The Mister & I am working on changing our diet to fit more in line with Keto.  Keto is basically a low carb diet with the thinking that your body uses glucose (dietary carbs) as it’s preferred method of fuel but by restricting your body from having a lot of available carbs, it will begin utilizing fat stores within the body. This HAS NOT been easy.  And that’s putting it lightly.  No pasta, no bread and really , really, really reading labels.

What it is, however, it protein & vegetables.  That’s sort of the jist I’m getting, at least.  I’ve bought an Atkins cookbook (which is less strict than Keto), a Paleo cookbook (which is less about no carbs, but no processed foods) and a Keto cookbook.  I’m in the process of browsing and selecting recipes to try.  I’ve pinned some options on Pinterest, but finding Keto recipes is a lot harder than Paleo or Atkins recipes, mainly because those diets have hit the “mainstream” harder than Keto has.

I have several that I am trying this week and that I will share if they are worth sharing – a lot of what we’ve been trying in the last few weeks have not been worthy, in my opinion.  Here’s hoping that these 4 are worth a share!

With my attempts at cleaning up my diet, getting healthy & strong, I’ve been eating basically the same thing every single day, which is boring and not exactly worth blogging about.  I’m quite sure reading about eating a 4 ounce grilled chicken breast, broccoli & brown rice (or look out, quinoa) is not exactly what most people are looking for when they are on the hunt for something new for dinner.

On the upside of all of this, I’m down about 5 pounds and 1.75 inches in the last 17 days.  I’m also on My Fitness Pal (my screen name there is ds1007) should you really be interested in what I’m eating daily and are on your own path to healthier living.

I’m looking for healthier meals for me & the Mister, and as I try new things, I plan on sharing those here!

In an effort to cut my food budget in half (I always go WAY overboard!), eat healthier, and eat more consistently at home, I decided to take part in a growing trend, freezer meals.  The basic idea is to pick several recipes with similar ingredients and do all the prep in advance so that you can freeze everything and have a stockpile of meals for a while.

I chose to do 8 recipes in double batches, making 17 meals (I’ll explain the extra meal a little later).  Each of these meals makes 4 to 6 servings, so then there’s left overs, either for the next day’s lunch or another dinner. Most of these meals are designed for the Crock Pot (my favorite working woman time saver!) which also make the process for getting dinner on the table a lot easier.

I spent a 2 evenings perusing the blogs and recipe sites for healthy (-ish) meals that mainly consisted of chicken, that were hearty and easy to put together for dinner.  IOnce I complied my recipes and the ingredient list, I headed out on a Saturday morning to our local warehouse club, Sam’s Club, for a bulk of my groceries and then to Walmart for the remaining items that I didn’t need in 5 pounds bags. I planned to do this right in the beginning of January so that we basically had a meal for the work week nights (we have pizza every Friday). I then spent 4 hours in the kitchen with the help of my hubby prepping and then freezing our bounty!

Here’s a shot of everything I bought.  I spent $122 in Sam’s Club & another $66 in Walmart.  That comes to about $2.21 per serving, assuming each meal gets 5 servings.  (This shot doesn’t include ingredients I already had at home and didn’t have to purchase.)

4 hours may seem like a lot of time, and it was, but I definitely feel that it was worth it.  I also don’t think that’s too bad considering this is the first time that we were doing this and that we had run into some challenges with the size of the bags I was cutting for our FoodSaver. There was also cleaning & ingredient gathering between recipes so that adds a little time between each batch as well.  I think that the next time that we do this, I’m going to pull out the leaves on my dining room table and have everything staged for each recipe and ready to go.

The 8 recipes I used are listed here, and as we try each one, I’ll post the results and the recipe (that way you aren’t stuck making a dish that may not have been as great).

