Potato Pancakes & Michael Jordan

Happy Tuesday Everyone!  For some reason I feel like how can it only be Tuesday?  Today was a long day and therefore it makes me feel like I lived at least 2 or 3 days in 1 day.

This week we have been enjoying some tasty meals, I want to share one in particular but don’t hate me, it is completely not healthy but worth every single calorie!

Sunday night I made Potato Pancakes.  I keep mine fairly simple like my mom made them 🙂  If you have never tried a potato pancakeor “Latke” as they are also known, then you are definitely missing out.  My mom used to make them when I was a child for breakfast on Sunday morning every once in awhile.  I have a new found respect for her now that I am the one making them and standing over the hot stove cooking batch after batch.  They are absolutely worth every minute of work and I love how happy they make my husband and every other person who eats them!  I remember my nephew trying them last year for the first time at 11 years old and I think he wondered what took so long to have one!

Here is how I make them:

3 pounds of potatoes (this probably makes 30 or so pancakes)

*Peel potatoes and rinse

Cut a small onion into 3 pieces

*In a food processor grate the potatoes one at a time, after every couple of potatoes add a piece of onion in to be grated

Drain potatoes and onion mixture over sink for 5 minutes then pour into bowl

*Lightly beat 2 eggs and pour over potato mixture

Add in 1/2 cup flour, 1.5 tsp of salt, 1/4 tsp baking powder and a dash of pepper.  Stir in mixture, combining well.  Transfer mixture back into strainer and drain for another 5 minutes.

Heat 1 or 2 large pans over high heat, add olive oil (fill about 1/4 inch), spoon about 3 tbsp of potato mixture and flatten into pan, cook each side until golden brown and cooked through.  Drain on a paper towel lined baking sheet.  Season with salt (optional)

Traditionally these are served with applesauce or sour cream.  My husband enjoys his with cottage cheese as well.

Be Proud of Yourself

If you got up today and worked out, be proud! If you ate fruits and veggies today be proud!  You are on your way to a healthy life for yourself.  I know that it is so easy to beat yourself up because of your weight, or how you look or how your clothes look.  We forget to take the time to recognize what we are doing right.  Every little thing you do during the day to make yourself healthier matters.  Even if you caved in and ate too much dessert or half a bag of chips, realize that tomorrow is a new day and a day to start fresh.  I am willing to bet you did something today that built a healthier life for you, maybe it was getting 8 full hours of sleep, or having a banana at breakfast whatever it was it means something and you should be proud of yourself 🙂

Tuesday Quote of the Day

I read this quote the other day and I loved it, I am not even a Michael Jordan fan I just thought the quote is extremely motivational.  For some reason I think of young athletes when I read it, two of my nephews are unbelievably good athletes and I love watching them play their sports of choice. It can be so hard to watch them and the other players get frustrated or sad after a tough game because we all know how that feels. If you are a parent or a loved one of a young athlete I think this quote would be great to show them to remind them that yes even Michael Jordan failed, as we all do.  Kids these days know who Michael Jordan is, right?

“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” 

– Michael Jordan

Attachments

Attachment is a very interesting subject, right?  Well it is to me 🙂  I have studied a lot about it in my education and most of my understanding of attachment is in relation to children and their attachments.

My dad recently sent me an interesting article on reasonable attachment and disordered attachment to food.   In other words what is a healthy and unhealthy dependence on food.  I had never really thought before about food in terms of attachment. We have to have some form of attachment to food because clearly it serves a much needed purpose for us.  It talks about healthy attachment being what is reasonable and that is related to what the purpose is.  The purpose of food is to nourish our bodies and sustain our lives.  If we are eating with the mindset that food is there to nourish us we are being healthy with our choices of food.  It becomes unhealthy or a “disordered attachment” when we stop being reasonable with our use of food and eat in a way that damages our health.

How many of us have disordered attachments to food?  I do not mean disordered in the sense that we have actual eating disorders but that we no longer consume food in reasonable way?  I know for a fact that I had and have to battle a disordered attachment to food.  I did not consider food as it is meant to be, nourishment for our bodies and therefore I was unhealthy.

