Cooking Healthy for Two....

It's a daunting task when you take on a new eating plan with the goal of eating healthier and changing your lifestyle. What makes it even more daunting is the other people in the house you have to cook for.... your spouse. He or she may not be seeking the same goals, and that can be particularly problematic. The evening meal I believe should be a melding of the partnership in the home. Just because David works outside the home does not excuse him from not being an active participant in meal planning and or cooking dinner. Yes, my  'job' may be household manager aka home maker, but I do more than just that. Being the home maker I research and plan the meals, then David and I shop together for our weekly groceries. That's what we hope to happen, in reality meetings happen, we go out to eat, I get stressed and order pizza.... then the whole thing just goes to Hell in a hen basket. David usually cooks on the weekends when his work and activity schedule is less chaotic. We both belong to community service organizations that has week night meetings, and are both active in our church, and I have my weekly women's group that I go to. Yet I always strive to have a consistent meal time, and it usually happens. Being 'just us' has it's advantages, we don't have to deal with the chaos of a child's activity schedule of sports and other 'lessons'.

One of the ways we are eating healthy is cutting out the 'box meals'... the prepackaged bombs of sodium and Monsanto chemicals. Yeah they taste good, but the end result for me is pain from aspartame and sucralose, and elevated blood pressure from all the salt. The average amount of sodium per serving of a box meal is about 750-800 mg. Mmmmm salt lick. I'm a human being, not a deer out in the woods. The frozen convenience meals are no better, healthy food 'glazed' with preservatives to keep them fresh... most of them sodium based and very bad for your cardiovascular system. So David and I are eating fresh, fresh from the butcher for our meats and seafood, and fresh from the local farms for our vegetables. This way we keep our local farmer's economy going, which is currently suffering due the drought, and we feel safe in knowing that there are no nasty pesticides and hormones in our food.

I have found Pinterest to be a valuable source for planning meals, and finding healthy recipes. I've even got David on Pinterest and as I find meals to my liking I 'share' them with him by sending a pin.... well, you know how that works. We also have a great program on our iPhone that allows us to share a grocery list called Any List... I have mentioned this one before. The new updates with the iPhone 6 and IOS 8 now have meal planning and nutritional information, and as you meal plan, the ingredients go straight to your grocery list. I haven't done the upgrade yet.... I'm still a penny pincher when it comes to that.

Well, it's almost midnight and I've got a weeks worth of meals to plan. Nighty night....

My Chicken Tortilla Soup...

Chicken Tortilla soup....

1 can of Rotel (diced tomatoes with chilis)
1 can of corn
3 medium chicken breasts
4 cups of chicken broth
1 can of black beans (drained)

2 tbsp of cumin
1 tsp of chipotle powder
1 tbsp of garlic powder or granules
1 tbsp of onion powder

The night before....
add chicken breasts to slow cooker with water and cook on low until morning.

Morning:
Drain and shred chicken then put shredded chicken in crock.
Add beans, Rotel, and corn and spices to taste (I used the measurements based on my taste)
Add chicken broth.
Stir
Set crock on low and cook for 8 hours or more...

When finished add crumbled tortilla chips.

Great Brunch....

One of the finer things in life, Sunday Brunch with friends. This week brought David and I and our friends Tammy and Richard to one of our favorite spots up the hill at Selland's Cafe in El Dorado Hills. You order cafeteria style and pay for it in line, but they bring it to you... the hitch, you have to pass by all of their baked goods....the fresh baked snickerdoodles, red velvet cupcakes...just to name a few. It is very busy on Sundays, but the line is quick and the service is always top notch, I don't think I've ever had to wait long at all. They feature both indoor and outdoor seating. 

Pictured above is one of my favorite dishes, the French Toast Casserole with bacon. The French Toast is a work of art, a melee of cinnamon, sugar, and an added treat of candied pecans. To balance the sweet they have four pieces of perfectly cooked and peppered bacon. Not burnt to a crisp, and not an underdone stretchy mess... perfection. I tried something new today, Vanilla Lemonade. Yum! So my Sacramento Valley friends, this is well worth a ride up the hill.... 

DINK and other ramblings...

DINK, it's been a while since you've heard that acronym. This refers to those of us who are married with no kids. When you say the acronym out loud, as in 'Dink', to me it sounds rather demeaning and derogatory. In the Navy this term means to be behind in work and qualifications. My husband and I do not have any children, we tried, I had faulty plumbing thus no children. It is my observation that society expects married couples to have children...why else would you get married? Um, love, companionship, commitment... What happens when you aren't able to have children? For my husband and I it was a period of pain and disappointment, we wanted a family. Lately it seems in society's definition that we're 'dink'... behind because we don't have any children. Seriously, who determines this definition of what a modern family should be like. We've come a long way in the definition of marriage and family.... mixed families, blended families, same sex families, yet they all seem to have the addition of children when represented in mainstream media. But what if you can't? What if you don't want to have children?

Mother's Day has come and gone. It's a double edged sword that day is. We want to honor our own mothers, and we also feel the pang of loss of not being able to be mother's ourselves. I was blessed to have lots of 'Mom's' in my life,  and for the longest time I yearned to be a mother. Yet my body had other ideas and it just wasn't going to happen. For those of us, for whatever reason, who cannot be mothers this is a rough day for us. I used to feel inferior, less of a woman because I couldn't be a mother. I was blessed to not have one of those mothers who was constantly asking me when I was going to produce a grandchild. Thank GOD for feminist mothers. Yet inside I carried the pain of infertility and the empty womb deep inside of me for a long time. I felt like I had let my husband down as well. Sounds a little old fashioned, a little 1950's, but that's what I felt. I also felt like a square peg in a round hole when it came to what group I fit into... I was no longer a single, I was married, but I didn't fit in with the majority of married women because they all had children and I just couldn't 'relate' to them. Along with the pain of infertility I was having an identity crisis. I was very fortunate to have a wonderful family who supported me emotionally, and a mother who didn't lay a load of guilt on me for not giving her grandchildren.

Yet I do have a child... he's about 14 lbs, orange fur, four legs and lots of 'catitude'... my boy Tybalt. Even though we didn't spend hours pushing a child out of our hoo-ha physically, we can be 'mothers' in many other ways, so don't despair. And not being a mother physically does NOT make you any less of a woman.