• Chicken Broccoli Alfredo – Crock Pot
• Chicken Cacciatore – Crock Pot
• Chicken Tacos – Crock Pot
• Buffalo Chicken – Crock Pot
• Island Chicken
• Maple Dijon Glazed Chicken – Crock Pot
• Marinated Pork Chops
• Mongolian Beef – Crock Pot

The additional meal came from a package of 2 flank steaks we picked up at Sam’s Club.  1 of the flank steaks was divided in half for the Mongolian Beef recipe.  What to do with the other steak?  Well, we know how fond of Jack Daniels I am and when coming across a marinade bag at Walmart for my beloved Jack, well, we had to have it.  We added a few shots of Jack to the marinade, as there was no alcohol in it (!!!!), and stuck it in a FoodSaver bag to be enjoyed at a later date, probably on the grill.

12 of our 17 meals before heading to the freezer

Our 17 meals should last us nearly the month of January, which would be awesome! I’m planning on doing this again at the end of the month for February.  I may reuse some of these recipes – I already know 2 that were winners!

I started looking for recipes and came across a New Orleans Bourbon Pecan Pie and though, I could substitute in Jack Daniels (my beverage of choice)!  The most daunting part for me was the crust.  I don’t know how to make a dough, nor have I attempted it, and wasn’t quite sure I wanted to spend that much time making a crust from scratch if I didn’t know how the filling was going to turn out.  For that reason, I used a Pillsbury refrigerated pie crust.

3 pieces gone….20 minutes later, there would be nothing left to photograph

Adapted from AllRecipes.com

Chocolate Whiskey Pecan Pie

 

Print

Author: Diane Darcy-Schmidt

Recipe type: Dessert

Serves: 8

Ingredients

• ⅓ cup White Sugar
• ⅓ cup Brown Sugar
• 1 cup Corn Syrup
• 4 Tbsp Whiskey
• 3 Eggs
• ⅓ cup Melted Butter
• ½ tsp Salt
• ½ cup Finely Chopped Pecans
• ½ cup Coarsely Chopped Pecans
• ¾cup Dark Chocolate Chips (divided)
• 1 (9 inch) Refrigerated Pie Crust

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350ºF.
2. Bring pie crust to room temperature. Once at room temperature, unroll over pie pan and press into the pan.
3. Lay ½ cup of chocolate chips across the bottom of the pie crust.
4. Beat the white sugar, brown sugar, corn syrup, whiskey, eggs, butter, salt and finely chopped pecans together in a mixing bowl until smooth and creamy. Fold in the coarsely pecans and remaining chocolate chips.
5. Pour the mixture into the prepared pie crust. If desired, cover the edges of the pie with aluminum foil strips or pie shield to prevent excessive browning.
6. Bake in preheated oven until the center sets, about 65 minutes. Cool before serving.

3.1.09

I made this pie for Thanksgiving.  Let just say there wasn’t any left to take home.  My dad, not a big sweets guy, gave me 2 thumbs up!  That alone should be your motivation to try this one out!  I’ll be making this again for our Ugly Christmas Sweater party this weekend…..maybe I should make 2?!?!

A lot has happened in my absence. We went to the Richmond NASCAR race in September, celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary in New Orleans at the beginning of October, hunkered down during Superstorm Sandy & Winter Storm Athena and celebrated 3 Thanksgivings with family & friends!  Not a dull moment.

We are trying to get back to normal, which isn’t so easy as our routine has changed again.  Once we got back from vacation, Walter started commuting to his company’s new office in Bridgewater, as opposed to working from home daily. We tried getting back on track with cooking a few nights week, but scheduling just wasn’t working and food was getting cold before he was getting home at 7/7:30pm.  In the meantime, I was trying to getting back to the gym after spraining my foot on vacation (yea, I know – not even there 5 hours!!!).

Then came Superstorm Sandy & Winter Storm Athena.  While we escaped with no property damage, we we had no power from Monday night at 8pm to Friday around 2pm.  Since we had a generator though (got that after all the trees came down with the SuperCell in July – bear with me – lots of storms going on in NJ!) we were able to run a little more than 80% of our house.  Since Sandy, our friend has been staying with us, since his house is in one of the harder hit area and did sustain major damage to his first floor.  He’s luckier than most, their main living quarters are on the 2nd & 3rd floors, which were spared. So needless to say, we are adjusting again, and the mister is now commuting to work as opposed to working from home, so there’s more adjusting to do.

