It was brought to my attention that I wasn't eating enough calories or protein. I thought that because I wasn't working I didn't need to eat as much; so I skipped breakfast and jumped to lunch. I rarely had snacks and some days I had little to no protein in my diet. No wonder I was hungry all the time. Now I eat three meals a day plus snacks, and try to include a protein with each. It's easy to have an egg at breakfast and some kind of meat with dinner, but lunch? The leader at Weight Watchers (I call her "The Golden Girl" because she's been a member of Weight Watchers longer than I've been alive!) suggested that I poach chicken breasts and use them throughout the week with lunch. That's what I did. The first time I even made a reduction sauce out of the broth. However, I poached chicken for two weeks straight until I couldn't stand it because it started to smell like feet. That's when I bought turkey breast slices and decided to cook it on the stove in my saucepan with some hot salsa I had in the cupboard. By accident half the jar emptied into the pan but it still worked out fine. It was much better than the feet smelling poached chicken. Here's a picture of it:
Turkey Breast Slices with Hot Salsa
I grew up on mostly potatoes, peas, carrots, and turnips. As an adult I tend to stay away from them. I really like asparagus and eggplant. So I went out and bought some. I quickly looked up on the Internet simple ways to prepare them. The asparagus I roasted in the oven with a bit of drizzled oil and chili powder, and the eggplant was grilled in the oven and later made into a stir fry with shrimp. Today, in fact, I blanched some asparagus for a stir fry I plan to make with catfish. I'll keep you posted on that one. If this turns out to be my last post you'll know the fish went deadly wrong. The picture below is my roasted asparagus with brown rice (my first time making rice, by the way) and meatloaf. I didn't make the meatloaf. It was good!
Brown Rice & Roasted Asparagus
I'm a big fan of sauces and I love Asian food. I bought some sauces to use when cooking such as sweet chili, honey hoisin, sweet and sour, and Thai peanut sauce. The photo below is my shrimp and eggplant stir fry with sweet chili sauce on brown rice. It was delicious.
Shrimp & Eggplant Sweet Chili Stir-fry on Brown Rice
The more I cook the more adventurous I'm becoming. I love chili and wanted to make a healthy version of one. Again, I quickly looked up a simple recipe on the Internet and whipped it up. I changed a few ingredients to make it more suitable to me but it was another success. I have to admit I made an impressive batch of chili for my first time.
Chili with Ground Chicken
I had some leftover ground chicken from the chili so I decided to use it with pasta. Weight Watchers encourages people to use whole grains so I bought whole wheat macaroni. To be honest, I don't really find much of a difference, unlike brown rice which is like the dried up cardboard version of white rice. I didn't mean to make this much pasta. I only used half a cup but it grew into a plate full. I didn't make my own pasta sauce. It's the cheapest tomato sauce the grocery store offered. I fried up the ground chicken and heated the sauce in the same pan with the meat, added a bit of cayenne pepper for some spicy heat and that was it. It might not look it but it too was quite good.
Whole Wheat Macaroni with Ground Chicken & Tomato Sauce
Tonight I'm having something quite different. I'm going to make that catfish and asparagus stir fry with hoisin and peanut sauce, and try it on some macaroni. The catfish was on sale because it was dated best before today but I'm sure I'll be fine, right? Keep your fingers crossed for me. Time to cook!
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