Jenny: January 2014 Archives

Food dreams

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I am a follower of the 5:2 diet, or intermittent fasting. What this means is that for five days a week I try to eat healthy and nothing insane, but I don't really worry about what I consume. The other two days, I keep my total calorie intake below 500 calories. For me that works out to:

Breakfast- Coffee with sugar free creamer
Lunch- Soup broth
Snack- 2 sticks of gum (yes, I realize that is ridiculous)
Snack- Sliced up veggies and more coffee with sugar free creamer. 

If I do both fast days and eat a sensible amount of food, I do drop weight and if I do both fast days and eat crap the other days I don't seem to gain much weight. So it works for me. 

That said, I often spend the evening of my fasting days dreaming of food, pinning recipes on Pintrest or making elaborate menus and plans for eating days. But the nice thing is, unlike other diets where I've felt constantly deprived (regardless of what they tell you, cough, cough, Weight Watchers) I get to eat like a normal person tomorrow. So I only need to dream away one evening and food awaits. 

Chocolate Cherry Cake

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When I was growing up our favorite cake was a chocolate cherry cake. You can make it with a few ingredients, a cake mix, cherry pie filling, an egg and so forth. Smudge's birthday is this weekend and I needed an easy cake for his party. 

At the grocery store, I read the cake mix box ingredients and realized I had all of this stuff (with no preservatives) in my pantry. So I went home and googled how to make one from scratch. 

I ended up using the recipe posted here: http://thesouthernladycooks.com/2012/07/27/exquisite-chocolate-cherry-cake/ (she's from Kentucky!). 

She makes in a Bundt pan, but I just used a rectangle cake pan like normal. I noticed just now that she suggests doubling the frosting recipe. I don't think that's necessary, but I do think adding more evaporated milk (maybe even twice as much) and thinning it out a good deal would be helpful. 

It's not a pretty cake, so there is no point in photographing it, but it is very, very tasty. Next time we might make it with raspberry pie filling instead of cherry and see what happens. 
Everybody knows that empty carbs are not good for you, but so, so delicious. But it's easy to turn to them as a vegetarian where often your only options (at least in Mountain Town) are grilled cheese and french fries. We've made a concerted effort in the past to eat lower carb, and while we are not strictly adhering to that by any means (as weekly pizza night will attest), we've kept a few of the best recipes in rotation. 

Last night we had Sophie's Vegan Crab Cakes and green beans and cauliflower with mustard dill sauce. It's a quick and easy vegan dinner that is more or less healthy (less healthy if you pan fry the crab cakes). Ironically, we followed this up by watching Top Chef, which had a whole seafood themed episode. Tons and tons of crawfish being boiled alive or chopped in half and then discussion of how the "best fish is one you catch yourself." Yeah... I think the best "fish" is the one that was never a fish, but I'm crazy like that. I know that sounds all political, and sure yeah, but also? Those crawfish looked like big giant cockroaches to me. Totally creepy. 

Note: instead of tofu, we just use Veganaise in this sauce and it goes great on the crab cakes too. 
dill sauce.JPG

Dis Be Nummy- Mountain Edition

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It has been a long time since this blog was operational, but for some reason I am feeling the urge to bring it back. So I am! The last iteration of this was the Austin version, motivated by our garden and our fantastic CSA. We have since moved clear across the country to Ogden, Utah. The climate is very different here. For one thing, there is winter and snow. This means that we can't garden year round like we could. It also means that the vegetables at the farmer's market and that we can grow have changed. We tried a CSA here, but it was a LOT of patty pan squashes, so it didn't really work for us. Our garden this past summer was successful enough that we didn't even go to the farmer's market that much. 

Somethings haven't changed. We still can't make ravioli worth a damn. We're still lacto-ovo vegetarians. We still have a kid, though he's a lot older than when I was updating regularly. At this point he could even write his own entries.  

Anyway, it was nice having recipes in a centralized place on the blog and so I decided to bring it back. Our menus run Monday through Sunday, and assume there will be times we just eat leftovers or quick dinners of Mac and Cheese. I try to fast a couple of days a week (following the 5/2 diet) so Eric and Ollie eat their own things those days. And once a week we have pizza and movie night. So there will always be different kinds of pizza on the menus.

Menu for 1/6-1/2 

*Pizza- Taco and Cheese Pizza
*Samosa Soup and Aloo Chat

About this Archive

This page is a archive of recent entries written by Jenny in January 2014.

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