Also, my uncle recently relocated down here, and this was his first Valentine's day solo, so I figured that I'd cook a lasagna for him as well. And so I did.
Remember how I said we're all poor and stuff? Yeah. Ricotta is expensive. So is Italian cheese mix. So I rooted around my pantry & fridge and decided that I could TOTALLY do this without anything but the Parmesan that I had on hand. I'm also not eating red meat, and I think ground turkey is disgusting, so I substituted chicken thighs, which I had in the freezer.
So I made a meat sauce with thighs, sausage, canned tomatoes, carrots, onions and garlic. Yeah. That part was amazing. I'm also stepping slowly out of the PPD fog, so I decided that with this excess energy that I had, I was going to make my own pasta noodles too. So I did. MMMMMMMMM...if you've never made your own pasta, I HIGHLY suggest it over the dried shit from the store. Home made comes out creamy and soft and...just...good. (And it doesn't have preservatives and other weird stuff like that in it!) In lieu of the ricotta/mozerella/parm mixture that I have always made in the past, I made a bechamel sauce and instead of nutmeg, I used garam marsala (for a kind of sicilian flavor...I freaking LOVE pasta with garam marsala!)
It ended up really really REALLY good...and not as heavy. For once, after eating lasagna, I didn't feel like I had a brick sitting on my intestine.
That was my Valentine's day. Brad came home with a bottle of wine and a mini orchid and I cooked him a ton of yummy food. Win-win.
I've decided to go on a "diet." Sort of. I already don't eat very much, honestly. I'll eat one *meal* a day, and then snack or eat small meals the rest of the day. Every once in a while (when I can rally myself to leave the house, so you KNOW it isn't frequent) I'll eat fast food. Blech. That's not very often. So I joined choosemyplate.gov
You can set up a profile, and you enter in all of the food you eat, it tells you your goals and where you are on your goals...for example, right now, I'm at 83% of my suggested vegetable intake, and 18% of my protein. I told it I was a breastfeeding woman and it informed me that I SHOULD be eating about 2200 calories a day. I told it that I wanted to lose weight and it recalculated me down to 2000 calories a day. This is pure insanity, because for the week that I've been doing it, I haven't gotten about 1500 calories until yesterday, and that was after eating a steak and drinking 2 glasses of wine. I haven't come CLOSE to 2000 calories in god only knows how long. And yet I'm not losing weight. This is super frustrating to me.
I exercise when I can (which until last Tuesday was every day for at least20-30 minutes of bodyweight exercises and/or kickboxing and/or pilates) on Tuesday I pulled a muscle in my leg kicking the shit out of air. Yay me.
Protip: when you're kickboxing, pay attention to form. Don't just flail about because you're tired and frustrated and want to get your 30 minutes in regardless of the fact that your evil child is shrieking at you because he woke up from his nap 45 minutes early....Yeah. Oops.
So today is the first day that I've been able to walk on my right leg without limping and wincing, so I'll start working out again tomorrow, I guess. Bah. Meanwhile, I'm watching what I've been eating, and I've decided that the BEST way to do this is to go on a whole foods diet. No more processed anything. This is a lot harder than it sounds. But I've done pretty well since Saturday.
Saturday I cooked a beet risotto, Italian-style sweet & sour pork, and sauteed beet greens. It was super fantastic. For breakfast yesterday I ate a bowl of oatmeal, for lunch when Brad let me run away from the boys for a couple of hours, I ate a taco salad from Barberitos (they actually use REAL ingredients...so it was basically just spinach leaves, olives, cheese, guacamole and pico. For dinner we had mashed potatoes, steak and a big salad. For breakfast this morning I made apple pancakes, scrambled eggs with spinach and for lunch leftover salad. For dinner tonight I'm making a whole roasted chicken.
This is do-able.
At the same time, however, I've decided to start seriously potty-training Dylan. He's 20 months old and he knows the words...he occasionally grabs his crotch when he pees and he HATES being in a dirty diaper. So all day today he's been pants-less. He's peed on the floor like 3 times and while he'll chill out and sit on his potty chair, he hasn't actually GONE in it yet. He just got up from his nap, so as soon as he's done with lunch, the diaper comes off again. This is going to be interesting. Thank god we have hardwood floors and not carpet. Yuk.
So that's all for now, I guess...
Attached are my lasagna pictures and my pork & risotto pictures. Enjoy!
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