Saturday 2 - Sunday 3 October 2010

Ahhh...the weekend! I didn't do so well with photographing everything this weekend. It wasn't a stellar weekend food-wise, but it was a fun one in general.

Saturday

Here's one thing I found at Ross last week:  Pumpkin Spice coffee!  This was good - I found the flavor pleasant and mild, not at all overpowering.  I had some with a handful of peanuts, because it was my day to get up with Ms. Early Birdie and I knew it was going to be awhile before the Slug-a-Bed Boys would be awake.

Weird...sometimes my camera corrects for horizontal, sometimes it doesn't.  Anyhow, here are the usual Saturday brunch - cheesy eggs with diced tomatoes and chives, bacon, and my poor, failed pumpkin protein pancakes.  I experimented with a recipe, and they ended up all mushy on the inside.  Whoops.  Glad this didn't happen when Debby came to visit!  Maybe making the standard protein pancake and then putting the pumpkin and cream cheese on top would work better?

After breakfast and tidying up the house (vacuuming the house is good for my blood glucose levels!), we took the kids to the open house at the local quarry.  They have it every year, with the big trucks on display (the kids get to climb all over excavators and bulldozers and all kinds of stuff), mountains of rock and sand for climbing and sliding down, and a free BBQ lunch.  So we ended up watching the Things hurl themselves down a sand mountain, and feeding them a bite or two before they climbed up to do it again.  It cracked me up, there was this big puddle of mud and this blissed-out little 2-year-old guy laying right in the middle of it, doing the breast stroke.  All the kids get filthy and full of sand, and it's so much fun.  (Eating-wise, I had half of a very large hot-dog without the bun, a few bites of hamburger with bun, and about a handful of cherry tomatoes and broccoli, about 3-4 Cheetos, plus a little bite of a brownie bite.)

Well, we took 'em home and cleaned them up.  I had to run some errands in town, so Thing 2 came along and we made a mom & daughter shopping trip out of it.  (Which reminded me a lot of the shopping trips me and my mom used to do, especially the yogurt stop!  Funny how food trends come back again.  If there's a jello salad renaissance in the next year or two, you heard it predicted here first!)

We saw some funny pumpkins outside of Cunha's Country Store:

Whew!  Being a pumpkin is hard work, and you can't even wander over to the yogurt shop for a break!

Here's my chocolate Carbolite (fat and sugar free) yogurt.  I got the medium, and I ate it all, but I'm thinking the small will be just fine next time.

Thing 2 wanted a hot dog, but she didn't like it (guess it was too gourmet!) and so I ate the dog and she had about half of the bun.  They had regular chocolate, so she got that with some gummy bears, and enjoyed it quite a lot.

We visited some of our other favorite shops - Posh Moon (a French-inspired store with lots of cool clothes and sparkly items - I found a cute pumpkin necklace and some charms, more on those later) and Tokenz, a gift shop with a craft bead area in the back.  I thought they might have beads shaped like food and other dollhouse items, because Thing 2 likes playing restaurant with her little pet animal toys.  We had great success!

So the problem with long, full days and eating on my feet is that sometimes I get food amnesia.  So I was ready to tear into dinner.  We had leftover chicken, made into taco meat.

Here are my two low-carb, high-fiber tortilla tacos...

...Thing 2 was full.  Did I save them for later like a sensible mom?  Noooo...

I had the rest of the chicken with just salsa.

And I tried frying cotija cheese.  It wasn't that great. :-/

So I had to tell you about the charms. When my best girlfriend and I turned 40, her younger sister took us out for a swanky dinner. (By a miracle, we all happened to be near Santa Barbara at the same time.) She had got all 3 of us charm bracelets! So we send each other charms now and then. I found some great ones at Posh Moon: these tiny circle-shaped ones with a picture on one side and a word on the other. For my BFF's sister, whose middle name is Clover, I found a 4-leafed clover with the word "lucky" on the other side. Too right, that one, girlfriend is amazingly lucky. For my BFF, I found a daisy on a red background, with the word "unique." Also quite fitting. The one for me is a Rosie the Riveter picture with the word "strong" on the other side; I felt like I needed the reminder lately.

Sunday

Breakfast: Sausage gravy, 1 egg with salsa, 2 slices flax toast with butter/canola spread and sugar-free jam, plus lots of decaf coffee with half-and-half and almond milk.

It was donut day again, but I did a lot better with flexing my resistance muscle this week. Mr. H&H gave me one bite cut off of Thing 2's chocolate glazed twist, but one bite did not turn into a whole donut's worth of nibbling.

I ended up taking a break from photographing everything today. It ended up being kind of a snacky day after all, but I spent lots of time on my feet, too. We put up the Halloween decorations and Thing 2 and I baked sugar cookies. (They're safe for me - I don't end up craving them like I do other kinds of cookies.) I had little one that I made "thumbprint" style, with a little sugar-free jam on it, and it was tasty. I also had a bite each of ones the Things had decorated for me. I got quite a workout cleaning up after the sprinkle-fest.

I also had planned to make Biz's pumpkin soup, but Mr. H&H didn't find the idea appealing. I knew I'd be the only one to eat it, and so I figured maybe earlier in a weekend would be better to make it, so I used the open can of pumpkin and made pumpkin custard instead (i.e., the pie filling, but baked without the crust). I made it with Splenda instead of sugar, and it was okay, but I think I may have overbaked it a bit. Mr. H&H and Thing 1 liked it pretty well, though.

We ended up eating early dinner (pizza) and I got to experiment with my new toy, which is bound to make you laugh. (I know I did!)

So here's the story: I have this addiction to highly palatable flavored kale chips. They are crunchy and salty and usually are made with some nut or seed paste, so there's the fat and salt thing going on, too. The good news is that the ingredients are substances found in nature and easy to pronounce, they are vegan and raw and gluten-free and all else that is beloved by those of a crunchy granola disposition.

The bad news? Those suckers are expensive.

So I greatly desired a dehydrator, so that I could figure out a way to make my own. I've tried baking kale chips, but the results were invariably bitter and inconsistent and often burnt. In a word, darn nasty and a waste of time and energy. (Okay, so that was more than one word.)

Well, I was wandering around in Ross one day, and lo and behold: a dehydration system that works in my microwave oven! And it was on reduced clearance, for only $3.50. (Or about 1.5 ounces of kale chips.)

I figured it was worth the gamble.

I got a bunch of the thinner consistency kale, and made a batch. Well, darned if the thing didn't actually work! Crunchy little kale leaves. I set to mixing up something to season them with, and here's my batch of Thai peanut sauce kale leaves:

A couple of leaves got a little scorched, because of the fat content of the peanut butter, I think. But early results were highly promising! I don't think I'll be able to fully replicate the store-bought ones, but this might help a bit.