Oatmeal for breakfast

Breakfast is easily to look forward to when it's so delicious.  We start our day with oatmeal filled with nuts, seeds, coconut, dried fruit, and honey .  I usually skip the dried fruit and honey for berries and cinnamon because I try to stick to fruits with a low glycemic index.  This breakfast starts the day right with lots of fiber, protein, and deliciousness.  Oatmeal doesn't have to be bland or boring or sweetened with sugar.

Camping Meals

My husband and I are avid hikers and love to be in the woods.  This summer we caught the camping bug and our little guy seems to have it too! He loves the woods too! No one should be surprised.

My husbands new favorite meal is highly portable and about as easy as it gets.  After learning that Trader Joes canned goods are bpa free, this meal has become a staple. It's chicken chili. Combine all this in a crockpot or for me a dutch oven with cumin, garlic, chili powder and oregano and cook on low for several hours until it is thick and the meat  shreds.  So good so easy. Eat it in the woods, even better.

You'll notice kale has been added, no meal is complete without a leafy green. And a salad.

Grilled pork chops with sweet potatos and green beans

Porkchops used to throw me.  I cook using a thermometer because food safety is paramount in our house and I am not that good at determining when things are done yet. So I was cooking pork to 165F. Don't do that. It's too much. Once I learned that 150F is perfectly fine, my porkchops became delicious instead of dried out.  I don't get too fancy with them: I usually pair them with rosemary.  Sometimes I use maple syrup with Dijon mustard if I am doing a roast loin but really rosemary is so good with pork, I stick to it.  Because grills are hot, I sliced some apple to be my porkchop's protector. I always have apples to spare and this makes an impressive plating too, who doesn't love a little warm apple and cinnamon?

The green beans get wrapped in aluminum foil with garlic & olive oil and just hang out on the cooler part of the grill. They take about 10 minutes to get super green and tender then take them off and wrap them back up.  The sweet potato is actually Japanese sweet potato and if you try it, you'll never go back.  I sprinkle coin slices with cinnamon and coconut oil then on the grill they go. Slice them thin for fast cooking but not too thin or you'll get fast burning.

This is a really easy meal and a standard at our house. The green beans get swapped out for whatever green leafy is in season and a salad always tags along.

Movie lover & hater

I rarely have mellow reactions to films. I like it, or I'm angry. A lousy movie can spoil an evening and spill over to the next day.  Do I think this is one of my more endearing qualities? No. Do I intend on changing? No.

 I love to take movies on fully and be immersed in the characters and story.  The price of that is occasional disappointment when faced with a poorly crafted film. Of which there are many. I will be reviewing new movies I see here and also blathering on about some of my favorites, but first I must tell you a little more about my feelings about movies.

I consider films the same way I think about dreams.  Like little windows into understanding masked with sometimes outlandish characters and settings that can be deconstructed into important personal meaning.  A movie should entertain while you are watching it but should later linger as you wonder how it relates to your life as you would a dream.  This extremely personal and perhaps self indulgent view of films has me locked in and always looking for more.  But most important to understand is that I rarely think of them as a project created by lots of people as a job for profit who sometimes don't give a fig for viewer enlightenment.  This is exactly why I failed to break into the film industry. There, I said it.

Salad is our buddy

Once upon a time I opened a bag of greens and put it on the table. That was our salad. Half the time hubby didn't eat it, sometimes he forgot and others who knows.  He is a stickler for good presentation of food.  Before you go condemning him for being too picky, like I used to, I'd like to point out many healthy eaters have this same quirk: it's a great habit to care about your food looking appetizing and making a meal a special occasion- that's how it's done all over the world.  Anyway, that bag just wasn't cutting it and had to evolve.  Now our salads are present at both lunch and dinner and add lots of variety to our meals.  At first the extra step was difficult to incorporate but now, I wouldn't dream of a meal without a salad.

Today's salad featured our fresh strawberries grown in our backyard and some pine nuts that looked irresistible at our local market.   Greens are arugula and red leaf along with cucumber and radish.  Dressing is our homemade balsamic vinaigrette that I never get tired of.

Fabulous Feet Friday

Of the under-appreciated appendages, feet must be right up there in the top five.  Momma's need their feet for running after little ones and in my case lots and lots of walking.  In the last couple of years anticipating motherhood and embracing my old-fogey married status, I gave up high heels.  But I did not give up a love of shoes.  Every Friday I will dedicate to those hard working feet of ours and the importance of taking good care of them.

Fajita Chicken with veggies

Fajita Chicken with mexican wild rice, refried black beans, veggies and avocado

We are off the gluten.  No flour tortillas for us.  Or bread or cookies or pasta or a hundred other things I do not miss.  That summer squash was straight from our garden but the refried beans were straight from a Trader Joe's can.  The chicken and other veggies were from the farmers market and the organic rice purchased in bulk at Whole Foods.  This was my first time seeing if I could get away with a tex/mex flavored meal minus tortillas and cheese of any kind.  It can be done! I added cholula to my plate because I love a little kick and the color makes me happy too.