Cold and crunchy Monday

It’s Monday!  Woot. 

😉 actually today has been a pretty decent Monday thus far.  The office is super quiet since many of my coworkers opted to use our floating holiday today.  I decided to bank mine and take my birthday off (next week) instead.

Hope you all have a fabulous fun/food/framily filled weekend!

The PB2 Giveaway ended last night!!!  Read further for the lucky winner 😀

Breakfast #1

It’s been so hot these past few days, that I was craving something super cold for breakfast this morning.  I decided a fruit smoothie would be the ticket to cooling things off.  I threw the following into the blender:

  • 1/2 cup Almond Breeze unsweetened almond milk
  • 1/2 cup Trader Joe’s Vanilla Greek Yogurt
  • 1 cup fresh frozen strawberries
  • 1/4 cup blueberries
  • 1 packet Truvia (Stevia) all natural sweetener

Once I blended everything up, I opened the fridge to put the almond milk away and saw a lonely half-empty bag of spinach sitting on the shelf begging to be eaten. 

I’ve read lots of posts on the “green monster” smoothies, especially on Julie’s blog, but I’ve never tried one myself… Until today that is!

I grabbed a handful of spinach and threw it into the blender and gave it a good pulse. 

Yes, that is spinach you are seeing

The result:

One huge smoothie with “monster” flecks:

This was surprisingly tasty!  You can’t specifically taste the spinach itself, but it gives the smoothy a hearty fullness.  It also cuts on some of the sweetness of the fruit, so I was glad I used a whole packet of truvia.  I think I’ve officially jumped on the green monster bandwagon 😀

If you’re intrigued — check out the Green Monster Movement.

Stats on the Green Monster:  197 calories, 37g carbs, 2g fat, 12g protein, 6g fiber

Breakfast #2

O…. O…..   mmmmmm…. haven’t had overnight oats in a few days, so I went with the go-to OO Combo: 

  • 1/2 cup oats
  • 1/2 cup Almond Breeze unsweetened almond milk
  • 1 tsp brown sugar
  • sprinkling of cinnamon
  • fresh strawberries

All stirred up:

Overnight oats… oh how I’ve missed you :-*

Stats on the oats:  208 calories, 38g carbs, 5g fat, 6g protein, 6g fiber

Lunch

Keeping on with today’s cold theme, I thought I’d add a little crunch to my lunch with a nice salad.  Last night, I threw together a monster salad that consisted of:

  • 1/2 bag fresh express romaine
  • 1 roma tomato
  • 1/2 cucumber
  • 1/4 cup white onion
  • 1 serving baby carrots
  • 1 link of Jennie O’s hot turkey sausage

Topped it all off with 2 tbsp of fat free ranch dressing:

Stats on the Monster Salad:  295 calories, 28g carbs, 10g fat, 22g protein, 7g fiber

And the winner of the PB2 Giveaway ……………

Drumroll please……

Based on the random number generator, the lucky winner is:

Monique at She’s Going the Distance!!!

  

Thank you guys for taking the time to post on my blog!  I really love seeing what you guys have to say, and as cheesy as it may sound (who doesn’t love a little cheese?) it really brightens my day 😀

Monique – please send your mailing address to:  ferventfoodie@gmail.com

Everyone else – you can purchase PB2 online at www.netrition.com.  Since it’s flat rate shipping, I’d recommend getting some Mama Lupe’s low-carb tortillas, Joseph’s low-carb pita, and some carba nada pasta 🙂

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Jambalaya!

Ever since I saw the recipe for Cajun Jambalaya in the July 2010 issue of Clean Eating magazine, I’ve been dying to try it! 

Luckily, I already had some leftover grilled chicken from last week and leftover turkey sausage from the “corn dog” I made over the weekend, so there wasn’t a ton of prep work for me to do.  You could definitely use raw meats though–everything is chopped into bite size pieces so it cooks through pretty fast.

I can’t believe how ridiculously easy this was!  Basically, I mixed the following list of items together in a bowl:

  • 4 raw medium size shrimp, tails removed
  • 1/2 link Jennie-O Hot Turkey Sausage
  • 2 ounces grilled chicken
  • 1/2 medium green bell pepper, chopped
  • 1 plum tomato, chopped
  • 1/4 cup white onion chopped
  • 1 clove garlic, minced
  • 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
  • Sprinkling of S&P, onion powder, red pepper flakes
  • 1/2 cup dry brown rice
  • 1/4 cup low sodium chicken broth

Then I layed out a big piece of foil, sprayed it down with olive oil cooking spray, and dumped everything onto the foil:

Then you just wrap it up like a Chipotle burrito — making sure that the edges are sealed tight so the liquid doesn’t leak out.  Pop into a 400 degree oven for 25 minutes, and VOILA!

 JAMBALAYA!

This was spiiiiiiicy!  I loved it!  And it made a TON of food.  One note for next time — some of the rice that was sitting on the top of the pile got a little crunchy.  I think this can be fixed by either soaking the rice in water before putting it in the mix, or by adding more liquid to the pouch. 

I’m in love with this foil pouch cooking method!

Stats on the Jambalaya:  384 calories, 46g carbs, 8g fat, 30g protein, 5g fiber

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Early bird catches the corn dog

It’s Saturday, and you know what that means.  Yard work!     

You’d think for as much time as I devote to my yard, it’d be in pristine shape….  Oh what a pain in the ass homeownership is  the joys of home ownership 🙂    

There is one specific area of the yard that I leave completely untouched.  You can see I have quite the crop of poison ivy growing:    

area of infestation

 

     

I hit up the Home Depot this morning to pick up some spray to (hopefully) help with my poison ivy.  Did you know Home Depot opens at 6am???   I leaned this little nugget of information when I called them at 7am to see when they opened.  6am?  Those customers must be hard-core home improvers.     

Before I got to work in the back yard, I cooked up my favorite egg breakfast:  1 dippy egg & 3 egg white scramble with S&P, Red Pepper Flakes, and Frank’s Red Hot.  I always add a splash of liquid (usually skim milk or water) to the egg whites to help them stay fluffy.  Also, toasted up a Thomas’ multi grain english muffin on the side.     

    

    

Stats on breakfast:  218 calories, 28g carbs, 6g fat, 22g protien, 8g fiber    

After chowing down, I headed to the yard.    

Until last summer, I was one of those people who thought I wasn’t allergic to poison ivy.  Well, that is until I accidently weed wacked some of it.  I really didn’t know what poison ivy even looked like, so I was unaware of the horrible mistake I had made and basically let myself marinate in the poison ivy juices all day while I worked away in the yard.  This resulted in what I will call a immobilizing infestation of poison ivy all over my legs.  Since then I will not go near the stuff.    

Today, I put on pants and long sleeves (despite temps in the mid 80’s) just so that I could approach the “infested area.”  My luck, I’ll get poison ivy on the only part that was left exposed:  my face 🙁   I’m sure I’ll have nightmares about that tonight!    

I’ll have to post some before and after shots once I get it all finished (which will be never sometime soon).    

After all the yard work, I was starving!     

Sometimes I just get cravings for weird foods.  Case in point, today I had a sudden craving for a corn dog!  I can’t remember the last time I had one, but something triggered the corn dog eating machine deep inside me.  So, I decided to try and make a healthified version of a corn dog.  Even typing “healthified corn dog” makes me scoff.  How ridiculous sounding is that?    

I had some frozen Jennie-O turkey sausages in the freezer and also some Joseph’s Lavash bread, so I pulled them out to defrost before hitting up the yard early this morning.    

I cooked up 2 turkey sausages – 1 for the “corn dog” and 1 for a healthified jambalaya recipe I’m going to try later in the week.  Once cooked, I wrapped 1 turkey sausage in 1/2 a Joseph’s Low-Carb lavash bread, stuck in on a skewer, and threw it back on the grill.    

    

    

Ridiculous, I know…    

Once the lavash was crispy, I pulled it off the grill and served it up with a big squirt of mustard.     

    

    

Ok – so it’s not exactly a corn dog, but eating it off a stick sure made it seem like one and it definitely hit the spot 🙂  I’m a BIG fan of Jennie-O’s hot turkey sausage.    

Corn dog stats:  210 calories, 7g carbs, 12g fat, 22g protien, 3g fiber    

BTW –  yesterday while volunteering I had a Smores Luna Bar – and I wasn’t a big fan.  It wasn’t bad tasting — just didn’t remind me of a smore AT ALL.  Definitely the least favorite of all the flavors I have tried to date.  I also had a few bites of a Chocolate Cherry Bear Naked Grain-ola Bar.  It was OK – but again, I wasn’t super impressed.  Apparently I was hard to please yesterday…   

What did hit the spot, however, was the Gioniono’s pizza we had for dinner:    

Abundant vegetables to make me feel better about eating pizza, amazing Gionino's pizza, pool of hot sauce goodness 🙂

 

    

Still trying to decide what to cook up for dinner tonight…  Suffering from foodie’s block.

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