Summer Eating Can Be So Simple

June 22, 2011 By

In my obese life, I ate the same fattening things year round. Rather the calendar read spring, summer, winter, or fall, my diet consisted of high calorie restaurant meals, large portions of home cooked dinners, and desserts of all kinds. Chocolate was available all year long, and ice cream was as good in the winter as it was in the summer. If a day went by without me eating an entire box of some processed food it was unusual. Just as unusual were the days when I ate  more than one variety of vegetable. The vegetable of choice? Canned green beans. If I did eat a salad, it was iceberg lettuce swimming in full fat bleu cheese dressing, topped with fried croutons. Definitely not the healthiest, well rounded diet in the world.

No wonder  I had a weight problem!  When I finally decided to get my weight under control, and regain control of my health, I realized that I didn’t want to just lose weight in a haphazard manner, but I wanted to lose weight by learning to eat healthy foods. As most of us know, you can lose weight by eating small amounts of junk food, but that is definitely not the preferred method. As my journey began,  I started paying attention to not only what I was eating, but how fresh my food was. In doing so, I discovered the joys of eating in season foods.

Logically, one of the easiest times to eat “in season” is the summer. I had never visited our local farmer’s market as a overweight person. Instead I ate canned, frozen or no vegetables. As healthy eating took over, the desire to find fresh food got stronger. The first time I saw the farmer’s market I couldn’t believe it. All those vegetables looked amazing, and the varied assortment was something completely unexpected. As I strolled the vendor’s area, I had a hard time picking what to buy. It was fun to support the local farmers, and get amazing produce at the same time. I never knew the strawberries from the grocery store were a poor imitation for the real thing. And that tomatoes grown fresh, and not transported hundreds of miles had a completely different taste from the mealy grocery store ones.

As I changed my eating habits, my family benefited from the better choices I made for them. Fresh fruit for dessert replaced high fat baked goods, and oatmeal topped with fresh blueberries was much better than packaged varieties. Salads became an experiment in new tastes, flavors and textures, as I learned to appreciate zucchini, onions and cucumbers. Smoothies for dessert tasted better than ever with real strawberries instead of frozen, and even our favorite dessert pizza became healthier when I topped it with fat free yogurt and fresh fruit.

Green living is very fashionable right now, and eating in season goes right along with that philosophy. In our town there is no recycling (unbelievable I know), but I can still do my part by supporting local vendors. As we change our own personal lifestyles, we can set good examples for those in our own family, and assist other people at the same time.

I’ve seen a change in my husband’s attitude towards processed food. Whereas boxed was best, now he too enjoys fresh food. As he says, “It’s nice to be able to tell where your food came from!”

Try some new things this summer, and take advantage of the bounty of fresh fruits and vegetables that are available right now. You will be glad you did!

I’d love for you to tell me what your favorite summer food is.    Diane

 

Filed Under: cooking

Chicken Hummus Wraps

May 12, 2011 By

Chicken hummus wraps

These wraps are so delicious, easy to make and best of all – healthy for you.

Ingredients for 4 wraps:

4 whole-wheat tortillas of your choice (I use high-fiber wraps)

2 cooked chicken breasts, sliced into lengthwise strips

Your favorite flavor of Sabra hummus. (Basil-Pesto would be great)

1 onion, chopped

2 mushrooms, chopped

1 package of your favorite greens. (I used baby romaine)

Directions:

Spread hummus onto wrap. Layer vegetables, greens and chicken onto wrap. Roll up and enjoy.

Filed Under: cooking

Chocolate Hummus Recipe

May 12, 2011 By

Chocolate hummus dessert

Chocolate, Coconut and Caramel Hummus Pastries using Sabra hummus

Caramel can be prepared up to 2 days in advance.  Purchased caramel can be used if you do not have the time or temperament to make caramel on the stovetop.  Filling is best made the day it is served.

Do not fill cups more than an hour before serving.

Caramel

1 cup                          sugar

1/4 cup                       water

1 cup                          heavy cream

2 tablespoons           unsalted butter

1 teaspoon                vanilla

 Filling

1 cup                          Sabra® Classic Hummus

¾ cup                         Toasted coconut

1 cup                          finely grated premium chocolate (60% cocoa butter or more)

20                                Prebaked phyllo pastry cups

1/4 cup                       toasted coconut

To make caramel:

PLACE sugar and caramel in a heavy bottomed sauce pan.  Cook over medium heat until sugar begins to brown.  Watch very closely, stirring infrequently.  When sugar is a deep brown (but not burned looking!), remove from heat.  Immediately and carefully add cream.

  1. STIR well.  Add butter and vanilla.  Stir until well blended.
  2. POUR into a storage container and refrigerate until ready to use.

