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Thursday, September 23, 2010

We have lots of things to talk about!

Well, I haven't posted anything in two days...and I'm not really sure why. I guess I've just been busy. Tuesday I went grocery shopping with a friend. I got lots of great deals, which is always fun! I love the feeling of having stocked cupboards..it's like the cooking possiblities are endless! When grocery shop, I plan out my menu for two weeks, make a list and buy what I need for those two weeks' worth of meals. (I do go to the store of the off-week if we need produce or milk). I have felt like I've been in a cooking slump lately and I'm really tired of the same old meals. On Sunday night, I sat down with a few choice cookbooks and decided to make all new meals these next two weeks! As I try a new recipe, I will let you know which ones were good...and I'm sure I'll write about which ones were not so good too. lol As I type this, I'm waiting for my new breakfast recipe to be finished baking. This morning I made Egg Muffins and I'm really excited to see how they turn out! Basically they are like little western omelets baked in a mini-muffin tin. It felt good to chop up all these fresh veggies to put into our breakfast! To me, breakfast is either fruit, cereal, or milk...not VEGGIES. But I need to incorporate more veggies into my diet, so I'm excited to have found one way to do that!

Update: I just took the egg muffins out of the oven and tried one...and they are pretty good! I think I would like to make them in the larger muffin tin though....they are pretty small! Here is the recipe:

2 whole eggs
6 egg whites
about 1/4 cup each: sweet onion diced, button mushroom diced, green bell pepper diced, tomatoes diced
1 Tbsp Parmesan cheese
1 Tbsp real bacon bits (I used turkey bacon)
non-stick olive oil spray
Kosher salt & pepper
Dried parsley for garnish

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Dice all veggies and set aside. Crack eggs in med bowl and set aside. Mix the Parm cheese and bacon together in a small bowl; set aside. Hat a non-stick skillet over medium heat. Add all veggies and sprinkle with salt and pepper; sweat for a few mins until soft and the flavors merge. Beat the eggs with a little salt and pepper. Spray a 24-cup mini muffin pan with non-stick cooking spray. Place about 1 tbsp egg mixture in each muffin cup. You will have some left over.

Scoop about 1/2 tbsp of the cooked veggie mixture into each muffin cup. Using the rest of the egg mixture, top off the muffin cups making each one about even. Sprinkle the cheese bacon mixture on top.

Bake for 10 mins; remove from oven and sprinkle with parsley for garnish. Run a butter knife/toothpick around the edges of each muffin before removing from the pan.

Nutritional facts for 1 serving (6 mini egg muffins):
Fat - 4g
Calories - 85
Fiber - 1g

All in all, these are a healthy way to incorporate more veggies in your breakfast!! I even had a bit of cooked veggies left over, so I combined them with the egg yolks and some milk to make a batch of scrambled eggs for hubby! No wasting food here today! lol

Ok, confession time. Yesterday I slacked off on my healthy eating a bit. My meals were decently healthy, but I snacked way too much. Thanks to my grocery shopping this week, our snack cupboard is full of goodies! Not necessarily anything horrible to snack on...but I just ate too many snacks in general. Our electricity was off for 2 hrs yesterday, so as I sat a book, I snacked. And I felt horrible afterwards! I really felt yucky the rest of the evening. It's amazing how different you feel when you put good things into your body! Yesterday I also didn't not get a run in. It looked like it was going to rain, so my running buddy and I decided it would be best to cancel last night's run. Honestly, I didn't feel the greatest and I knew that running would be difficult b/c of that fact.

On the flip side...there were some good things that happened yesterday! First of all I got my very first massage! It was wonderful! I have been having issues with my right collarbone/rib/shoulder area and the chiropractor recommended that I get a massage...boy was I thrilled to hear that!! I have been wanting to get one for quite some time, but could never justify spending the money on myself. Now that I've had one, I am a firm believer in getting them whenever you can! I didn't have the normal massage, but one that concentrated on the area I've been having issue with...but it was still great! I am convinced that my hubby or a close friend of mine who go to massage therapy school...mainly so I can get them whenever I want and for free! Any volunteers? lol

After my massage I stopped by the local thrift store. I like to stop by every now and then to see if I can find some nice jeans or shirts. This time I found neither, but I came home with 4 books that I'm really excited about! The one that I started reading yesterday is called, "Perfect Weight" by Jordan Rubin. He is the author of "The Maker's Diet". I started reading that book a few years ago and just could not get into it at all. But last weekend a neighbor stopped over and somehow we started talking about his son who had had health problems and the doctors gave him no hope for improvement. After a ton of prayer and research, they started making changes in their diet and started eating wholesome foods. (think health food store types of foods) This just baffled me. It's so funny how God works in our lives because I have really been wanting to make a change in my eating and really wanting to rid our house of prepackaged foods, etc, but not really having the knowledge of HOW to do it. And here my neighbor is, in my yard, telling us that they eating nothing but whole foods....and I never suspected it! When you feel God nudging you to do something but you don't know how to do it, just pray that He will send the materials or the right person to you to educate you! Anyways...he recommended Rubin's book and said that they used certain parts of that book in their lives, along with other information, and their son started getting better! When I came across the Perfect Weight book, I knew I had to get it! So far, it's been a really good read! Mainly Rubin would like to educate people on how to change their lives and stop the obestiy crisis in America. In this particular book, he went to Toledo to start a healthy living campaign of sorts. I can't wait to keep reading and find out all about it! I should also add that Rubin himself experienced first hand how what you eat can change your live...and even save it! He was suffering from health problems when he was a young adult and even was down to 110lbs and the nurses and doctors didn't think he's make it through the night, then started eating whole foods and now lives a normal life. It's just amazing. Literally what most of us eat is not really food at all, but fake food if you will. It's full of chemicals and has been put through so many processes that it no longer contains any nutrition. Eating food like this over long periods of time has got to have negative effects on our bodies...with obesity being just one of them. And with obestiy comes a ton of other health problems. The statistics in Rubin's book are just shocking to me. Here are a few: 2/3 of American adults age 20 years of older are overweight (defined by having a BMI of 25 or higher), and the number of those who are extremely obese (at least 100 lbs overweight) has quadrupled since the 1980's. If people keep gaining weight at the current pace, US researchers at John Hopkins University predict that 75% of US adults will be overweight (and 41% obese) by 2015, which is just around the corner.

Obesity really is an epidemic. And unfortunately, Americans just tend to accept their obesity instead of deciding to live healthier lives. Rubin even writes about a company who manufactures larger scaled furniture to accomodate people who weigh up to 700lbs!

I hope Rubin's book continues to shock, encourage, and inform me...and I will pass that information on to you too!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

We eat a lot of veggies here since my parent's and myself became vegetarians a year ago and we don't drink milk- we use rice, almond, or soy milk here on our cereal and we have been eating soy icecream products, we don't eat much eggs here though.

Amy Westbeld