We are trying to get a routine in, but with the holidays looming around the corner, it’s harder and harder to do.  Between trying to get in end of the year doctor’s appointments, Christmas decorating & planning and a slew of entertainment items (Dave Matthews, John Pinette & a Saints/Giants game to name a few) we’re more than busy.

I did promise a Thanksgiving pie on our Facebook Fan page, but have failed to get that out there just yet.  It was a Chocolate Whiskey Pecan Pie, which, to be honest, was my first pie attempt & it was freakin’ awesome! I used a refrigerated pie crust instead of from scratch (I did mention this as my first pie attempt, right?) because I really wanted to see how good the filling was going be before making myself nuts worrying about the crust.  Stay tuned for that recipe – I’ll be making another for Christmas, so maybe you’ll want to use it for Christmas as well!

Here’s looking forward to getting back on track.  I have a few Holiday decorating things I’m planning on sharing, as well as some other tasty treats I’ve been playing around with for the last month. Look for my Chocolate Whiskey Pecan Pie next week!

This week and next week are super busy with my 9 to 5, my own company & going away for the weekend to Richmond for the NASCAR races this weekend.  Trying to juggle a gym schedule with all the other obligations and get a “healthy” dinner (at a reasonable hour) and the necessary sleep, has been really hard.  I’m plugging away nonetheless.

I am happy to share, than in the last month (since August 13th) I’m down 6 pounds, and 22 since the beginning of the year!  It almost seems unreal, but I know I’ve put in the hard work at the gym, and really been focusing on trying to stay within my calorie range and eating “cleaner”.  Trying is the operative word here.  I’m not perfect, nor am I trying to be.  I’m just trying to be better than yesterday.  That’s all I can ask from myself.

If you haven’t already heard of Sparkpeople.com, let me introduce you!  This site is packed with a wealth of information, from fitness routines & videos, to recipes for healthier meals, to tracking tools for nutrition, fitness & your weight.  I’ve been using Sparkpeople.com since 2007.  One of the coolest things about Sparkpeople.com is their “Spark Teams”.  Groups of like minded people rallying together to motivate and push one another further!  The BEST part?  Sparkpeople.com is FREE!

I think moving forward, Attempting Domestication is going to move towards sharing healthier meal options, my personal progress at moving towards a healthier & fitter life, as well as the occasional treat (you know I can resist cupcakes completely!).  I think that this is the right direct for Attempting Domestication, and more importantly, for me.

Long story short, due to ongoing complications with my knee, I saw my orthopedist.  Basically I was told that to avoid a knee replacement surgery within the next 12 months, I’d have to work hard to drop 30 to 50 pounds.  As I have virtually no cartilage in my left knee, it’s been made more uncomfortable with the increased weight. Once I drop the weight, we can explore injections, but ultimately, my knee will be replaced in less 5 years.

I immediately joined a gym the following Monday and signed up for personal training once a week with access to the additional paid class, boot camp.  I and had my first “official” personal training session this Monday.  I enjoyed Boot Camp last night.  Well, enjoyed is an understatement and overly sarcastic. I was late because of work, so I only did half the class.  I don’t think I’ve seen my face that flushed in along time.  It felt good to get the sweat going, but it really just pointed out how out of shape I am. Tonight is another round of personal training with a long 5k walk scheduled for Sunday.  I’m pretty sure I’m going to need Thursday, Friday & Saturday to recover from the first 3 days of the week!I’m sore as anything, and I’ve basically been drowning myself in water since Monday and trying to up my protein intake, as I typically don’t get enough on a regular basis.

Needless to say, with me hitting the gym directly after work, dinner is a lot more difficult to get together in a timely fashion (as in on the table prior to 8pm). Hubby is being a great help.  I find the new recipes to try out and we tweak them together to fit our portion needs & tastes, and then he executes them prior to me getting home.  It’s super helpful since he is working from home until his new office is finished & ready for occupation.  I just wonder what are we going to do in October once he’s committing 30+ miles each way.

Now some might ask, why don’t you just go to the gym in the morning before work.  Well, I am NOT a morning person.  And that’s even an understatement.  I am pretty much the most useless person you’ve ever met before 10am. That being said, it would be rather obvious as to why I’m not going to the gym before work. That would make life easier, but I would not be a happy person any day of the week. HAHA!

With that said, I think that Attempting Domestication is going to be headed to a once a week posting schedule.  I am fairly certain that I can’t maintain the pace & quality that I’d like to think I’ve produced thus far, with all the extra time commitments I’ve just made to myself.  Right now, doing what I need to do (working my butt off at the gym) is a big focus for me, as I really don’t want to have to get my knee replaced in the next year, let alone have to pay the 20% copay that comes along with it. So I will be focusing on getting back into shape, dropping a few pounds and eating healthier, and I’ll share as much as my time constraints allow along the way.

This isn’t going to be a quick journey, nor a painless one.  It was fun eating cupcakes & drinking red wine while it lasted, but I think those days are going to be much fewer and farther in between now.  I see visions of the TRX straps in my sleep and daydream about completing the boot camp session. Oh how I crave a cupcake right now. A pancake batter with maple frosting and crumbled bacon cupcake. Mmmmmmm!

In the quest to solve this annoyance of getting my make up brushes wet/damp I came across a pin on (you guessed it!) Pinterest for a DIY Make Up Board.  I immediately showed hubby and insisted I needed one made asap!  We went to Home Depot and picked up a piece of sheet metal (24″ x 24″), some spray paint, thin molding to make the frame, magnets, and the mounting brackets.  I picked up 2 small pencil cups at Staples, one for my make up brushes and the other for my mascaras & pencils.

When we got home, we spray painted the sheet metal and pencil cups a hammered silver, and the frame got a matte black.  Hubby glued the frame to the sheet metal and attached the hanging brackets to the back.  We let it sit overnight with clamps to make sure everything was nice & secure.

In the meantime, I took all my makeup out of the bathroom & sat down at the dining room table with my magnets & command adhesive strips.  This was an opportune time to go through and purge the old stuff (I’m a nerd and write on the back of all my make up with a sharpie the month/year it was purchased) and stuff I wasn’t using.  I got rid of a good 25% of the stuff I had before I started putting on the magnets.

I used the command adhesive poster strips because the magnets weren’t exactly that cheap, and this would allow me in the future to reuse the magnets, rather than having to be buying new magnets constantly.  I also hate the idea of a glue gun, so this made life easier & less messy! I simply took the command adhesive strip (and I actually cut each one in half) and attached the “wall side” to the make up and then peeled off the other paper backing and stuck on a magnet.

Voila!

One thing that worked really well for me, and seems to be a pretty smart idea in hindsight, was to put the magnet on the caps of certain products (tubs of face powder, loose eye shadow) as now when I’ve had to replace things, I just take the old cap & screw it onto the new product without having to reapply any magnets.

This was an easy project that really didn’t take more than an afternoon between the painting, assembling, drying and installing and then setting everything up with the magnets.  I love it, and it really has made such a difference in my bathroom.  Not only is my stuff not getting wet, but I can actually see what I have, rather than digging through the basket I was using to hold all of this stuff.

Our town of Freehold Borough in central New Jersey, and more specifically our street, was hit devastatingly hard by a storm that experts are now classifying as a supercell.  A supercell storm “is produced when an atmospheric area has high instability at the same time as increase in wind strength with altitude occurs”, according to Jim Hayes, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service based in Mount Holly, NJ.  Hayes also said, this type of “storm, normally found in the Plains states, is a strong version of a thunderstorm that lasts for a couple of hours as opposed to the average thunderstorm length of 20 to 30 minutes.”  Until July 29th, I had never heard of such a storm.

