegetables are tender. Optional: stir in baby spinach once soup is done, and/or top with grated Parmesan cheese.
In typical spring fashion, I have been trying to balance an insane social schedule with an attempt to maintain/improve my physical health. Early morning sleep-in sessions have gradually been replaced with some personal training and boot camp sessions, and any evenings I skip the usual glass of wine help the cause, too. I have a beach trip coming up at the end of the month (Congrats, Meg! Can't wait to celebrate with you!) so I have been hitting the pavement once or twice a week for a run, too, to make sure my body looks bikini-ready.
On top of all of that is the never-ending struggle to eat healthy, well-rounded meals. I have skipped out on official food tracking of late, but have been trying to keep the health mentality in mind when selecting foods and meals to make during each week.
While I am a coupon-clipper amateur, I do pride myself in finding great ways to stretch my weekly food budget, which varies from $30 up to $80 depending on how many meals we are eating at home that week. So you can imagine my glee when eMeals reached out to me to test drive their meal-planning system!
Here's a little about the system:
eMeals relies on a team of experienced meal planners, writers and editors to create new dinner menus every week that are designed around grocery store sales, seasonal specials and diet preferences. For as low as $5.00 per month, subscribers download a recipe plan for the week with a matching aisle-by-aisle grocery list. The easy-to-follow recipes usually contain fewer than seven ingredients to allow for prep times of less than 30 minutes. It also helps families stay within a predictable budget by being prepared with a detailed list to use at the grocery store.
The eMeals program has over 30 meal plan options to choose from and provides a consistent and reliable approach to food budgeting by factoring the weekly cost of ingredients into each menu plan.
I got to select my meal plan of choice, which gives you options for different large grocery stores as well as nutrition level and family size. Plus it shoots out the weekly coupon and BOGO specials along with an expected budget total.
Publix Meals for Two meal plan, here we come!
I headed out this weekend to go shopping for my first list of items. This is what a plan looks like. This is a sample - the full plan is customized per week and is completely filled out just for me:
We have busy weeks with a few evenings of night school for the S.O. and usually a few nights out for yours truly. So I usually shoot to cook at least four meals at home per week. That gives us enough food for lunches and some to enjoy on leftover nights, and if we are in a bind, I usually have something in the freezer, too. This week, we are low on everything (including freezer meals) and plan to eat at home more than last week, so it's restock time!
I used my seven-day printable list from eMeals to pick out my favorite five meals for this week to pick up at the store. I just crossed of the items/meals I didn't need. The meals look really tasty, and include well-rounded sides like salads and veggies. It has some great variety (I hate getting into cooking ruts). The shopping list was supposed to cost around $60 pre-tax if I stuck to it exactly. I skipped about $10 items' worth, but then got an additional $35 of re-stock staples like cereal, salad dressing, paper towels and a Publix sub (ok, not a staple, but it was lunchtime!). I am pretty impressed with the amount of food I brought home for $90 including all that extra stuff. All of the prices were dead-on, and it was really easy to follow the list and pick out exactly what I needed. I can't wait to have these five meals this week!
Are you interested in eMeals for yourself? Well, you are in luck! eMeals is graciously giving away a three-month subscription to one of my readers! Use the Rafflecopter widget below to quickly and easily enter.
Can't wait to win? You can also sign up here for your own subscription, and use the code BLISSDOM when you register to get 15% off your plan! :)
And don't forget that you can also check out the eMeals blog for recipes, tips on how to simplify your life, organize your days and plan family fun.
Are you ready to win and save money on your weekly shopping trips?! Best of luck!!
a Rafflecopter giveaway Disclosure: eMeals partnered with bloggers such as me to help promote their meal subscription services. I received a meal plan test account from eMeals in exchange for this promotion. This post contains affiliate links.
The winner of the giveaway in this program
will be randomly chosen and gift card fulfillment will be handled by a
third party.
Are you a slow cooker addict? This has been one of the most fun appliances I have had the pleasure of owning. Well, alright, it's tied with the stand mixer; it's hard to deny the appeal of that beauty, too :)
Over the past year, we have both enjoyed learning what types of foods and combinations work well in the crock pot, and have had a few less-than-stellar learning experiences in the meantime, too. Lean meat = a no no, cream of anything soups are amazing transformers of even the blandest ingredients, and I am still amazed at how great just onions and carrots and celery can be when cooked for 10 hours. When we walk in the door late each evening, dinner is just there and waiting. Amazing.
The learning curve has paid off. Yesterday's creation (read: I made it all up) was a pure WINNER. The best part was that I threw it together in only five minutes before running out the door to work. The meat was frozen, and all I had to do was peel and chop a few carrots. All of that "effort" later, and we had an inexpensive, healthy, gourmet meal just like Mom used to make. I have included the recipe below for you to try out in your own crock pot, if you please. The chicken shreds down and almost just melts in your mouth, and the resulting sauce is rich but healthy.
