Yea, I know it's been a while. Pictures are backing up. Still working full time and hating it. Not so much the full time as the incompetent people I have to work with and the fact that I don't have much of a life outside of work. Anyway...in the last month I made a lot of food from my Hungry Girl cookbook but then I saw a documentary called
Food Inc. and now I am trying to make food choices that are not only good for my body but good for the environment and my budget too. I never realized how much commercial food production impacts our world. I am not going completely vegan or even completely vegetarian but I am trying to switch my diet over to 85% non meat and 15% meat that has been humanly treated. But I won't bore you with my ideals, but if you are interested I suggest watching the movie and checking out the book
Food Matters by Mark Bittman (I actually just got a copy of his Food Matters cookbook recently). Speaking of things I got recently, a lot of the Borders around us are going out of business and I got a good deal on a
Kobo at one of their stores and I cannot put that thing down! For a basic ereader it is pretty sweet!
Alright, lets back it up a few weeks. I have 2 boxes of puffy pasty in the freezer that I got at Aldi during the holiday specials, so I made my twist on the Hungry Girl Mini Mushroom Tarlets:
Delicious!!! I cannot how say how amazing these were. I still have some puff pastry left, so this will be happening again soon!
Next was my version of Hungry Girls Swirls Gone Wild Cheesecake Brownies:
They were pretty good. I think next time the cheesecake mixture needs to be mixed throughout the entire batter rather than just at the top.
Needed to finish up the chicken thighs in the freezer:
Roasted chicken and potatoes. Simple, always good, and easy.
Another Aldi meal:
Honey baked ham and spinach cucumber salad. I forgot how much I loved cucumbers, either in salad or by themselves. Everyone should eat more cucumbers!
As you read earlier, we are trying to eat better not only for ourselves for our planet too. We went to Whole Foods to stock up on some earth friendly products. I purchased some thick cut, bone in pork chops that rate a Step 4 on
Whole Foods Animal Welfare Rating System. Mike is not able to go fully vegetarian, so we will be cutting back on our meat and the meat we do eat, we will try to find options that go along the lines of the animal welfare rating system. So here our my cornbread and cranberry stuffed pork chops:
This picture isn't very flattering with the fat sorta dripping down the side, but this was super delicious! We made sure to savor every bite since these pork chops were kind of expensive!
A deep fryer is not the healthiest accessory to have in the kitchen, but Mike really wanted one and Aldi, of course, had one on sale. So let's deep fry healthy! Mike made sweet potato chips from organic sweet potatoes we got at Whole Foods:
Really, really good. We ended up making them our meal for that night. We're horrible, I know :)
I like to make a big breakfast on Sundays, but I wanted it to be healthy. So I found a recipe for whole wheat coffee cake (now I cannot find the recipe for it on my computer, sorry!):
Yes it does look blue. The recipe called for vanilla yogurt, but all I had was blueberry, so I made it whole wheat blueberry coffee cake, which was an excellent decision on my part since it made it taste wonderfully of blueberries!
Picked up some silken tofu at Whole Foods with the intent of making a chocolate tofu pie. Started to make the chocolate tofu part and realized I did not have a graham cracker crust to put it in, so I made one using this
recipe :
And then I filled it with the tofu goodness and baked it:
I did cook it a little too long because the edge of the crust was a little browned and the top of the pie looked a little darker than normal. If you're not used to tofu, I wouldn't suggest jumping into this
recipe unless you really want to try something different.
I was able to find some tofu shiratake noodles at Whole Foods and a lot of Hungry Girl recipes call for them in place of normal noodles. So we tried Hungry Girls version of Skyline Chili's 3-Way chili:
It wasn't that bad. The tofu noodles take a little getting used too, but the chili and cheese really helped!
And lastly, tonight's dinner. I know I should have take a picture before I ripped them out of the garden, but we had some fresh bibb lettuce joining our dinner tonight:
Pair it with some whole wheat pasta and home made sauce:
It was excellent! I am so glad we finally have some bounty from our garden! I need to take more pictures of all the plants in bloom and all the new growth. Maybe next time....
Until next time, please enjoy this photo of my tired babies relaxing under the couch:
