Fuel Restocked

Yowza!! It's COLD out there!! It's a good thing I planned ahead and watched the weather so I would know what to do this morning. It was sunny and beautiful out, but looks can be deceiving as it was also 2 degrees not including any wind chill!! I didn't find any of this out until I got up after sleeping in late ... which was fabulous! Anyway, I'd already prepared to take today off from running along with yesterday, so it all worked out great!

I used a lot of this weekend to get the kitchen reasonably ready for the week! More accurately, last week, I used little holes in the day I could find to scope recipes in the new Trim Healthy Mama cookbook to see if there was even one more that caught my eye. Believe me, there are plenty waiting to be caught; it's a matter of sitting down to find them! I figure if I look for one every other week, I won't get frustrated with too much new at once, if you know what I mean!

To that end, I found a BBQ chicken recipe we have on the dinner menu for later this week, and I also found a recipe for ketchup that turned out to be awesome! I had some with my black bean burger wrap for lunch today, and it was perfect!

I know it looks like a mess. But, focus on the ketchup ...

This recipe for no-sugar ketchup is really close to the THM one I made. Ditch the molasses, allspice and cayenne pepper, and it's almost the same. I adjusted the water content of mine up, but that's a personal thing. Anyway, if you're on the hunt to get rid of sugar in one more place in your corner of the world, I recommend trying this! I love THM, but I did miss ketchup. Ba-da-BING, it's BACK!

It's the little things that can make for a fantastic lunch ...

With the wrap in the back and a side of quinoa that I reheat on a frying pan until it got crispy (my favorite way to eat it), I topped of this frigid day's lunch with a vanilla smoothie finally amended to the way I like 'em!

The smoothie quest has been a slow and quiet one for me. Aaron's the real smoothie king around here while I have other things I enjoy for lunch or in-betweens. My smoothie issue has been its density, but I got that figured out today by throwing in a half cup of light cottage cheese. After blending that up, the consistency of an ice cream milkshake held up all the way through the last sip! The above drink contains 1/2 C each of unsweetened vanilla almond milk and light cottage cheese, about a tablespoon of sweetener (I could have used another teaspoon or so), a tablespoon of vanilla extract, a teaspoon of sugar free French vanilla creamer and a cup of crushed ice, all thrown in the blender and blasted together. Had it been my meal, I would have put in a scoop of protein powder. But, I really just wanted something to accompany my burger and quinoa.

Another kitchen success were these last night:

Last Fall, I shared an Everything Bagel Breadstick recipe. This is the exact recipe, but I made them into balls instead of sticks. Frankly, I thought they were much better! With more surface to cook, they were a little more bagel-bite than a soft breadstick very closely resembling the taste of an everything bagel. They're really good either way, but I'll be sticking to making them into balls! They're easier to create (seeing as you don't have to roll them long) and manage (much easier to place one little dough ball on a pan than to move a breadstick without breaking it). Oh -- the original recipe for these calls for egg washing the outside before putting on the seeds. I did no such thing for these, and the seeds stuck great.

Rounding out the kitchen this weekend was another batch of my aforementioned Cry No More brownies ...

These just don't last. I cut them into small squares and put half
in the freezer with the other half available in the fridge. That way,
if we forget about them, the whole batch isn't lost as well as it
helps ration them a bit because they're known to be easy to grab
and throw in the ol' mouth for some people around here!

... and Aaron's sprouted bread that I lovelovelove to use for egg white French Toast:

A work in progress. So yummy!

That recipe is here (yeah, it's not actually Aaron's sprouted bread as it is that he's the one who makes it for us.). Aaron's a super-whiz at whipping this up. The recipe makes two loaves, but we landed on cutting it in half to make one at a time because, if you don't eat it fast enough because you went on some other oh-I-found-and-now-love-this-recipe tangent and forget about your beautiful bread, it has nothing in it to preserve it for a forgetful amount of time! Just a heads up.

So, the kitchen has served me well on these really cold days!! I'm genuinely thankful for the THM guidance -- I've said it before, but I'll reiterate I feel so much better all the time because of it! And, now that I'm restocked in the fueling department, we'll see how much the weather lends itself to running this week. Tomorrow sounds like a definite at this point, so I'll be checking in after I thaw!