The other thing I wanted to tell you about were the noodles we served this chicken and carrots casserole over. I picked up a bag of Organic Brown Rice Pasta Fusilli from Trader Joe's on a whim - gluten and wheat free, cholesterol free and sodium free, made totally from brown rice and water. Since I am a Northern-born gal, I love me some traditional pasta, but I am also willing to try out healthier and lighter options here and there.
My take: This stuff was great! I couldn't tell at all that it was not regular pasta. Granted, I wasn't eating it plain, but I still think this pasta would be fantastic under a red sauce or tossed with cheese and oil, too.
Ok, time for the recipe! Enjoy it, all!
Chicken and Carrot Slow Cooker Casserole Serves 4-5, WW points = 6 + pasta
1 lb. frozen chicken breasts
4-5 carrots, peeled and sliced
1 can cream of chicken soup
1 can cream of celery soup
2 tsp. salt
2 tsp. black pepper
2 tsp. garlic powder
2 tsp. Penzey's Forward seasoning (or your own creation of paprika, etc.)
1 cup frozen green peas
Layer chicken, carrots, soups and seasonings in crock pot. Cover and cook on Low 10-12 hours. Stir in green peas during last 10-20 minutes while pasta cooks. Serve over pasta of choice.
When you are a homeowner, or anyone that is out on their own in the world, sometimes your wish list isn't filled with things like shoes or new outfits. Sometimes, that shiny bauble at the local jewelry store calls to you, but you know instead it's time to go buy replacement air filters or Swiffer dust pads. The weekly bills don't often reflect time eating or socializing on the town as much as they do the purchase of groceries and laundry detergent.
Even so, I find some serious thrill in the management of a home. Keeping things in order and running smoothly makes me happy. I am less and less tempted by the shiny "extras," and more and more tempted by awesome things that are really going to make an impact on my everyday life.
Enter the CrockPot. This wonder of an appliance has been at the top of my wish list for the last year or so. The only issue (besides money on hand) was that most basic crockpots aren't made for people that are out of the house for more than the 8-hour maximum cook setting. Being a person that is often gone for 10-12 hours a day, that wasn't going to work for me. I couldn't be turning on the food at 7am and having it shut off at 3pm, when I wasn't getting home until 6:30.
So when this baby arrived under the tree this year, I was thrilled. The original Crock-Pot has this great programmable Designer Series that come with an automatic "warming" feature. Instead of shutting off at the end of the 8 or however many hours, these guys switch over to "warm" for up to 6 hours. That means that when we get home at the end of our 12-hour days, the food is ready and hot and perfectly cooked.
We have used the crock-pot at least once, if not twice, each week since the holiday. One thing that has been a challenge is learning how to actually best use a crock-pot. There are some basic strategies to pick up before you start in with recipes, so I thought I'd share some of my takeaways here. For all of you crock-pot veterans, this is old news, but I bet a lot of you are rookie crockpotters just like I was :)
You don't need to use much liquid. Too much liquid, and you end up stewing the meat, and it gets tough. Less than a cup of broth, beer, wine or water is really all you need to steam things up and tenderize the meat.
Lean meat doesn't work. We made this mistake with a lean cut of beef. Pick up the fattier pieces of meat that have lots of marbling. That all breaks down during the slow cook time. Too lean, and you end up with jerky-consistency. Betty Budget Tip: the fattier cuts are usually cheap-cheap-cheap. $4 for a huge hunk of that kind of meat can often feed your family for at least two meals!
Brown the meat before it goes in. This especially goes if you are a visual-eater and want your meal to look pretty in the end. It also helps to sear in flavor during cooking.
Fresh herbs should be added at the end of cook time. Their flavors disappear during it, otherwise. Dried or ground herbs, however, can be added in the beginning.
Get creative. We have been adding in all sorts of vegetables and meats and liquids to ours. A surprise winner so far was a pork shoulder that we roasted with broth, onions and celery. Shredded onto marble-rye bread with some apple-vinegar slaw to top it off, these became easy and healthy Reubens. Yum!
As part of my weekly recipe recaps, I now will be able to start incorporating more slow-cooker recipes. I can't wait to share with you what we learn about dishes made in these genius and easy ceramic cookers. I have one of the Fix It and Forget It books on hand for reference as we create and ideate with ours.
If you don't have a slow cooker yet, consider getting one as both a way to vary your cooking experience and a method of controlling your budget and nutrition goals. Plus, how can you go wrong with something that cooks the food for you? :)