To make filling:

  1. MIX all filling ingredients together.  Refrigerate until ready to use.

To Serve:

1.  SPOON a rounded teaspoon into phyllo pastry cup.  Top with a rounded teaspoon of caramel.  Sprinkle with toasted coconut.

  1. PLACE on serving platter.  Drizzle pastries and platter with caramel.  Serve immediately.

 

Filed Under: cooking

Keeping Your Goals In Mind

December 20, 2010 By

I know it’s the week before Christmas and it’s a busy time of year. These past couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of musical events, out-of-town company, holiday functions and quite a bit of cooking. As we countdown to the actual holiday, it can be really easy to just throw our hands up in the air and say, “It’s too hard to keep eating healthy food and watch my weight.”

No one is immune to the potential for holiday weight gain. I still have to be very diligent in watching my food portions and choices because if I don’t keep my goal of “never going back” in front of me, then I could easily begin to regain weight. When I bake cookies or dip pretzels in chocolate, I decide before I begin if I will have any, and then how many I’m going to eat. This often helps me because I know I can have one if I want it, and I understand in advance how many I’m going to allow myself.

Another way I avoid just eating whatever I want for a few days in a row is to remember that those cookies or cakes not only have the potential to add unwanted pounds, but they also contain ingredients that are not very healthy for me. Butter, chocolate and salty pretzels are okay every once in a while, but certainly not day after day after day.

It isn’t always easy to keep your goals in front of you when cookies and candies are beckoning you to indulge, give in and forget what you’ve been working for all these months or even years. Although I don’t think that losing weight needs to be your goal during this coming week, I do think that continued diligence is important.

As you get closer to, and eventually reach your goal weight, you will have years and years ahead of you to practice maintenance. What better time to begin preparing than right now for the hundreds of holidays that will occur throughout your life?

Focusing on your health, fitness and scale goals during these next few days can really help you make wise decisions when faced with the abundance of food.

How will you keep your focus over the next few days?  Diane

Filed Under: Choices, cooking Tagged With: , ,

This Is Going Back

July 26, 2010 By

As careful as I try to be I mess up all the time. Here’s a perfect example. I was planning our meals for the week and decided that we would have black beans and rice, homemade tortilla chips, green beans and fruit. Then I thought to myself, “We haven’t had yellow rice in a long time. I’ll get some at the store.”

I was grocery shopping later that day and walked down the aisle with the Mexican foods. I grabbed two boxes of yellow rice and put them in my cart. I finished shopping, waited in line FOREVER and went home. Two days later I was getting the black beans going and grabbed the boxes of rice. I glanced at the nutrition label and this is what I saw.

I looked at the serving sizes to make sure that enormous sodium amount wasn’t for the entire box. No, that yellow rice really had 820 mg of sodium per serving. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t serve that to my family.

So instead of yellow rice we had a mixture of brown and white rice, which is how I usually make rice for black beans. I’m returning the rice boxes to the store this afternoon.

That experience made me think about how easy it is to assume that a food is healthy to eat but in reality it’s not very good for you. I falsely assumed that yellow rice would be fine but I was wrong. We have been really trying to watch the amount of sodium we eat and 820 mg in one serving of rice wasn’t fine for me or my family.

This isn’t the first time it’s happened to me. Even after I lost my weight I sometimes get lax about checking the nutrition labels and let extra fat, sugar or sodium slip into our diets. You’d think I’d learn!

Have you ever gotten something home and decided, “I’m not eating this!”  Diane

Filed Under: Choices, cooking Tagged With: ,

My Newest Endeavor

July 9, 2010 By

I’ve been surround by friends who milled their own wheat for years but always resisted making my own breads because I just didn’t want to do it. I knew some of the facts about bread you buy at the store – even whole wheat bread. Facts like:

  • The flour you buy at the grocery store is virtually empty of fiber and the germ is removed. The vitamins are bleached out and replaced with artifical vitamins.
  • Commercial millers take the wheat berries, and break it into three parts: – the bran, which is the fiber and mineral portion- the germ, which is where most of the vitamins and unsaturated fats are-and the endosperm, which is where the grain keeps its protein.
  • They only use the endosperm to make white flour and feed the nutritious part to animals. They do add back vitamins but not all that were lost.
  • Even wheat flour you buy at the grocery store is processed and just enough bran is added back in to meet minimum standards. Also, wheat flour loses its nutrients very quickly, so the flour at the grocery store could be less nutritionally dense than you need it to be.
  • Buying whole wheat bread is great, but the good quality breads are expensive and still don’t have as many nutrients as freshly milled grain.
  • You can mill many types of grains, not just wheat. You can grind popcorn, spelt, oat groats, kamut, and quinoa. I used hard white wheat to make these rolls and bread loaves. I have soft white which I will use for muffins, granola bars and pizza crust.

