Frank’s red hot – Page 2

Saturday is for the Chirpy

June 26, 2010 1 Comment

Hello friends!

Good news! I woke up this morning, and I literally had a smile on my face 😀 The sun was shining and the birds were chirping (which some people find annoying but I happen to love)… Come to think of it, that is odd for me considering I have a phobia of birds…

After my rough start to the day yesterday, we thought the best cure would be Gionino’s pizza and their amazing hot sauce for dinner last night (we will take any excuse for the G, really):

After dinner, I walked 2.5 miles at about a 4 mile per hour pace. I’m not 100% sure the walking is helping me to rebuild the strength in my knee, but it doesn’t seem to be hurting so I’m going to keep on keeping on!

For breakfast #1 today I decided to make up some eggs. I swear my body goes through egg withdrawal if I am sans-eggs for more than a couple days! I chopped up a small potato into bite size pieces, then microwaved for 4 minutes flipping the little guys over half way through.

Then I threw them into a hot pan to crisp up on both sides. Once the potatoes were crispy, I added the following mixture: 4 egg whites, some Frank’s red hot, S&P, red pepper flakes, and a splash of water.

Served em up with a dollop of ketchup 🙂

Stats on breakfast #1: 215 calories, 36g carbs, 9g fat, 17g protein, 3g fiber

After the eggs, I completed Day #1, Week #2 of my interval training plan which consisted of 5 intervals of 3 minutes walking and 3 minutes running. No knee pain! Boo ya! I got to the 2.5 mile marker in 27 minutes.

Breakfast #2 today was some overnight oats 😀

Last night I threw the following into a bowl then popped it into the fridge:

1/2 cup uncooked quick oats
1/2 cup unsweetened almond breeze vanilla almond milk
1 tsp JIF peanut butter
1 tsp brown sugar
sprinkling of cinnamon

This morning, I topped the oats off with some fresh strawberries. Mmmm mmmm gooooood 🙂

Stats on breakfast #2: 233 calories, 36g carbs, 8g fat, 7g protein, 6g fiber

You know what I really love about overnight oats (besides the delicious creamy coolness)? It’s like a little surprise for yourself. You take 1 minute of time for yourself the night before, and the next morning you have this little bundle of joy just waiting for you!

Speaking of preparing, I haven’t been doing a very good job of planning my meals out for the week in advance. During tax season, I am amazing at this (not to brag or anything 😉 ) and not only do I shop for the meals on Sunday, but I also cook EVERYTHING for the week on Sunday. Lately, it feels like I’ve been going to the grocery store several times a week, instead of one large trip over the weekend. So, this week I’m going to do my best to sit down and plan everything out. Speaking of planning… I need to plan out what to make for dinner tonight!

Headed to the yard for hours of glorious yard work 🙂

What I ate

Early bird catches the corn dog

June 19, 2010 1 Comment

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:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA — 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:

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

Recipes, What I ate

Just trust me on this one…

June 17, 2010 No Comments

Breakfast #1

I think we all know I adore eggs for breakfast. No arguments here. Bad news is I sometimes can’t find the time in the morning to whip them up. I’ve been wanting to try cooking eggs in the oven for a while, so last night I decided to give it a go. I mixed up my typical scrambled egg mixture: 1 egg, 3 egg whites, S&P, Red Pepper Flakes (RPF?), and some Frank’s Red Hot. I poured the mixture into two miniature ramekins, and popped in a 350 degree oven for 26 minutes.

They look like little egg muffins! Little eggins! 🙂

This morning, I decided to turn the lil eggins into a wrap. So I pulled a Mama Lupe’s low carb tortilla out of the freezer, heated that puppy up, and topped it all off with some ketchup.

That looks like an eggin massacre…

Portable and delicious!

These eggins are just so cute! What I really like about this cooking method is you could make a whole muffin tin full of lil eggins! If you had friends over for brunch, everyone could toss in their mixins of choice! Love this idea! Who’s ready for a brunch party? 😀

Breakfast #2

Recently, it was brought to my attention that peanut butter may make an amazing mixin for greek yogurt. Today my friends, I put this to the test.

I mixed up 1 Dannon vanilla greek yogurt, 1 tbsp JIF peanut butter, and 1/2 a serving of crushed Emerald’s cocoa roasted almonds.

The result?

Friggin’ deliciousness! This reminded me of a peanut butter cheese cake for some reason. Some crushed up nilla wafers on top would have been fabulous. Let’s just say I licked the container clean, and it’s not exactly easy to reach the bottom of a yogurt container with your tongue. But I made it happen. 🙂

…

……..

