food

Food Prep & a special note.

Leave a comment Posted on by Snoskred

Coconut mango chicken in the pressure cooker, cooking?

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Check.

So far that is all I have achieved today. It was meant to be a big day of cooking but it turned into a huge day of sleeping in because I was so tired from the past 2 days and turning my body clock back around to regular day time – for 2 work shifts this weekend then I go back to vampire mode for 2 shifts from midnight to 6am!

I’m going to make the chocolate chili next, I’ll go and get some fresh meats for that, and see if I can hunt down the cauliflower and broccoli.

If I am going to do one big day of cooking per week, I may well need 2 slow cookers.

On a completely different note. Jo Abi wrote this post today about toilet roll holders. I can understand immediately the problem and it is a problem we once had in a couple of the rental houses we lived in because when you move in you take what is there. Some of these things are more complicated to work than flying the space shuttle, and they train 6 months to do that.

Then we moved into a rental house where they had one like this –

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No more hassles! No more thoughts of “it is easier to just let this sit here on top of the toilet roll holder than to try and put the toilet roll *on* the toilet roll holder, so I’ll just put it here”. No more arguments “the roll ran out when you were sitting there so it is your turn!”

And so we never run out of t.roll to put on the holder –

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While writing this, I thought I would show you my stash of paper products – t.roll and p.towel.

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I have to say it is the most enormous mind relief to buy these products in bulk. There is nothing I hate more than running out of t.roll or p.towel especially as you will usually run out of it in the middle of the night. And not to have to lug this stuff constantly back from the supermarket – one trip, one lug, lasts 6 months or more for us. :)

Costco, food, paleo, prep for going paleo

Trying Something New

1 Comment Posted on by Snoskred

So. The time has arrived for me to stop Lite N Easy and try something that might be more suited to my body chemistry..

I have found the excessive amount of breads and starches on this diet to cause a lot of bloating and gas. I began to think maybe I have a gluten problem and grains were not my friend but now I am 99% sure I have a thyroid problem.

One big hint that it might be thyroid – the last blood test a couple of years ago showed my TSH levels to be on the low side and my doctor and I talked about it then and decided to wait and see. This time I’ll be asking for the medicine to fix it. I have a lot of the symptoms seen here, too.

I have a doctors appointment this week to organise the blood test and make certain of that. In the meantime I am going to start making some huge changes eating wise.

I have been reading about the Paleo diet for a long time, and have always wanted to try it but the truth is, it takes a lot of organisation and effort to be able to eat that way full time and with my working hours.. it wasn’t the right time to have a go at it. So I am making up a slightly modified version of the Paleo diet for myself. I might not be quite as strict with the Dairy to begin with, though I am pretty sure I can cut it out of the meals I am a cheese addict and I need one small allowance on sugar.

I’ve ordered a bunch of coconut oil and other coconutty items which should arrive hopefully Wednesday. I have been cooking with coconut oil since mid last year (while I was on the L&E, I was cooking with it for the other half) and I prefer it to the other oils.

The one thing in that package which will be vital to making this change to begin with is coconut sugar. Yes there is not supposed to be any sugar on the Paleo diet but my one vice is coffee and I believe I can do without sugar everywhere else but in my daily double shot latte. I have been cutting that back as time goes by and I am down from two sugars back to just one.

Now that the silly season is over, I’ve cut back my hours a little and have made a couple of investments into items necessary for making this change, and will be making some more investments this week.

The biggest time killer is food preparation with this diet. I don’t have time every day to be endlessly cutting and chopping, etc. But I do have 2-3 days off each week, so if I can get organised on those days and have everything ready to go for the following week, that would work. Inspired by Melissa Joulwan over at The Clothes Make The Girl – see her Paleo 101 for everything you need to know about Paleo, I have a plan for my days off this week.

The slow cooker arrived today, the deep freeze should be here tomorrow, containers for food storage will be my task on Wednesday, Thursday will be a Costco and fruit and veg visit, Friday will be a huge cook and food prep day, with a slow cooker meal done each day after that to get some variety of items in the freezer ready for when I arrive home from work as well as fridge ready meals to cook.

I have a text file chock full of recipes I am eager to try which I have collected from a number of Paleo websites over the past few months. Quite a few of them are slow cooker recipes. I have never used a slow cooker before and I bought a combo slow cooker/pressure cooker, just to make life even more challenging lol. :)

On the one hand I am kinda grr this is a lot of work I am giving myself and on the other hand I am pretty excited about making this change.

I will of course, relentlessly blog about it all. :) So you are joining me on this journey, yays!

I have learned a lot from my time on Lite N Easy but right now, today, I am the exact same weight as I was when I started with it. Though my weight has gone up and down during my time on L&E, it generally has stayed within 2kg of my current weight. I do not think this is the fault of Lite N Easy at all – I know people who are on it and losing significant amounts of weight.

I blame my faulty thyroid and low metabolism.

And realistically, I have to blame those things, because when you are on a 1200 calorie diet, exercising 5x a week for 30 minutes + and seeing no weight loss.. and then you step up the exercise, and still nothing? Something else is going on here.

food, paleo

Enough Healthy Food!

Leave a comment Posted on by Snoskred

How about something completely awesome yet very bad?

Inspired by Sydney Shop Girl who posted about finding the Ghirardelli Chocolate Brownie Mix at Costco, I made sure to pick up a box the last time I was there – which hilariously was the day before starting Lite N Easy a few weeks ago..

And what a box it is. Weighing in at a mammoth 3.4kg, it contains 6 premix brownie mixes.

I made two packets – one for my work, one for the Other Half’s work. I substituted the vegetable oil for coconut oil. I am a big fan of the coconut oil and will try to get it into any recipe where possible.

I don’t have a picture of the finished product – these must be baked for 45 minutes and by then I completely forgot to take a photo. By the time I thought of it today at work, they were *all* gone. I got emails about these brownies and people were dropping by my desk to ask me all kinds of questions about the recipe, so they must have been pretty darn awesome.

Me, I tried a tiny piece when they got taken out of the oven last night and they were still warm. Very tasty! Sorry I have lost the last Costco receipt so no idea on how much the box cost me – I know it seemed very cheap for the size of box. :)

Even though I did not buy a lot of food at our last costco visit we still spent $400 there. I did get some Christmas pressies for the nephews and nieces, though.

food, recipes

Mineral Water With Orange

Leave a comment Posted on by Snoskred

I’ve been nowhere near any kind of regular soft drink in over a year now. It may even be longer than that, I can’t be sure.

I made the switch to mineral water. This was not an overnight love or even like. It took effort and determination on my part to learn to like it. Now, when I rarely end up with a soft drink as a surprise, it is far too sweet for me and I can’t drink it.

One of the things that helped me to learn to like it was adding fresh fruit to it. I often added slices of lemon or lime but then one day I added strawberries and that soon became my favourite. Then I tried slicing up an orange the way I like to slice them up – this is also one of my favourites. I put all the orange slices into a cup and then add mineral water.

So how do I like to cut up an orange?

Cut the top and bottom off the orange. This will make it so you can easily sit the orange on the chopping board, ready for the choppery!

Start trimming the peel off the orange. This is a delicate process because you want to keep as much of the orange as possible.

Continue trimming off the peel and pith. Keep going until you have done the whole orange. Then flip the orange over, you will likely have left some extra pith/peel on the bottom. Trim off any extra pith/peel

Halve the orange, being careful to cut in between the sections.

Quarter, and trim out the central column. You can then put the orange pieces into your mineral water – I like to make them a little smaller so I can fish them out in bite size pieces with a fork.

This way you get a serve of fruit with your drink.

orange

It is awesome, it tastes fantastic. I highly recommend it. Great summer drink!

food, recipes, yay

UCK!

Leave a comment Posted on by Snoskred

While out picking up chicken treats this afternoon I stopped to get some human food as well. There was yogurt on special, 2 for $3 at Coles and one of the flavours was caramel tart or something like that, so I thought I would give it a try..

YUCK YUCK YUCK.

I tasted two spoonfuls and threw it out. It was absolutely awful.

Turns out this yogurt was fat free and sugar free – they used artificial sweetener in there.

MY GOD WHY WOULD ANYONE DO THIS TO THEMSELVES?

I am not even going to bother trying the second one. I am still trying to get the taste of the first one out of my mouth.

I’ll stick to ones that use real sugar thanks. And nothing fat free. I like fat. The worst thing that happened to this world was all this fat free nonsense. IMHO, of course. :)

food

Easter Is CANCEL!

Leave a comment Posted on by Snoskred

Since January, my every day breakfast has been Hot X Buns. I am not a good breakfaster, I will skip it unless I have something I enjoy eating handy and easy to make. I love a Hot X Bun, and I don’t mind making them myself but I love it when the other half makes them for me which he is happy to do while the coffee is being made..

After Easter was over, I went to Coles, Aldi, Woolworths and IGA looking for Hot X Buns. In every store, I saw people just like me, wandering aimlessly around looking for the buns and not finding them. I saw people sadly exploring the raisin toast option with disgruntled looks on their faces. I saw one woman considering English Muffins. I saw a man looking sadly at the crumpets, dreaming of what could have been.

I ended up at Bakers Delight, paying $13 for 12 hot x buns, knowing that I have had the buns from there before and not liked them very much and they don’t last very long either. I ate those, thinking Easter was over and these were the last Hot X Buns on the planet.

Then I went to the *second* Woolworths, because we have two, lucky us! And it was HAPPY DANCE because they had Hot X Buns there on the shelf. I thought this may have been an accident, or perhaps they had cooked too many and still had some left from Easter. I bought every packet I saw which at the time was sadly only 3. Would these be the last Hot X Buns for 2011?

Apparently not! I kept going back and they kept having them. I couldn’t believe my good luck. Could Easter last all year? Or was this a Woolworths going rogue, cooking buns when they were not supposed to because people wanted them and kept buying them? Or did the baker just like making them?

Whatever it was.. it seems that it is over for good now. *SOB* I have been back several times over the last week and they now have some kind of raisin bread where the buns used to be. And every time I go there, I see that I am not the only one mourning the loss of the buns.

Last night while sadly searching the shelves for buns, I found an enormous box of Croissants. I guess that will be the new Breakfast, at least until January next year. I am not kidding, this box was almost a metre long! It has 12 jumbo croissants in it.

I had one this morning. A hot x bun it is not. But it is a hot breakfast, and it meant I could go to work and do my 6 hour shift without keeling over from a lack of food and being tempted by the large range of chocolates and cookies on my Team Leaders desk. For fundraising, they are. Supposedly. When I have the Hot X Bun breakfast, I am able to withstand the temptation of Mint Aero bars and Caramello.

This time next week I will be welcoming my new Chicken friends to their new home. More on that as it comes to hand! The coop is nearly finished now, so they will have a lovely new home. I am a little sad for them, that they won’t be getting hot X bun treats like Frogdancer’s chickens got on Easter Sunday. I don’t think they will like a croissant..

Chickens, food

Bacon and Avocado Grills

10 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

1. Toast Bread.
1a. You can butter your bread, or use cream cheese. I do not like to do either, myself. Any of these options will work.
2. Place enough bacon to cover your bread under your grill – however you do it. Or, you can cook it in a frypan but that will take longer I suspect. I have an LG Solardom so I put it on the top shelf of the microwave for 5 minutes, turn it over, and do the other side for 4 mins. When you have done that, it will look like this.
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3. While the bacon grills, once you have toasted the bread, cover it in avocado. I like to slice mine and arrange it creatively on the bread. Some like to mush theirs up. Either way is fine. Mine look like this.
cado1
4. When the bacon is grilled, arrange it prettily on top of your avocado covered toast. Like this.
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5. Cover the bacon with a slice of cheese. I like the Aldi vintage sliced cheese for me, but for you feel free to use any cheese you like.
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6. Place grills back in the oven until the cheese is melted how you like it.
cado5
7. Eat!

food, recipes

It’s moments like these..

6 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

When you have a desperate craving for microwave popcorn and none in the house since you accidentally cooked the last packet a *tiny* bit too long yesterday causing smoke and possibly even fire that you begin to realise the benefits of being the opposite of Mother Hubbard.

Until this time last week I had two packets of microwave popcorn squirrelled away in my cupboard. In fact there is so much shiznit in my cupboards currently yet I can’t find an eatable snack because all I want is what I don’t have!  I have plenty of potato chips but I do not want them. They’re not hot, buttery, freshly popped popcorn..

food

Cereal Confessions..

9 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

This is NOT a sponsored post, but I feel the need to share the following information with you. It is possible that you may hate cereal as much as I always had until I tried this new cereal from Weight Watchers. Please note, I know nothing about Weight Watchers or their points system. I hated cereal all my life, I was never a breakfast person. I have only recently started eating it because it is supposed to be more healthy and I could do with a bit more fibre in my diet.

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I have been so surprised by this cereal. There is something so wrong about it. This cereal should be everything I hate. When I saw it on the shelf I thought yuck, I’m going to hate eating that. There were other cereals there, ones with lots of sugar and general badness. Even one with chocolate chips! But I chose the Weight Watchers fruit and fibre cereal even though I knew I probably wouldn’t like it based on the fibre content. I thought – it’s only one bowl a day, I can survive it. However, it’s brilliant, so I’m sharing cos that’s the kind of blogger I am.

cereal3

Normally on cereal I need at least one spoonful of sugar to make it palatable. This WW cereal, I don’t need to add anything except milk. The fruit that is in it makes it sweeter than normal cereals I’ve eaten. The first day I ate it, I did add sugar as I usually do and it made it way too sweet.

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All I can say is, they must have some absolute geniuses over at Weight Watchers if they can take a cereal which contains everything I should hate and turn it into something I absolutely love, that I look forward to eating in the morning – and have even eaten a couple of times INSTEAD of a bowl of potato chips while watching tv in the evenings. I’m not lying, truly! If you’re in Australia you should give this cereal a go. ;)

The fruit is soooo nice. I love it. I’m not a fan of dried fruit usually but when you add the milk to it I find it softens nicely. They say it contains 34% fruit. You can’t get a spoonful of this cereal without at least one piece of fruit on it so I believe they are right.

I needed my cereal this morning, because we spent all day moving stuff. I’m completely exhausted and only here to post this before I shower and collapse into bed. We did manage to get the pool table upstairs, so that was fantastic. I met a neighbour and their dog before we’d finished unpacking the first ute load. People are very friendly there. I’m looking forward to that. ;)

I also found out they have Tai Chi within a very short walk, so I might be signing up for that. ;) Half the art/dining box room is now empty, we got a lot done today and now we can take it easy for the rest of the week. I have packed the entire kitchen, only leaving out a few bowls for cereal eating. ;)

food, Snoskred hearts