It started innocently enough, with some rain and a little wind.  At that point, my husband joked (but not really) that we better move to the back of the house.  Sadly, this is what we do every single time it’s windy, as the tree that stands outside of our home is over 80 years old, stands more than 80 feet tall (more than twice the height of my home) and is more than 5 feet in diameter.  The tree creaks and moans with the slightest of winds, and for the last 4 years, I’ve been arguing with the Shade Tree Commission of our town over it’s continued existence less than 15 feet from my front porch, as it is their property and not ours. Sadly, when our road was repaved about 3 years ago, the contractor that replaced all the curbs and everyone’s driveway apron also cut out any roots that were in the way of the new forms.  They have nothing holding them into the ground anymore.  Despite knowing this, each and every time the tree is “inspected” I’m left a door tag letting me know that all is well with the tree and that it’s good and healthy, no need for any trimming or it’s removal.

After enjoying time with my girls the previous day (you can read about our fun here), it was time to unwind and watch a movie. We moved to the back of the house into our bedroom and turned on the TV.  The wind started really howling and then it began to hail.  Odd, since it was 90+ degrees out. The wind picked up even more and soon is sounded as if the windows we going to implode on us.  The power went out.  Walter started yelling to shut all the doors to the rooms and move into the basement with our cats.  Tornado was the only thing I heard.  I grabbed the 3 cell phones, my laptop, our wedding album & dvd, and then we started gathering our 3 cats (ie: ripping them out from under the couch as they were terrified) to get into the basement.

I sat at the bottom of the stairs, heart pounding and terrified, trying to coax our cats away from the top of the stairs. As we sat there in the dark, we could feel the earth and our home shaking as each tree fell on our block. After about 35 minutes it sounded as if the wind and hail had died down, my husband decided that it was time to check on our elderly neighbors (which there are a number of, as we’re the youngest on the block).  He ran out with a flash light and started banging on back doors, since we were unable to leave our front porch due to downed power lines and a tree.  We then began to see the damage that this storm had caused, although we wouldn’t see it clearly until the next morning.

I called my parents as soon as the storm ended.  My mom asked, “What storm?”  Amazingly, less than 5 miles away, they barely had any rain, let alone the wind and the hail.  She woke my dad up (he had just gone to bed) and sent him down to us.  It took him nearly 40 minutes to get as close to my house as he could, which would up being more than 1/2 a mile away.  As Walter and I tried to get there, we encountered downed powerlines, downed trees, a transformer fire & a car crunched by a tree, and a boy very happy to have gotten out of that car alive. Walter refused to leave with me, deciding to stay behind and make sure everything was okay with the house, the cats, and our neighbors.  I didn’t sleep at all.  I was on Facebook, Twitter, the local newspaper’s site, watching the local local news (as in not NYC or Philly), and calling friends to make sure they were all okay.

Dad & I headed to Lowe’s for their opening and were able to procure a generator.  We then hit up Dunkin Donuts for some Joe & Donuts for the neighbors.  We were able to get closer to the house (about 2 blocks away) than he was able to get the night prior, but getting the generator there was a little bit of a challenge, with all the debris.  We had to assemble it in the street & wheel it in.  Thankfully we bought one with wheels.  Of course, as we are doing this, Eyewitness News 7 shows up and shoves mic in my face asking how my house is.  I had to tell them that I didn’t know, and my husband refused to send me pictures via text.

The following are pictures that were taken by myself & Walter the morning following the storm.

View from our Driveway to the street

View of the tree in front of my neighbors’, which cracked in half and closer is a 35+ foot long “branch” that fell from the tree in front of our house onto the roof and gutters.

A view of our home from the street. The neighbor’s tree is cracked in half, leaning on the power pole and wedged into the tree in front of our house.  A 6+ inch in diameter limb went through our roof. The branch leaning near our front door came crashing down some 60+ feet from the tree in front of the house, landing as you see it, smashing gutters and cracking the cement sidewalk to pieces.  To the right, the tree in front of the neighbor’s house, came down taking all the powerlines and cable lines with it.

Front yard. Dad trying to move the smaller pieces to the street so we can wheel the generator to the back of the house.