……………………..

Lunch

Alright… Here’s where the just-trust-me factor comes in.

Let me preface what’s about to go down on my blog with the following: I wanted to try something new for lunch today.

Repeat it with me: I wanted to try something new for lunch today.

I’m going walking with my sister after work, and knew I was packing a chicken sandwich for dinner. Soooo, I was leaning toward the other white meat AKA tuna fish for lunch (NOT a fan of pork, and therefore it is NOT the other white meat in my life). You may recall that I have a long jaded relationship with fish (case in point: my fight with fish). Tuna happens to be the only fish I have found to date that I actually enjoy.

So Tuna it was.

I subsequently noticed I had some cottage cheese in the fridge that was nearing the end of its useful life.

I decided to google tuna + cottage cheese + recipe just to see what might turn up.

I clicked on the very first link: Tuna Salad Sandwich Recipe

Internal debating ensued.

Do I really want to try tuna fish mixed with cottage cheese? Could it possibly be good? I was hesitant, but I decided to give it a go.

Into the bowl:

1 5 ounce canned solid white albacore tuna, drained
1/4 cup fat free cottage cheese
salt, pepper, dried parsley, celery seed, dried dill
small squirt spicy brown mustard
1/2 tsp lemon juice

At this very moment, you are probably disgusted thoroughly intrigued by this concoction.

I added some chopped up tomato, red onion, and banana peppers right before serving. In an effort to keep my carb-tooth (located directly next to the sweet tooth) under wraps, I served the tuna salad up in a red pepper instead of your typical sandwich:

Me and the tuna pepper:

Up close:

I know those cottage cheese chunks look a little funky, but rest assured my friends, it was down right tasty!

Stats on the tuna pepper: 218 calories, 18g carbs, 2g fat, 36g protein, 4g fiber

Ramblings

Confession

June 15, 2010 6 Comments

So, I have a confession to make.

…

Before we get into that matter, let’s recap lunch and dinner:

As posted earlier, I was ill-fated this morning so I decided some pizza for lunch would help me come around.

Lean cuisine cheese pizza with leftover gionino’s hot sauce… Pretty darn close to the real thing:

If you haven’t tried hot sauce on your pizza, I am begging you to give it a try!!! Soooo good!

On to dinner. Things just keep getting better! I don’t mean to brag, but hot damn my dinner was good! (said with midwest hillbilly accent while simultaneously throwing in an arm jab)

I had a leftover turkey burger from the weekend I wanted to use up, but I wasn’t feeling the typical ketchup and mustard fixins. So I decided to make a quesadilla burger — and let me tell you it was glorious!

Here’s what went into the quesadilla burger:

The sauces I used were 1 tbsp fat free breakstone’s sour cream, 1 tsp (AKA all I could scrape from the container) of Trader Joe’s Jalapeno Cilantro Hummus, and some Frank’s red hot. I threw it all in between a Mama Lupe’s Low Carb tortilla I had ordered from Netrition.

I also decided to take a second stab at turnip fries. This time, I cut them into larger wedges and cooked them at 450 degrees for 35 minutes.

I threw the quesadilla burger on the waffle iron (that’s right, waffle iron) to crisp up the tortilla and heat everything through. Why dirty the george foreman when the waffle iron was just sittin there begging to be used?

All together on the plate:

Not the most appealing photo, but trust me this quesadilla burger was awe-inspiring.

The turnip fries still didn’t have the fry texture I was shooting for. Crunchy? No. Tasty? Yes. I actually preferred the smaller skinny fries we made last time over these. Could be because the larger fries reminded me of the rooty texture of you know what.

Dinner Stats: 298 calories, 23g carbs, 9g fat, 36g protein, 9g fiber

On to what you are all really here for: the confession.

About a week ago, I discovered what may be the most amazing cereal on planet earth. I have secretly been enjoying sporadic handfuls of this glorious cereal since then, yet I have not posted anything about my discovery on my blog!

Well here it is.

Barbara’s Peanut Butter Puffins.

Lets take a few moments and discuss why this cereal is utterly amazing.

First the limited list of ingredients (which is pretty darn good for a cereal).

Second, one serving is only 110 calories, 23 carbs, 2g fiber, 6g of sugar, 3g of protein!

Third, the taste is pure peanut butter amazingness.

Fourth, the puffins are shockingly large. For comparison purposes:

Go. Buy. Now.