I'll Never Miss Celery

Last week I really tried not to eat the same thing every day.  I think I was pretty successful.  You be the judge:

•  Trader Joe's chicken tamale
• red bell pepper strips with balsamic vinaigrette dipper
• pineapple chunks
• green grapes

•  turkey salami and mozzarella cheese slice with pesto spread on a sandwich thin
• roasted asparagus (salt, pepper, olive oil roasted at 400 for 20 min)
• frozen peaches and blackberries
• celery and organic (way too healthy and not as tasty as Skippy) peanut butter

I loved the idea of this lunch.  I gobbled it all up in less than 15 minutes.  Then I got to the celery and peanut butter...and my throat started scratching.  I don't know if it was the celery or the peanut butter but I had a mild to medium to allergic reaction to something in that little red box.  I hope it was the celery, because, well, who will ever really miss eating celery.  I've never had a hankering for a plate full of celery.  Peanut butter, on the other hand.  Please, God, don't smite me for my wicked ways by making me allergic to peanut butter.  Even the gross healthy peanut butter that my Darling Dearest is now forcing us to use because Skippy has extra death ingredients or something.  I have to do some more "experiments" to make sure I'm not developing a peanut allergy.  I see some peanut M&Ms in my future.

• turkey salami, mozzarella and light provolone cheese, spinach leaves wrapped in a whole wheat tortilla
• fat free vanilla Greek yogurt
• blood oranges
• cucumbers with balsamic vinaigrette dipper

• turkey bologna and light provolone cheese on Ezekiel 4:9 bread
• sugar snap peas 
• fat free vanilla Greek yogurt
• frozen peaches and blackberries

Well, I started to get desperate at the end of the week.  I said I wasn't going to have sugar snap peas for a while...but there were no other vegetables for me to put in my box.  I seriously considered just leaving it empty but opening my lunch at my desk to find an empty container makes me so sad.   I ate most of them, but, honestly, I'm still not feeling sugar snaps. 

What vegetables do you eat for lunch?  Do you eat vegetables for lunch?  

Chipping Away

The big theme in the past couple of weeks has been chocolate chip goodies.  Take a look:

I made chocolate chip cookies from this recipe.  Both me and the Mr. agreed they were too delicious to make in such a large batch (over 2 dozen).  I tried to keep the rest of lunch simple that week:

•  mixed green salad with cucumbers and bell peppers (balsamic vinaigrette dressing)
• 2 chocolate chip cookies
• peaches and blackberries (frozen and then thawed)
• turkey bologna and light provolone cheese with pesto spread on a whole wheat tortilla

When the cookies ran out I started having these sinfully delicious pita chips.  I swear they are fried in salty heaven oil.  Anyway, I moved on to these fantastic blondies for my lunch dessert next.  I only added in dried cherries because I hate nuts in baked goods.  Chalk that up as another one of my food "issues."  Anyway, here are the  main components of the lunches above:

• turkey bologna and light provolone on a sandwich thin
• fat free vanilla Greek yogurt
• those evil pita chips
• garlic chicken (a constant favorite) over brown rice
• cara cara oranges
• bell peppers strips with balsamic vinaigrette dipper
• sugar snap peas
• chocolate chip cherry blondie 

This is what happens when I'm too lazy to pack my lunch the night before and oversleep the morning of.  That was a sad day.

The blondies didn't last very long and I got a wicked stomach bug that kept me home from work for a couple days.  My fella made a nice chicken and sausage gumbo from a Weight Watchers recipe.   Yummers tummers!  One day I had a hard boiled egg as my afternoon snack.  Solid.

This was my finally meal with sugar snap peas.  I am so burned out on them!  I usually pride myself on being able to eat the same thing day in and day out, but this meal on Friday was boring straw that broke the camel's back.  So, sugar snap peas are on the bench, for now.

And here we have today's lunch:

• 3 bean turkey chili 
• blood orange slices
• fat free vanilla Greek yogurt
• Wasa crisps for dipping in the chili

I'm not sure what recipe my Chief Chef used for the chili.  It was done in the slow cooker, like 90% of our meals, so it is probably is pretty easy.  He likes to sneak in as many vegetables as possible so there is some spinach, peppers, and mushrooms swimming  around with the turkey and beans.   Those Wasa crisps were the perfect crunchy companion with the chili too.  It gave me flashbacks of that great elementary school cafeteria delicacy...the Frito Boat!

Happy lunching!

Box Fresh Every Day

• tuna fish and egg salad on a whole wheat sandwich thin
• kiwis
• sugar snap peas
• broccoli
• clementines
• low fat cheddar cheese for a snack

• clementines
• kiwis
• whole wheat pasta with veggies
• Greek yogurt with chocolate chips (heart shaped for Valentines Day)
• sugar snap peas

• frozen peaches
• turkey and cheese sandwich
• garbanzo beans with salt and pepper
• sugar snap peas
• clementines

• Wasa crackers
• tuna and egg salad
• sugar snap peas
• garbanzo beans with salt and pepper
• frozen peaches and blackberries
• clementines

• clementines
• turkey bologna sandwich
• sugar snap peas
• garbanzo beans with salt and peppers
• fat free vanilla Greek yogurt

• Turkey bologna and cheese sandwich on Ezekiel bread
• garbanzo beans with salt and pepper
• fat free vanilla Greek yogurt
• sugar snap peas

• mixed greens with yellow bell peppers and cucumbers and balsamic vinaigrette
• kiwis
• sugar snap peas
• curried tilapia (we used this recipe) originally from dinner

• cara cara oranges
• sugar snap peas
• turkey bologna and cheese in a whole wheat tortilla
• fat free vanilla Greek yogurt

• frozen peaches and blackberries
• garbanzo beans with salt and pepper
• red bell peppers with balsamic vinaigrette dipper
• turkey bologna and cheese wrap

The past two weeks have been CRAZY with me.  I'm saving money like a demon (still on the Mon-Fri spending ban) plus doing a lot of other stuff.  I made sure to at least take a picture of my boxes every day.  I won't discuss each and every one, but I will say that my new favorite dessert is frozen peaches and blackberries.  Once they melt together by lunch time it's heavenly.

Please let me know if you have any questions about any of my lunches.  I'm feeling a bit uninspired in the writing department.

Technicolor Monotony

Well I been eating more or less the same lunches for the past couple of weeks.  Although the food has been fresh, colorful, healthy and tasty...by Friday it gets BO-RING!

I finished up the last of that blasted lamb curry at the beginning of last week.  Then I moved on to some lovely turkey bologna and light harvarti cheese wraps.  I had those pretty much every day last week with lots of fruit and veggies on the side.  A meat and cheese lunch (no matter if it's "light") is still pretty taxing on my weight loss/management budget so I try to balance it out with low calorie yet filling side dishes.  But it was a fun lunch that week.  I think I've expressed my love for lunchy lunches before and bologna and cheese is just about the lunchiest lunch I can think of.  But, I fell into my old ways of dinner-type leftovers this week.

This week I had EXACTLY the same meal for 5 days straight.  I only put up 3 pictures because, well, who needs 5 shots of the same thing:

• 2 cara cara oranges
• sugar snap peas
• broccoli florets
• cucumbers with balsamic vinaigrette dipper
• 1/2 brown rice with chicken adobo

We made the chicken adobo in the slow cooker on Sunday night.  Let me know if you want me to put the recipe up.  It's pretty similar to the old faithful Garlic Chicken that we make all the time.  Just less garlic and more spice and some vinegar.  Anyway, I really enjoyed it Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.  There is something lovely and comforting about having a hot lunch in the middle of the day.  Sometimes I can even drift away for a moment and imagine that I'm not sitting at a desk surrounded by stacks of paper and a glowing computer screen.  By Thursday reality set in a bit and I was just going through the motions and eating the lunch that was there waiting for me.  But by Friday! Oh good Lord! I was dreading what was in that box.  I felt like I DESERVED to have something more special in there.  I wanted CHEESE, dammit and something CHOCOLATE.  I wanted something artificial that I didn't make or that wasn't grown in any place other than a lab!

The only thing that stopped me from tossing my bento out the window and heading straight to Pret or the nearest gas station mini-mart was fact that I had zero cash, coins or credit cards in my possession.  My SO and I have put ourselves on weekday spending ban for the month of February.  We put all our cash and cards into a tin on Sunday night and don't touch them again until Saturday morning.  Not having any money on hand has really made me aware of how often I actually reach for my wallet during the week.  Ok, I won't bore you with details of this little experiment, but I mention just to let you know that I did, indeed, eat my lunch on Friday.  But as a result I went home and baked up a pepperoni pizza for dinner and washed down 2 slices with some well mixed chocolate milk, thankyouverymuch!

Just A Spoonful Of Sugar Helps

 I had my million dollar lamb curry on Thursday and Friday.  The only major addition was smooth, cool and creamy Greek yogurt.

• Indian lamb curry with spinach
• green salad with peppers and cucumbers
• strawberries
• Brussels sprouts
• clementines
• vanilla nonfat Greek yogurt

I still can't stand plain yogurt so I chose vanilla flavored Chobani,  There are 17 grams of sugar for an 8 oz. serving.  I only had about 4 oz. in my container for lunch.  Oh! I finally looked up the conversion from grams to teaspoons.  Nobody actually weighs anything in grams in a regular kitchen so I had to know how much sugar I would I have to put in my yogurt or whatever to make it taste as sweet as it is when the major food manufacturer makes it.  Anyway, it turns out that 1 teaspoon is about 4 grams.  That means I would have to put at least 2 teaspoons of sugar into plain Greek yogurt to make it taste sweet enough.  Honestly, that's not that bad to me.  I put 2 teaspoons of sugar in my black tea with milk.  I'm sure things like Coke and Snapple have a zillion grams of sugar (i.e., a quarter of a zillion teaspoons of sugar).  But 2-4 teaspoons of sugar for a "dessert" type treat seems pretty reasonable to me.

Have a great weekend!

Adventures In Meat Shopping

Today I'm going to confess to doing a very foolish thing.  But first, the food:

• strawberries (for my oatmeal in the morning)
• Indian lamb curry with spinach
• broccoli
• pineapple
• green salad with cucumber and peppers

So, we have this new fancy butcher in Harlem.  It's all grass-fed, organic, etc. and being the good hipster liberal that I am, I feel the need to buy something from the shop every once and a while to show my financial support and hopefully help quality businesses like this thrive in my neighborhood.  We hardly ever cook red meat at home because we see it as an expensive and unhealthy treat that is better at a restaurant or dinner party.  When we buy something from Harlem Shambles it's usually a couple of their breakfast sausages.  We eat them on Sunday morning along with some fluffy pancakes and all the fixins'.  But this Sunday I wanted to make something special for dinner and I chose a lamb curry recipe from our slow cooker cookbook.  Surprisingly, we had all of the spices and vegetables in the house already.  The only thing I had to buy were the chiles and the lamb.  I expected the lamb to be kind of pricey but I figured  that even if it's $9 or $10 a pound I'd still get at least 8-10 servings out of the pot so in the end it's still more economical than getting Indian take out.  Anyway, I went to the shop and asked for exactly what the recipe called for "3 lb. boneless leg of lamb of lamb."  The only lamb they had on the display case had bones.  I noticed it was $9/lb and I mentally prepared myself to pay over $30 for a hunk of meat.  But, the butcher went to the big walk-in fridge to get "the cut you need" and proceeded to cut it up into cubes for me.   After carefully trimming and cubing the lamb for me he plunked down and neatly wrapped package and chirped, "that'll be $54.26 please."  Guys, I nearly keeled over and died!!!  Once I regained my composure I sheepishly handed over my debit card while furiously calculating the price per serving of this now VERY IMPORTANT curry.  I made a little joke to him that now I have to find a reason to celebrate something since I just paid celebration prices for this meat.  I don't think he laughed.  Needless to say, I walked out of there feeling a bit crestfallen.  I was almost afraid to tell Mr. Man how much I paid for 1 meals worth of meat.  He is even more miserly than I am and would not be at all embarrassed to march right back to the shop try to return it.  The main point is that I should have asked how much it was before anything went down.  I hate feeling like an uniformed consumer.  Besides, the lamb was really delicious and perfect and I would not have bought it any place else.  Harlem Shambles is a great butcher shop and I still plan on buying meat from there.  But we're back to our breakfast sausage budget for the foreseeable future.

Try this recipe:

Indian Lamb Curry with Spinach*

• 3 lb boneless leg of lamb, cut into 1 1/2 inch cubes
• salt and pepper
• 2 tablespoons canola oil
• 2 yellow onions, finely chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 3 small fresh hot green chiles, seeded and minced
• 1-inch piece fresh ginger, peeled and grated (I used 2 tablespoons of this instead)
• 1 tablespoon brown mustard seeds
• 1 tablespoon ground cumin
• 1 tablespoon ground coriander
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cardamom (I substituted a teaspoon of ground ginger since, who has cardamom?)
• 1 teaspoon ground turmeric
• 2 cups reduced sodium chicken broth
• 6 cups pre-washed baby spinach leaves

Put the lamb in a big bowl and season with salt and pepper.  Warm the oil in a large frying pan and add the lamb (medium-high heat).  Brown until even on all sides for about 5 minutes.  Place the browned cubes in the slow cooker to wait for the other ingredients.  Add the onions to the same pan and sauté over medium-high heat until golden brown (about 7-10 minutes).  Add all the other ingredients to the pan, except the spinach and chicken broth, and stir until the the spices are fragrant and evenly coat the onions.  Pour in the broth and deglaze the pan. 

Pour the onion/spice/broth mixture over the lamb in the slow cooker.  Cover and cook for 8 hours on the low heat setting.  A few minutes before it turns off, add the spinach to the slow cooker and stir until completely wilted.  I wanted to serve this with some brown basmati rice, but I couldn't find any of the pre-made frozen stuff at Trader Joe's so I boiled up a few small potatoes and poured the curry over that instead.

Enjoy!

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*This is how I decided to make this recipe.  It's not exactly the way it is written in the book, but it's the way that worked for me.

Who Would've Thunk It

I think I am starting to like pasta.  Will wonders never cease?

• Brussels sprouts
• strawberries
• whole wheat pasta with some canned wild salmon, broccoli, peppers and a little tomato sauce
• frozen pineapples

Pasta has never been a favorite of mine.  It's not that I DIS-like it...it's just that sometime the texture is too squishy for me.  Thankfully, whole wheat pasta is a little more firm so I've been adding to my diet more.  So far so good.