Food & Drinks

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Making Chocolate From Scratch!

2 Comments Posted on January 19, 2013May 31, 2015 by Snoskred

This is incredibly simple and once you try this you will likely not want “regular” chocolate again. The recipe I used can be found here –

Chocolate (Homemade)
3 tablespoons cocoa powder
1/4 cup virgin coconut oil
1 tablespoons sweetener of your choice (I used 3tsp Coconut Sugar)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
pinch of salt
(I added cinnamon)

I made one small change to the method – I added all the dry ingredients into a mug plus the vanilla extract and added hot water to dissolve them. This was mainly because of the coconut sugar which is quite granular when dry. On this plate the coconut sugar is directly next to the vanilla essence in the teaspoon measurer.

Then – Place all of your ingredients in a bowl with the coconut oil and whisk well until combined.

It’ll look weird because the chocolate separates from the coconut oil until you whisk it enough.

You’ll know it is ready when you can’t see any coconut oil and it is all amalgamated into an awesome liquid..

It is magic whisk time, peoples!

I ladled them into small plastic containers so I can have some chocolate snacks to take to work. Then put them in the fridge – or freezer if you want to eat it soonish. Once the coconut oil hardens, it is ready to eat.

The levels of awesomeness cannot be described. :)

UPDATE –

I tried a new recipe for chocolate which I found here – Good Girl Gone Green – this recipe turned out great and will be the one I am using in the future.

Chocolate
1 cup of coconut oil, melted
1 cup of cacao powder
1/2 cup of maple syrup
1 Tbsp of vanilla flavor

It works out a lot more solid than the previous recipe.

Here is a link to some other chocolate recipes which might be worth trying. 8 Vegan Chocolate Recipes.

food, Paleo Recipes, recipes

Sweet Potato Fries

1 Comment Posted on January 15, 2013May 31, 2015 by Snoskred

I cannot believe how easy this was to make, and how awesome it was to eat! Where have these sweet potato fries been all my life?

Oh, I know where. The regular white potato has overshadowed all other forms of potato. Now, I know better..

All I did was cut up some sweet potato, coat them in extra virgin olive oil, then used the salt and pepper shaker on them. Baked for 20 mins, flipped over with the tongs, baked for another 15. Done!

Update on all things Paleo – Saturday was my first day of eating paleo – or a slightly modified version of it. There has been some dairy in the form of yoghurt. I have a huge tub of it to finish off, and I have been eating it for breakfast with fruit.

The main thing I am worried about right now is cutting out added sugar. If there is sugar on the ingredients list, I’m not eating it. And there is sugar on a lot of ingredient lists, found in unexpected places. Like tinned beetroot, tinned tomatoes, vegetable chips – which would otherwise be a perfect thing for me as they have a sweet potato flavour. And stock! Chicken, beef, vege.

I have only found one brand which is sugar free in the health food section of Coles. Please carefully note, it is NOT with the other stocks, but with all the gluten free super healthy foods area. Why make things logical when you can make people wander the supermarket like ghosts unable to leave the planet earth until they find the one thing they are looking for in all these different sections?

So anyone searching the internet as I did for “where can I find sugar free chicken stock in Australia” will hopefully find their way here and know which packet to look out for.

There is one teaspoon of coconut sugar in my daily coffee. That is all. I will eventually cut that out as well.

The second concern is avoiding grains. I have always been somewhat meh about bread – I can buy it and eat a shedload of it as a surprise, or I can buy it and forget to eat it. But I do love my Hot X Buns. I had a packet of them last week as a kind of goodbye to grains.

I am hesitant to say this now because who knows, there could be dark days ahead. I was concerned there would be side effects of cutting out the sugar. As it stands right now, I feel ok. Possibly better than ok. I’m not craving sugary foods nor am I craving foods in general. I’m less hungry than I have been for a long time. Partly that is thanks to the lite n easy teaching me to eat less more often, partly that would be because of all the proteins.

Basically the eating looks like this right now –

Breakfast – plain sugar free yoghurt with fruit

snack – almonds and cashews (bought loads of these from Costco in bulk)

lunch – chicken in coconut cream sauce (recipe to come as a surprise eventually, I made this one up myself and I made a lot of it yesterday)

snack – olives stuffed with almonds or marinated olives

dinner – another chicken in coconut cream sauce

snack – an apple or an avocado

It seems boring but it turns out it is not. I can’t believe how much flavour everything seems to have now. I had an apple today and it was the sweetest thing I have eaten in centuries. It was like an appley can of coke. Is this what happens when you cut out the fake sugar sweetness?

food, paleo, Paleo Recipes, recipes

Coconut Mango Chicken

2 Comments Posted on January 11, 2013May 31, 2015 by Snoskred

So easy, so awesome. Recipe here.

I didn’t have any chipotle and I am not the greatest fan of hot chilli in any case, so put in some Paprika instead. It didn’t really need much in the way of spices – the mango reduced into this awesome almost buttery sauce. There were still chunks of mango which were so soft and incredible..

More than likely I overcooked it. It will take some getting used to, these insane tiny cooking times with the pressure cooker. It was trying to tell me it needed to cook for 4 minutes or some such nonsense. I took the safer way out and cooked it for 30. I doubled the recipe as I had plenty of chicken however it made a lot of mango coconut juice left over. Probably should have used 1 can of coconut milk and one of coconut cream to thicken it.

food, paleo, Paleo Recipes, recipes

Food Prep & a special note.

Leave a comment Posted on January 11, 2013May 31, 2015 by Snoskred

Coconut mango chicken in the pressure cooker, cooking?

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 –

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 –

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

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

Long day..

Leave a comment Posted on January 10, 2013May 31, 2015 by Snoskred

What the?

No, I’m sorry, we need the fuel guzzling turbo section. WHERE IS THE SPECIAL CARPARKS FOR THAT? ;)

We visited both Ikea and Costco. Found perfect sized wire baskets at Ikea for the deep freeze (so you don’t have to be an archaeologist to find stuff) as well as a bunch of great candles on sale..

Then off to Costco, where we spent about 3 hours. And $849. On mostly fresh food as well as a lot of nuts in bulk – without added sugar which is relatively rare, for Costco at least.. We did pick up some frozen stuff as well. Unfortunately I did not get much meat. I think I’ll try to source that locally.

I have to find cauliflower and broccoli tomorrow as they did not have much in the way of that. If I go to Aldi super early I might manage to find some decently priced. With all the tourists down here at the moment it goes very quick.

Probably you will ask why go all that way to buy fruit and veg – the fruit and veg available here is not good and it is costly. The apples at Costco are twice the size of the ones sold here. In the trolley below the capsicums you see are 6x 3 different colors for $5.99 – you would pay $5.99 for one orange one here. You can get green ones cheap sometimes. The massive thing of 1kg baby spinach for $9.99 – you’d probably get 200g for that here unless you lucked out and found it at Aldi.

Here are some trolley shots. Yes, we had two trolleys in the end. How it all fit into the one originally I have no idea.

I’d like to have taken some more here it is at home shots, but I came home with a shocking headache so I’ve had to invoke the Forte. Panadeine Forte, that is. I did manage one.

Going to catch some serious zz’s before the big cooking day tomorrow.

Costco, IKEA, prep for going paleo, shopping

And It Begins

1 Comment Posted on January 9, 2013May 31, 2015 by Snoskred

There are some jobs that I have been wanting to do for over a year. One of them was to sort out the shoes. Why would I do this in preparation for kitchen jobs you ask? Well the kitchen is like one huge open plan area and in one corner of that we had shoe racks – it was right near the entry way and it seemed like a logical place for them to go but it never worked in practice. All shoes have now been moved to this new home.

Plus some shoes have been put aside for donation and some for throwing out. Decluttering is always a happy feeling for me..

The scarf storage has been on the door of the new “shoe room” for a while. I’ve put the jewellery cabinet and storer into the same room as well. Kinda like a mini dressing room. Now I just have to get all the jewellery in the one place – I can think of 7 different locations where you can find jewellery of mine right now – on top of the soda stream being the most bizarre one. :)

The plastic containers have been a nightmare I never seemed to wake up from, and I was over it. OVER IT. But now, it is sorted – using a bookshelf which was no longer needed for storage of the tupperware type containers, and all the plastic storage containers I bought today for use with the new plan of things.

Here is our new pressure & slow cooker! Shiny, no? Well kinda no, it was the floor model so it is a little dusty. Now I just need to learn everything there is to know about slow cooking. As in how it works, etc. I have never done this before.

We bought a meat slicer. Yays! I am sick of spending excessive amounts of money on sliced chicken, turkey and ham. We have a foodsaver already.

I also got this rocket blender. I have wanted one of these things for a while now and I think a strawberry/banana coconut milk smoothie might work for the mornings as a breakfast.

Of course with the new deep freeze, I can freeze fruit like there is no tomorrow. Bananas tended to sit and get ignored until they went bad and got thrown out in the past. When I find good strawberries I like to buy a lot of them, wash them off and store them. Now I can just put them in the freezer.

I bought a whole watermelon today half of which I have frozen for the chooks in case we get any more of those super hot days. I’ve cut up a bunch of apples to freeze for them. I had frozen zucchini prepared for them on Tuesday which went into their water as ice cubes, they loved it enormously.

Speaking of Tuesday, which was a catastrophic fire risk day here.. this SMS came to me as a surprise, twice. Plus we got an electronic recorded message to the home phone.

I was still up when the sun rose on Tuesday so I went out and washed out the chickens water bowls and ran the sprinkler in their enclosure for a while – the water helps keep the sand cool and helps with their dust bathing themselves down to a cooler level of earth. It was already 31 degrees on my weather station before the sun even came up, but it was overcast so I went to bed thinking everything would be less hot than predicted.

Around 10am just as I was drifting off to sleep the safety switch tripped. I had to get up, get dressed, go out and turn it back on. Around 2, some telemarketer called me on my mobile which I had turned to ring from silent in case there was some kind of emergency. I was not making a great deal of sense on the phone seeing as I was asleep, lucky for the telemarketer else I would have gone off for being woken up. After I hung up, I woke up and went out to check on the chooks – the weather station said 44 degrees C. Hot time!

The girls were doing ok, chilling out in the shade under their coop, dustbathing happily. I put some more frozen veg in their water and went back to bed. Absolutely terrible sleep and then I had to go to work earlier than I had been used to – 5pm instead of 6. I nearly did not make it.

Tonight I am hoping to head back to bed at a more regular time having got up about 2 today and then doing a hard day of chores. I tried to do this last night – went to bed at 2, tossed and turned till 6, said stuff it, I’ll go watch another Dexter ep until I am tired, which turned into 2 eps.

Tomorrow it is off to Sydney for an Ikea & Costco trip. We’re heading up a little later than usual in the hope of missing all the peak hour traffic we usually hit on the way home – it is daylight until late now and Costco is open till 8:30pm. Will update you urgently! :)

cooking, country life, get organised, health, Home, prep for going paleo

Trying Something New

1 Comment Posted on January 8, 2013May 31, 2015 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

Zucchini Update

Leave a comment Posted on December 13, 2012May 31, 2015 by Snoskred

Sorry have been a bit busy this week, will have some other updates soon..

But for now, here is an update on my Zucchini! They are enormous!

Little kitty checking them out – they are nearly as big as she is, and she is pretty rotund lol.

The patch is looking a little ratty now but there are plenty more enormous friends growing in there.

Made a Zucchini soup with these two, plenty of herbs and a few potatoes.

garden, recipes

Summer Menu – New Items Week 3 – Lite N Easy

3 Comments Posted on December 5, 2012May 31, 2015 by Snoskred

A couple of interesting new things this week..

BLT Burger (Bacon,Baby Leaf Salad and Mayonnaise on a Ciabatta Bread Roll)

This was lovely. I always enjoy the bacon it is high quality with little or no fat attached.

Salt N Pepper Chicken.

This was not what I was expecting however.. epic win thanks to the water chestnuts. I do not think this was breast chicken but the sauce was pretty tasty.

I just wish they would switch out the white rice for something more interesting – like the gorgeous fried rice in the Sweet N Sour chicken, or the rice with veg in the Chicken Tikka Masala, or maybe brown rice, or a wild rice. Would order this again.

Beef Rissoles with Walnut & Apple Coleslaw

Stunning. STUNNING! I was stunned. I had to sit there and meditate on the awesomeness of this for the next 2 hours. The coleslaw was great. There was baby spinach.

The beef is excellent quality, very little fat or gristle in there if any at all. And it is sooo tasty. I don’t eat much in the way of red meat but if I could have this for every meal, forever, I would. Loved it. And this makes me think I will try more of the red meat options in the future.

Roast Chicken

I have a sad about this. :( The star of this meal should be the chicken and it was not particularly awesome. I am not sure what part of the chicken it was but I don’t know where I would find it on your usual roast chicken. There was some dark meat, no bones at all. It was quite odd.

The peas and potatoes and gravy were quite awesome. The cheesy cauliflower was also quite friendly. Not sure about the stuffing, never have been a great fan of that. But you know something, if Lite N Easy wanted to make a peas, roast potatoes, pumpkin and gravy dinner, I would put my hand up to order it regularly.

Thai Green Chicken Curry

This was very tasty. Not something I would usually eat though I have tried the Lean Cuisine Thai curries before.

Other Updates.

I am giving up completely on the scales.

I know for a fact I am losing centimetres and inches in various places. I can see my body shape changing. Clothes are fitting better – and some of the smaller underwear I bought in the US last year but then had to put away because it did not fit very well are back in the regular underwear rotation. My trusty Slazenger shorts which have been with me through fat and thinner are telling me we are headed back to thinner.

And yet the scales refuse to budge one iota. The new scales I bought to replace the potentially faulty scales are extremely inaccurate. If I stand half a centimetre forward, I get a different reading to the reading I got half a centimetre back. If I lean forward to look down, the needle moves upward to a higher weight!

But on the other hand, I think I might need to double check on the status of my thyroid just to make sure nothing is wrong. On the other hand to that, do I really want to get a blood test, probably not.

I’m making an effort to get to the gym as many days as possible this week because I have gone back to sleeping not as well as I would like. I’m down to only one cup of coffee per day so I am not sure what is causing the insomnia.

exercise, lite n easy

The Awesome Lite N Easy Eggs Benedict

Leave a comment Posted on December 4, 2012May 31, 2015 by Snoskred

So awesome! Here is how it works. You will need to order the eggs benedict from Lite N Easy, of course. They will supply you with the Ciabatta Toast, spinach, egg, bacon, and hollandaise sauce with a lovely recipe card.

You will also need –

An egg poacher, spray on cooking oil.

Use the spray on cooking oil on your egg poacher thingy so it will easily fall out of the egg poacher thingy – note my awesome use of technical terms here! :)

Toast your ciabatta toast carefully without exploding the toaster or any other kitchen appliances. While toasting, put the bacon in the microwave for 1min20. Once ciabatta toast is ready, carefully layer on your spinach.

Now me, I like to put hollandaise under the bacon. It makes it less easy for the egg to slip off and land in your lap.

Lay your bacon on top of the hollandaise-y spinach.

You will have plenty of spinach left over so you might want to layer on some more on top of the bacon.

I could have put on several more layers, in fact.

Put your poached egg on top of the creation we have been creating.

Put some hollandaise on top of the egg.

Now you will want to be very careful. You may choose to change into items which do not get upset if they are dripped on. However if you are careful you may not drip any hollandaise or egg yolk. Just like how some people manage to eat a Hungry Jacks whopper without dripping tomato sauce and mayo everywhere.

This item you have spent some time creating will last mere nanoseconds, because it is so nommy and then you will also wish you were back on the 1500 calories because *you get two of them* instead of just one. And this makes me wonder, if you are on the 1800 calories, do you get three? I could eat three, but probably not in one sitting. Not these days anyway.

Believe me this eggs benedict is EPIC on several levels. The levels of epic awesomeness cannot be described sufficiently in just words and pictures. When this is on the menu, *must order it*.

lite n easy