Weight loss-Friendly Cauliflower Bake
Jul 25, 2012 Food
If you were to look at the list of foods I’ve eaten in the past ten days, you probably wouldn’t believe I’m trying to lose weight. I have this crazy goal of weighing 140 pounds by the time I turn forty towards the end of October. Why 140? Aside from the almost-symmetry of weight and age, that’s the last weight I remember feeling satisfied with. The last time I would go clothes shopping without getting frustrated. The last time I didn’t stress about packing for a trip. Actually, I think most of my weight-loss motivation may have to do with clothes.
Anywho, I also have another, shorter-term goal: to take full advantage of my kids being at sleepaway camp. The first week they were gone I think my husband and I went out to eat together four times. Four glorious, babysitterless times. Then the DietBet started, and I needed to find a way to enjoy this time with my husband and still lose some weight. So far, so good. In fact, we ate our way through Montreal this past weekend without doing too much damage to my weight loss: I’ve lost two pounds since the competition began.
Tags: cauliflower, Food
Hanna Andersson’s Garden City Store
Jul 25, 2012 Paid/Sponsored Post
I was compensated to host the event discussed below, but purchases made were my own.
Since there is no Hanna Andersson store in New York City, I will have to console myself with the gorgeous location at the Roosevelt Field Mall on Long Island. I got to see it for myself last week (and go to a mall! And eat pretzel bites in a food court with Linda!), and couldn’t stop taking pictures of the adorable clothes.
Hanna Andersson manages to make bright, interesting clothes for both girls and boys. I have one of each, and often had trouble finding anything interesting for my son before discovering Hanna Andersson.
Unfortunately my giant ten-year-old is now too tall for their stuff, and according to the chart in the store, so am I (although the website does have women’s clothes!).
But my daughter would go absolutely crazy over this vest:
Tags: clothes, Hanna Andersson, Kids
A quick, healthy, solo pasta lunch
Jul 19, 2012 Food
I’ll freely admit something that my foodie friends find awful: I love frozen food. Love it. I eat frozen meals frequently and it has nothing to do with weight loss (although they really do help me out with portion control, my main food problem). Lunch for me is often a package of frozen vegetables over pasta.
A lot of that has to do with the fact that I’m usually eating lunch alone. I hate making a mess and taking time just to make one serving of something, but I know from experience that if I make a lot thinking I’ll save it for later, I’m more than likely to just eat it all.
But occasionally I get the urge to cook for myself, like today. Looking in my fridge I noticed I had a lot of grape tomatoes, and I needed to do something with them. Luckily, I’d seen this recipe yesterday for tomato cream sauce made with cherry tomatoes, cream cheese, and just a few other ingredients.
It looked really quick and easy, without too much prep (just slicing garlic and halving tomatoes). I just love finding recipes that use fresh ingredients that I don’t have to slave over for ninety minutes. So I went for it.
I wish I could show you a bigger picture of it, in the bowl perhaps, but I had scarfed down half of it by the time I thought to take a picture.
This recipe took me exactly thirty minutes, from idea to mouth. I made a few small changes from the original: I only made half, because I knew I would eat whatever I made. I used grape tomatoes, because that’s what I had on hand. I used basil from my garden instead of parsley, because I like the taste better. And I added some crushed red pepper flakes, for a little kick.
I mixed it with two-and-a-half ounces of penne pasta, and the entire bowl came to just 420 delicious, filling calories. Can’t wait to make this again!
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
There’s a 62% chance I’m going to die in my house
Jul 18, 2012 Paid/Sponsored Post
[This giveaway is now closed. Congratulations to the winner, Kayla.]
[This post was commissioned by Kidde]
OK, that’s not exactly true. It might be worse: given my clumsy nature I’m sure my odds are way higher than that. I mean, we have four staircases in our house, and I’ve fallen down every one of them. But I have to somehow make fun of the fact that I scored a pathetic 38% when I completed a Home Safety Challenge survey from Kidde, the people who make the very cool talking smoke and CO alarmswe’ve had in our house for almost five years (I’ll be giving one away at the end of this post.) Now, in fairness, there’s a huge section of the survey having to do with children’s safety, and most of the questions were geared towards homes with younger children. We don’t have outlet covers and window safety bars and stair safety gates and all that stuff anymore, and I think the survey could have done a better job of funneling parents of older children past those questions. If I discount those questions I do score higher. But I still don’t get a passing grade. Like I said, pathetic.
My weak points
My weakest points in the survey mostly had to do with getting out of the house in case of a fire. There are many rooms that simply don’t have a safe egress. And I did try: when we moved into our very tall house I bought escape ladders for the 2nd, 3rd and 4th floors. But along with a tall, old house we also have very old, very wide windowsills, and the escape ladders don’t work with them. So for six years they’ve been sitting in boxes, while I’ve procrastinated getting hooks installed near the windows in case, God forbid, we should need to escape that way. But there was always something else to spend our house renovation money on. I’m also not as good as I could be about testing my alarms and changing the batteries. I’ve gotten complacent because my alarms are hard-wired, so instead of changing the batteries every six months I wait until the alarm tells me to. That’s not very smart, because if we lose power and the alarms have to run on battery power for a while, those batteries should be new-ish and ready to go! To make it worse, once our alarms let us know that we need to get out, we don’t have a meeting place. And I’ve never had a fire drill with the kids. And while I’m proud of myself for having fire extinguishers on every floor, some of them are more than ten years old, and I don’t know which ones, and I’ve never practiced using one anyway and probably couldn’t in a fire-induced panic!
Read the rest of this entry »
Randomosity: Bad Ernie Edition
Jul 17, 2012 Randomosity
This just shouldn’t make me laugh as hard as it does. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Do not click play if you don’t want to hear things coming out of Ernie’s mouth that just shouldn’t be coming out. However, do click if you’re a fan of Casino. The end just kills me.
***
Continuing with the Muppets – but a more family-friendly version – is this spoof of the song everybody loves to hate this summer, Call Me Maybe. (For the record, even though everything about my musical taste tells me I should hate that song, I never turn the station when it’s on. And I sing along. Loudly.) I just can’t stop listening to this version though. Of course, I’ve always suspected that Cookie Monster was my soul mate.
Tags: Muppets
Great Sportsmanship
Jul 16, 2012 What's Going On
This is one of those stories that makes me miss my kids (they’re at camp), because I love showing them examples of people not being dicks.
Over the weekend during the Tour de France, some jerk threw tacks onto the road. Over a dozen riders got flat tires, including the defending champ from last year, Cadel Evans, who had to change tires twice.
But not wanting to take advantage of something completely out of their competitors’ control, those at the front of the pack – led by Bradley Wiggins – slowed their pace until the affected riders had caught up. Wiggins explained after the stage was over:
I thought it was the honorable thing to do. Nobody wants to benefit from someone else’s misfortune.
These are pros with a lot on the line, and I just love the example they’re setting. Bravo.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
The Thing Everybody’s Missing About The Rape Joke
Jul 15, 2012 What's Going On
So there’s this comedian, Daniel Tosh. He has a show on Comedy Central, Tosh.0, in which he makes fun of internet videos. I’ve seen it, since I’m basically married to a twelve-year-old boy when it comes to shows about fart jokes and drunk people doing stupid things. I don’t find the show funny, I don’t find him funny, and I would never go see him in a comedy club.
And I’m no comedy elitist: I love Family Guy, South Park, Louis CK, and a site I came across last night that shows pictures of cats looking bored while their owners record amateur porn in the background (or, sometimes, the foreground). I laugh my ass off at Comedy Central roasts, no matter how wrong they get. I don’t get offended easily.
But when I heard that Tosh had told a woman in his audience at the Laugh Factory that it would be funny if she were gang raped, my gut reaction was “What an asshole. That’s just wrong.” Which confused me, because normally I stand up for a comedian’s right to say whatever.
Basically, what happened was that Tosh made a comment that even rape jokes can be funny, and a woman in the audience got offended and yelled back that actually, no they can’t. And according to this woman, Tosh responded with the following:
Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, 5 guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her…
And I watched as blog posts popped up about it. There are basically two key points being argued: Can rape jokes be funny, and do comedians get a pass just because they’re comedians? I watched as people took sides on both issues, and I got more confused. I agreed with all of them.
Tags: rape jokes, Tosh
A Heaping Bowl of Double Chocolate Chip Banana Bread
Jul 15, 2012 Food
Last night I showed my husband a recipe in the latest King Arthur Flour catalog for Double Chocolate Chip Banana Bread, and he wanted me to make it immediately. He even went to the store for the sour cream that we didn’t have and the egg that I dropped on the floor while taking it out of the fridge. But after all that, I ended up being too tired to make it, and went to bed.
Luckily (or unluckily for me, as I was hoping to sleep in) I woke up early this morning, and made it for breakfast, hoping to have a nice surprise waiting for The Ass when he woke up.
Whenever I make a recipe for the first time I tend to follow the instructions completely, saving any experimentation or second-guessing for the next time. This often leads to first time disasters. Like these things below that look like pizza crusts, but were supposed to be ciabatta rolls. I knew the dough was too wet, but followed the instructions anyway, and ended up with bready hockey pucks.
So, even though my instincts told me to do more than lightly oil my bread pan as the recipe called for, I followed the directions. The bad news is, my instincts were spot on and the bread stuck to the bottom of the pan. It fell out into a warm lump.
The good news is, it tastes freaking amazing! Seriously, best loaf of anything I’ve ever made. It’s moist and chocolaty and, on this first day of my latest Diet Bet, dangerous to have around. I ate a heaping bowlful. My husband came downstairs right around the time it fell out of the pan, and attacked it as well, declaring it “f***ing delicious.”
I will absolutely be making this again, but will either put parchment paper on the bottom of the pan or use Wilton Cake Release. The rest I will do the same: my butter and egg were room temp, my sour cream was cold, and my chips were mini. I did it all by hand and it was very easy to mix with a spoon – a great advantage if you want to make something for breakfast while others are still trying to sleep.
If you know me, expect me to bring this to brunches and pot-lucks and bake sales. A lot.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Tags: baking, banana bread, chocolate