Well, even though I’ve known all that for years and years I still resisted. I finally gave in after a friend brought me some blueberry muffins she made using her fresh ground wheat. They were delicious and substantial. I talked it over with John and we decided to give it a try. It helped that John just finished reading David Kessler’s book, “The End of Overeating!” John is even more aware now of processed foods and their impact on our bodies. Thank you Dr. Kessler.

Am I saying everyone should do this? NO!! But, I thought you might find the process interesting.

Here are the wheat berries in the grain mill getting ready to be ground into flour.  Aren’t they pretty?

Here’s the freshly milled flour. It’s very finely ground and warm when it comes out of the grain mill.  You have to use it within a few hours or it starts to lose its nutritional value. It can be frozen for a couple of days.

Here’s the first batch of dough I mixed up for rolls. The dough was much heavier than dough I’ve made before with wheat or white flour from the grocery store.

And here are the finished rolls and the bread loaves I made. They were delicious and filling! Even my teenage son was full and that’s a miracle.

 I hope that I don’t get burned out making our own bread. Fortunately I have an ultra strong Bosch mixer that can handle the heavier dough and knead 20 cups of flour at a time! With this large a family that’s a necessity!

Have you ever heard of grinding your own wheat or made your own bread?  Diane

Here’s the link for where I got my mill: http://www.pleasanthillgrain.com/

Filed Under: cooking Tagged With:

What a Difference It Made!

June 2, 2010 By

This past weekend I visited with a very dear friend, Miss Nelda. Whenever I go to her house she offers me cuttings from her yard, like these:

She said to me. “Do you like basil and mint?” I told her I did and before I knew it we were walking through her yard to her herb garden. She pushed through some other plants (I don’t know what they were) and found the mint and basil. She leaned over and yanked those plants right out of the ground. I was excited because in my mind I want to be the kind of person who grows her own herbs and happily plucks them out of the garden while I’m making dinner.

Not wanting to waste the herbs I made the following dish, which ironically used mint and basil! We found the recipe on the back of the whole grain Barilla pasta box and I altered it to what you see here. Sadly I threw away the box so I don’t remember the exact name of the recipe.

Sea Shell Veggie/Chicken Pasta

Ingredients:

  • 16 ounces shell pasta
  • 1 onion, chopped
  • 1 clove garlic, minced
  • 1 head broccoli
  • 2 chopped tomatoes (I used 2 cans of diced tomatoes)
  • 1 cup chopped carrots
  • 1 T olive oil
  • 3 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
  • mint (fresh!)
  • basil (fresh!)
  • pepper

Directions: Prepare pasta according to directions.  Meanwhile, heat 1 T olive oil and saute the onion and garlic until soft. Add chicken breasts and cook until completely done. Remove chicken and keep warm. Heat additional tablespoon of oil and sautee all the vegetables. After 5 minutes add 1/2 cup water. Cover and simmer for 5 more minutes or until vegetables are tender crisp. Drain pasta and put in serving dish. Top with vegetables, chopped chicken, and the fresh herbs. Serve and enjoy!

I was amazed at the difference fresh herbs made in this dish. I’ve used fresh herbs from the grocery store before but these had a flavor and odor that far exceeded the ones I had tasted in the past. So our project is to try and root the herbs she gave me so I really can have fresh herbs from my garden!

Have you ever tried to grow herbs? Ever had ones right out of the ground? What do you think? Diane

Filed Under: cooking, Weight Loss Tagged With: ,

What’s For Dinner?

May 19, 2010 By

For mother’s day a couple of weeks ago I got some nice gifts. Two gifts which I asked for and received were some Fiestaware cookware and an electric wok. Our stove, which is supposed to be very “nice” (sorry Jenn-Air) doesn’t get very hot, and I have a hard time stir-frying successfully. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that I try to stir-fry a lot at one time. . .  However, enter my new wok!

Earlier this week I made an Asian meal of stir-fried chicken and vegetables. I used a homemade stir-fry sauce which was very low in sodium (68 mg). I used less molasses and a bit of homemade (no salt) chicken broth instead of beef bullion and when all was said and done everyone loved it!

This week here’s what’s on my menu. Even though I didn’t write them down, I always have two veggies side dishes and usually a fruit as well!

Wednesday: Chicken and Dumplings

Thursday: Vegetarian Spaghetti with homemade Italian bread

Friday: Pizza night!