Luckily, our damage was not as severe as 4 other homes on our street had.  We have banged up gutters, a smashed walkway and a limb through the roof.  It could be a lot worse. All 4 had trees come through their homes and 1 had their car totaled to boot. Below is some of the damage at the end of the street.

The “least” damaged of the 4 homes. Tree went right into their master bedroom. The couple that lives here are in their 90s and he is a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, during WWII.

This house is on the opposite side of the street from us at the corner. We looked at this home when we bought ours, as they were both for sale. The tree went right through their second story and into their kitchen.

This is a panoramic that Walter took. The street in the center is our street. The cross street is were 5 Oak trees in a row came down, 3 to the left of the center street and 2 on the right.

2 of the Oaks that came down on our side of the street at the corner.

Amazingly, power was back on just shy of 48 hours after the storm hit.  I really can’t believe how quickly they were able to do that, considering the damage sustained on our block.  They worked around the clock along with several tree cutting services to remove trees & limbs in the way of lines to restore power.  Come the end of the day Monday, things were almost normal.  During all the mayhem, we wound up actually getting to know some of our neighbors on the end of the block, due to the amount of help and support they needed to try to get stuff out of their damaged homes.  Sadly, it takes a disaster such as this to bring people out of their homes, away from their computers, TVs and couches, and actually talk to one another.

Which brings me to how I feel about our house & town.  I love my neighbors.  They are awesome people who would give you the shirt off their back and offer you whatever else they could spare.  What I hate is how this tree in front of our house makes me feel.  I’m scared of it.  No lie.  No BS.  I’m terrified of that tree.  This past Sunday we had another bad storm.  Walter had to fly out to CA for work, so I was alone with the cats as we had 3 rounds of intense wind and rain again.  The whole time it was going on, I just kept thinking, please don’t fall on the house.  This is no way to feel in your own house.

So next Thursday, I’ll be heading to the town’s Shade Tree Commission meeting at 6pm, along with just about everyone else on my block who has been fighting for the trimming and/or removal of the tree outside of their home.  No doubt others from the town will be there too, as there was damage to other areas of the town as well.  Despite being told that we are now “officially on the list for removal” of our tree, I don’t feel any better.  I don’t think I will until that tree is gone.  Since being hit by the neighbor’s tree when it split in half, it’s now about 4 feet off center and has shifted the sidewalks and my driveway with the increased pressure being put on it’s small root system.

New Jersey had no snow this year (we did have snow on Halloween last year though!) and last month was the hottest on record. I hope we wake up soon and start dealing with how we are adversely affecting the planet rather than continuing to kick the can down the road for the next generation to figure out.  In the meantime, I’m hoping that the storms that are supposed to be in the area the rest of the week will spare Freehold, and us, from a second go round with downed trees.

From SparkRecipes.com

Quinoa with Spinach and Feta Cheese

Dinner, Spinach, Quinoa, Garlic, Feta cheese

Cooks in 20 minutes    Serves 2

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup quinoa prepared (cooked in 1 cup of chicken stock)
• 1 tsp. extra virgin olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 cup fresh spinach
• 1 ounce feta cheese

Directions

• Rinse quinoa with warm water and place into a small saucepan.
• Add 1 cup of chicken stock and bring quinoa to a boil.
• Reduce heat to a simmer and cover.
• Allow quinoa to cook for 10 to 15 minutes until all liquid is absorbed.
• In the meantime, heat a frying pan with the olive oil, and brown the garlic.
• Turn heat to low and add quinoa to the frying pan with the olive oil once the quinoa has finished absorbing all the liquid.
• Add spinach to frying pan, and stir until spinach wilts.
• Add feta cheese to pan and stir to fully combine.
• Divide contents of pan into to bowls & enjoy.

Print Recipe | Print Ingredients Only

This was another awesome Quinoa dish! While it is on the lighter side, we ate it as our dinner and it was filling enough that I didn’t feel the urge to go rummaging in the kitchen for anything else after dinner. I’m pretty sure Quinoa is becoming my new favorite food.  I’ve been eying up the BIG bag at Costco the last two trips….I might have to pick it up next time we’re there!