Creating a healthy attachment to food requires you to re-evaluate your attitudes toward food and create a lifestyle that focuses on food as sustenance.  Eating is a delicious and pleasurable experience but it needs to remain just an experience, not an attachment.  It cannot be something we depend on to fill voids or emotionally satisfy us.  Food should fuel our bodies so that we are strong and healthy and able to participate in life, and that should be what emotionally satisfies us.

Tomato Sauce

Now that I have an actual home and a beautiful kitchen I love spending time in there preparing meals.  When you live in an apartment with a small kitchen cooking is just not the same, it is easier to just use a jar of tomato sauce then make your own.  When my husband and I got married we bought a home and I am so glad we did because cooking is a blast in my kitchen!

Take today for example, it is a beautiful Saturday, the sun is shining and I wanted to spend some time in the kitchen and prepare my tomato sauce for our raviolis this week.  Any time I can prepare part of a meal ahead of time I do!  This tomato sauce is rich, sweet, and delicious.  I love it, it goes perfect with a bowl of pasta or layered in lasagna.  I highly recommend making a large batch of it to store some in the freezer. The recipe I use is a marinara sauce but I add either Sweet Italian Chicken Sausage or Spicy Italian Chicken Sausage.

Recipe

Adapted from CanYouStayForDinner

3-4 Sweet or Spicy Italian Chicken Sausage

2 Tbsp Olive Oil

half a medium onion (chopped)

3 cloves of garlic

1 can tomato paste

1 28 oz can crushed tomatoes

1 tbsp dried oregano

3 tbsp sugar

1 tsp salt

1 tsp pepper

Remove the casing from sausage and saute and crumble sausage in saute pan until cooked through.

In a large pot heat 2 tbsp olive oil and add garlic and onion. Saute until they are cooked and very soft, the longer you cook them the better the taste.

Add in the sausage and then add 1 small can of tomato paste and stir, then add the crushed tomatoes

Add in the salt, pepper, oregano and sugar.  I swear by adding the sugar, it makes the sauce sweet and so delicious, trust me on this one. Bring the sauce to a light boil and then reduce heat, cover and simmer for at least a half hour.  This makes about 4 cups of sauce.  Enjoy 🙂

Love What You Do

I am oh so glad that it is Friday.  Some weeks more than others I just really need the weekend.  I have not one single plan this weekend so I am hoping to relax, grocery shop and cook 🙂

I have been doing a lot of thinking about all that a healthy life entails.  It is so much more than your body, it is your mind, your heart, your contribution to the world, your soul.  A healthy life includes for me my husband, my family, my friends, my faith, and my job.  I want to focus on the last one though, my job.  I wish that everyone could be so blessed as to truly LOVE what they do.  I know that especially given today’s economic situation many people are without jobs or employed in jobs they hate.  I am one who can say that I love my job.  It is not perfect, there are hard days and frustrating people, but at the heart of it I am so happy to go to work each day.   I think finding a career path that makes me so happy has truly contributed to my overall sense of health.  I do not have the daily stress of hating what I do, I do not wake up dreading the day ahead.  I go to work strong and confident and I come home happy albeit a bit tired 🙂  Granted I have a job where 12 beautiful children want me to hold them and play with them, but it is also very hard work that can be stressful. Even if you are stuck in a job that you hate I can promise there are things to love.  So much of our lives are spent at work so it is important to make it as healthy of a situation as you can.  If you do not like your work love that you are good at it, if you do not like your work love that you are not one of the 8.5% of Americans out of work, if you do not like your work love that you can dream of something new and possibly achieve that dream.  If you do not like your job never stop looking for something new, it is so easy to be complacent and not believe that you can do something else but you never know what is around the corner.

And now on to simpler things!!  Our Menu for the week: (In case you are wondering why our menus only have 4 nights and not 7, it is because my husband is gone 3 days each week so we go by 4 day weeks 🙂

Potato Pancakes (Per my husband’s request)  A totally not healthy but delicious meal, I serve it with applesauce and cottage cheese so that is good right?

Goat Cheese & Sun-dried Tomato Raviolis with homemade sauce.  Spinach Salad with feta, croutons and homemade dressing

Buffalo Turkey Burgers with roasted broccoli

And maybe night 4 will be leftovers?

5 Favorite Salads

I LOVE LOVE LOVE salad.  I could never get bored or tired of salads.  I love finding different recipes for dressings and throwing different fun ingredients in them!  I know that in the winter most people do not enjoy salad that much seeing as how cold it is outside but I could eat salad in freezing temperatures.  So here is a list of my very favorite salads (one of them is winter friendly with a warm dressing).

1.  Mixed Greens with Honey Vinaigrette and Gorgonzola.    I made this salad one year for Easter I believe and I thought it really is the perfect salad.  You have salty and sweet ingredients that blend together beautifully.  I also candy my own walnuts and add them on top!   Recipe from Gourmet

2.  Roasted Beets and Goat Cheese Salad.  This is one of my favorite salads that does not actually have lettuce.  You can always add some mixed greens but it is also great without.  Start with roasting your own beets, slice and arrange on a platter, then sprinkle with goat cheese, olive oil, balsamic vinegar and basil or other herb.  Simple, classic and delicious.

3.  My Dad’s Caesar Salad.  Growing up my dad would make his famous Caesar Salad dressing and it really spoiled me and I struggle to find Caesar’s to measure up to his.  I asked him for his recipe and he did his best because it is not something he has written so here aer the ingredients with estimates as far as amounts.

Extra Virgin Olive Oil (1/2 cup to 1 cup depending on how much you are making)

Juice from about 2 lemons

1 Tsp black pepper

Tbsp grey poupon

5-6 drops of W0rcestershire

1/2 to 1 whole can anchovies (dice them) even if you think you do not like them use them!  You won’t really taste them and they add a great flavor

3-4 crush crushed or chopped garlic cloves

1 beaten raw egg (optional)

*In a bowl whisk these ingredients together and toss with crisp torn Romaine Lettuce.  Serve with homemade croutons and Parmesan Cheese on top 🙂

4.  My favorite everyday salad.  I typically eat at least one salad a day.  I throw in a bunch of whatever I have on hand and it is normally my favorite part of the meal.  For my favorite I use spinach or mixed greens, feta or goat cheese, olives, sun-dried tomatoes, homemade whole wheat croutons, avocado and a dressing of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, mustard and honey.

5.  Warm Prosciutto and Asparagus Salad

Make this salad, no I am serious, make this salad right now.  This salad is very popular in my family and for good reason, it is amazing.  Again, do not let the anchovies scare you, they add great flavor and you won’t taste anything fishy!  You probably have eaten anchovies more than you think, they are used a lot to add flavor.  If you really love anchovies you can add more to the recipe!  And go ahead, add more prosciutto too, it is 100% worth it.

Workouts

How is working out going for you?  I hope that if exercise was a New Year’s Resolution for you as we are almost done with January you are sticking with it and seeing some changes!  Keep at it, I promise it gets easier and once you feel your body changing and you aren’t almost suffocating you will start to even like exercise!

My latest workouts have been combining running with workout.  I do a warm up run for 10-15 minutes and then do a circuit like this.  I have been feeling very frustrated because my weight just is not changing.  I have been doing way too much in between meal snacking and those calories really add up.  So I am trying to up the intensity of my workouts and trying to eat 5 small meals a day, cause then all day is like one long snack right?  🙂

New Favorite Sandwich

Not too much excitement on my part this week.  I am trying to get adjusted to a new work schedule so that means figuring out a new workout schedule and life schedule!  I wish I could be someone who gets up earlier then they need to so I can workout first thing but somehow that just hasn’t worked for me.  I like my sleep too much to wake up an hour earlier.  So I have been trying to workout after work but sometimes other things come up and I lose the time.  I guess I just need to figure it out!

I have found a new favorite way to have sandwich.  As delicious as deli lunch meat may be most of them have a lot of sodium, scary chemicals and are just overall not good for you.  Problem is I LOVE sandwiches, especially turkey.  So last week I decided to buy a turkey roast and my husband cooked it in the crock pot and we used that for sandwiches.  It turned out delicious and I loved having fresh REAL turkey on sandwiches.  It really was super easy and I highly recommend that if you are a family that loves sandwiches this is the way to go.  Not to mention deli lunch meat can cost over $4  a pound and you can find turkey roasts or breasts for less than that!

And how delicious does this look???

I used the turkey in sandwiches, salad and quesadillas!

Dinners

I have been trying to use up some food in the cupboards and fridge so last night was simple turkey, bean and cheese quesadillas and tonight was frozen Trader Joe’s pizza….I know I know totally boring and blah!  I promise I will be back in action next week with some delicious recipes 🙂

 

Weighing In

Do you judge your weight by the actual number?

Or how you actually feel and how your clothes fit?

 

Some people do not know specifically how much they weigh, while others (like myself) weigh ourselves all the time trying to hit some magical number or maintain the number we love.  Our weight is such a personal number, we lie about it, forget about it, deny about it.  At times I wish I did not know what I weighed but instead went by how I feel.  I like what some people do and judge their health by how their clothes fit, how much energy they have, basically their overall health.

Now as much as I like that idea, it is far too unorganized for me.  I like to have numbers and goals and specifics.  When I began to lose weight I weighed myself way too much, I obsessed every single day if my weight went up even half a pound.  Over time I learned to weigh myself once a week and make sure that it was the same time of day each week.  Our body weight fluctuates by a few pounds throughout the day and so weighing in every single day or throughout the day is simply misleading.

My advice with your weight is this, figure out what works for you.  Does judging by how your clothes fit hold you accountable?  If your pants feel tight does that motivate you to get back in the swing of healthy eating?  If so that is great, this method works for you.  But if you are like me then having a number and a plan is the way to go. Weigh in once a week, keep a log of your numbers, and set a goal weight by a certain date.  Keep in mind that 2 pounds a week is considered the healthy number to lose weight and maintain the weight loss.  Remember that slow and steady wins the race.

Dinner Last Night

Last night’s dinner was me just throwing some ingredients together and hoping for the best.  I began by roasting some broccoli .  Then I heated 1 tbsp of olive oil and sauteed garlic, onions, bell pepper and green beans for 15 minutes.  I then cut up some jalapeno chicken sausage from Trader Joe’s and threw it in the mix.  I added the broccoli

and I added this all on top of a bed of this:

and sprinkled it with feta cheese.  The final photos did not really turn out but it was a nice and healthy dinner.  I served it along with a spinach salad topped with avocado, cheese, and homemade croutons.  I would recommend this Harvest Grains blend from Trader Joe’s if you like Couscous, Quinoa and Orzo!  The only change I would have made to this dish was added some kind of sauce to it but no sauce =healthier but I am thinking some kind of Mediterranean style sauce would be delicious 🙂

Splurging now vs. splurging then

I will always be someone who is going to let them self splurge every now and then.  I do not limit any food from my diet, that is to say I do not forbid myself from eating anything.  If I am craving a plate of nachos I am going to have one and enjoy every last lick of cheese.  What I am not going to do is eat 5 plates of nachos and then the bowl of ice cream that sounds good.  If I am going to let myself splurge I ask myself what it is that I really want?  When I splurge I want to enjoy every last delicious bite and at the end say “that was worth it”.  For me a trip to Burger King has never been worth it, nor a twinkie or a candy bar.  No, if I splurge I want it to be for my mom’s Chocolate Rum Bread Pudding, or my dad’s homemade Caesar salad dressing.

When I was overweight I was eating everything and anything, things that weren’t even that good. My entire life was a splurge, the word splurge did not apply to me because in order to splurge that means you are limiting yourself at some point.  When I changed my attitude towards food I had to recognize what it was that I truly loved to eat instead of eating everything because I loved to eat.  Once I had figured out what I truly loved it made it easier for me to realize that I loved it because I did not eat it everyday.  Everyday I was eating chips, cheese, and way too much of it not because I loved it but because it was there and it made me feel better in the moment.  Then 5 minutes after eating it I would regret it and realize how bad it made me feel, only to do it again the next day.  I have never regretted homemade lasagna or a decadent piece of chocolate, and I never will.  I love those things because I do not eat them everyday, and I know now that I would rather eat healthy delicious foods everyday and then splurge while sitting around the table at a big family dinner then try to find comfort in the unhealthy way I was eating before.  The joy and happiness I feel when I sit down to share a meal with my food loving family is greater than any temporary joy that overeating ever brought me.

No Plan

I typically swear by menu planning, I love searching for recipes and creating a meal plan.  But for some reason I have been trying for 2 days and cannot come up with a plan this week, so I thought I would try and get by mostly on what we already have at home and only pick up a few things at Trader Joe’s.  I have a tentative plan but nothing for sure.  I picked up mostly veggies in hopes of creating my meals around the veggies!  This week is going to be a tough one at work so I am going to see how I feel each day and cook from there.  The children have been on a break for about 5 weeks.  That means they are home, with parents, not getting dropped off at preschool for what is for some an 8 hr day.  So tomorrow marks the first day back for infants between the age of 4 months and about 20 months.  Tomorrow also marks the 1st day for our new staff and student interns, so that means a room full of people who have no idea what is going on!  I don’t mean that in a bad way, I was new once too, it just means extra stress and work for those of us who have been there awhile.  So wish me luck 🙂

Tentative Meal Plan:

Monday:  I found a mixture of Israeli Couscous, orzo, baby garbanzo beaks, and red quinoa at Trader Joe’s.  My plan is to cook that and toss it with peppers, broccoli and some jalapeno chicken sausage, we’ll see how that works.

Tuesday:  Chicken Tacos with avocado?

 

Wednesday:  Vegetable stir fry?

Daily Workouts

I took 2 days off from exercise to spend time with family and get work done.  Since it is raining today I will be doing an indoor circuit workout, tomorrow is supposed to be more rain so probably inside tomorrow too.  The rest of the week should be sunny so I am hoping to get back outside and running! If I don’t run til Tuesday it will have been almost a week since I have run.  I miss it but it has been fun doing some other forms of exercise too!  Ok, I think I have motivated myself enough with writing this to go put on workout clothes and workout during halftime of the niner’s game 🙂

A Day of no Cooking!

I would say that 99% of the time I cook every single meal of every single day.  We are pretty good about not eating out a lot so we go out to lunch on average once a week.  Dinner is almost always at home unless we are with family.  I love to cook and create meals, I really do, but at the same time days like today are nice when I did not have to prepare any of my meals and I only did dishes for one meal 🙂 I spent the day visiting some family in the Sacramento area and enjoyed some delicious meals!

Breakfast today was at the delicious Cafe Bernardo in Midtown Sacramento.  I met my wonderful and beautiful friend Michelle and we both ordered the Chicken Sausage Scramble. It was very tasty and I so enjoyed getting to spend some quality time with my friend 🙂  The toast came with blackberry jam and I am not normally a jam on toast kind of girl, I remember my grandma always put jam on her toast and I never tried it!  Today I did and I really liked it, I may have started a new trend for my toast.

Photo Courtesy of Sacramento Magazine

I then met my parents for a later lunch at The Habit.  The Habit is a hamburger place that serves burgers, sandwiches, salads, etc.  Their burgers are very tasty and I enjoyed a yummy cheeseburger and split sweet potato fries with my mom.  I am gonna say today was a “cheat day”.

Dinner was enjoyed with my parents and brother and we had fresh dungeness crab!  I love fresh crab and I had not had it in a really long time.  I am pretty sure I ate my body weight in crab.

Between eating two meals out and another big one with family I feel very full and like I really hope there is a break in rain tomorrow for me to go running!   Days like today feel so good because I did not stress out about what I was eating and just enjoyed the moment and didn’t worry about not getting a work out in.  I am so glad I am at the point where I can realize one day of no exercise and lots of food does not mean I will gain 10 pounds!

Tonight I am snug at my parents house.  My original plan was to leave super early in order to meet my husband at home when he gets off of work.  But poor guy just called and somebody went home sick so he is stuck there til Monday morning 😦  Four nights of no husband can get pretty rough so I am glad I am with family tonight and tomorrow to pass the time faster.  I will head to church with my family and then leave after lunch to get back home and ready for the work week!