Saturday: Black beans and rice with homemade tortilla chips

Sunday: Herb Baked chicken

Monday: Brown rice and veggie wraps

Tuesday: Bocca burgers, homemade fries

Question: I feel like I am in somewhat of a rut and really need some new meal ideas! What’s something on your menu this week that I could “borrow”?  Diane

Filed Under: cooking Tagged With: , ,

One Of The Big Three In My Journey

May 17, 2010 By

If you missed my weekend post: Is This Okay? (Mini-Rant) please read it! Not really for what I wrote, but for all the interesting, insightful comments you all left!

Today I wanted to focus on one aspect of my weight loss journey that is vitally important – Portion Control.

Portion control was one of my “Big Three” when I was losing weight. I watched portions, controlled the fat percentage in my overall diet, and exercised. Of those three, portion size was the easiest to deceive myself over. It was easy to watch the fat content in foods, exercise was either a “did” or “didn’t,” but portions could be tricky.

I would often try and justify having a second or third piece of bread because I didn’t put butter on it.

I would take a couple of extra crackers, instead of stopping at the 5 per the serving size.

I would dish out a bit more casserole than I knew was the right amount.

If I ate baked chips, instead of counting out the correct amount I’d just reach my hand in a few times in a row.

I would eat more pasta even though I knew what a serving looked like because I had measured it before.

I’d eat 3 pieces of diet whole wheat bread because it was diet, and had less calories.

Along my weight loss year I stopped fooling myself over portion sizes, and made myself be honest about what a portion really was and wasn’t. Sometimes it was hard because sometimes I wanted more of something, but I knew I had had enough. Here are seven tips that might help you when dealing with the temptation to eat a little bigger portion than you really intend.

Seven Tips for Portion Control

1. Per Dr. Oz - Use a smaller plate, bowl, or cup. I do this all the time and it really helps – both now in maintenance, and during my weight loss. If I ever eat ice cream I use one of those tiny custard cups and just put a small spoonful in. It’s not a lot of ice cream, but it is enough.

2. Learn what the proper portions of food are. Here’s a great resource. For example, a baked potato shouldn’t be bigger than your computer mouse. In other words, it shouldn’t be as big as your head like you see in some restaurants!

3. Read the serving size on the package. Sometimes you may be surprised at how small a serving really is. Crackers anyone? How about stopping at five.

4. Think before you eat. Really think about what you are about to eat, and resolve to enjoy each bite.

5. Stick with one helping of the main dish. If you are still hungry, fill up on veggies or salad and leave the entree alone.

6. Don’t be a member of the Clean Plate Club. It’s okay to leave things on your plate. For me, it’s the rare meal where I eat everything on my plate. Ask John!

7. When in doubt – measure. The value of measuring and weighing your food is proven. Do you want to measure forever? No – and you don’t have to. But if you aren’t sure or aren’t confident in your ability to use visual cues, then measure.

Portion control really is the key to weight loss and weight maintenance. You can exercise, you can eat healthy food, but without eating the right AMOUNT of food, you will have a hard time achieving your goals!!

Question: I’d love to hear your thoughts on portions and how you control them!  Diane

Filed Under: Choices, cooking Tagged With: , ,

Breaking the Unhealthy Breakfast Habit

May 14, 2010 By

I used to eat brownies for breakfast.  I know, we all eat unhealthy things for breakfast every now and and then, but I used to have Brownies appeared as a regular feature on my breakfast menu.  I didn’t really plan on cooking them when I decided what to serve for our weekly meals, but whenever I was feeling any emotion at all, brownies appeared.  A big pan of brownies should have lasted for several days.  However, because there was one big overweight me, all the remaining brownies disappeared by the next morning.

From the minute I woke up, those brownies seemed to call my name.  I would start out by eating half of one, and tell myself that was it.  But ten minutes later I heard the brownie call again and the other half would disappear.  One half by one half, I would consume the what was left of the brownies.  Sure I felt guilty.  But instead of dwelling on my obesity I would waddle off to the kitchen to make another pan.  You see, when John came home he might wonder who ate all those brownies, so I would make more so I didn’t have to explain where twelve brownies went.  (Not that he ever made me feel bad, because he didn’t.)  It was my own guilty conscience.

Later that day, when the next pan of warm brownies came out of the oven, I had to eat some.  That way the right amount would be sitting on the plate.  Fortunately, I don’t do that anymore.  Surprisingly, this wasn’t the easiest of habits to break. I had a hard time stopping baking and not eating sweets when I first woke up. Breaking that habit involved some concentrated effort and some stern talks with myself. Over time I got further and further away from having brownies for breakfast most mornings of the week.

I still bake brownies and I’ll admit that I sometimes have a leftover piece of one for breakfast, but it’s not a compulsion anymore.  I finally trained myself to eat a healthy breakfast, usually oatmeal and a piece of whole wheat toast!

What’s your favorite breakfast food now? Diane

Filed Under: cooking, Meal Time, Weight Loss Tagged With: ,
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »