The Abby/Betty Project is over, and I actually have become pretty good about cleaning up my mess. Please visit my new blog at fluffscakes.tumblr.com.
Thanks for reading!
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Monday, January 2, 2012
New Year's Weekend Cooking
We spent part of our New Year's weekend with my family back home. When we got back I started cooking! I made hoppin' John for New Year's luck (we had cole slaw for prosperity). I started to make a pound cake for dessert and realized we were out of vanilla, which ended up being a happy accident-- I subbed almond extract and dried cherries and made a wonderful cherry almond pound cake! Today I made TV dinners--Salisbury steak (Shane's TV dinner fave), carrot-potato mash, creamed spinach, and apple-cherry crisp. The idea and recipes were out of this month's issue of Martha Stewart Living. Enjoy the pictures!! :)
Thursday, December 29, 2011
starts tweeting!
Follow @abbybettyblog on Twitter! I have a lot of new ideas and I'm hoping to start blogging more often/regularly. Get excited! :D
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
fails to plan
I am back to not knowing exactly how to plan so we have enough healthy food for all of our meals for the week.
I started with meal -planning myself. This left me with way too much or too little food, leftovers that were too repetitive... With two people it is hard to cook four meals in a week. You will end up with way too many leftovers unless you do some major recipe-halving magic. If you cook two or three meals a week and try to eat leftovers, trust me, you will want something else by the time Thursday and Friday roll around.
I thought that http://www.thefresh20.com/ was the answer. We tried this for a while. This is a GREAT concept, but the recipes just aren't very tasty. After being burned several times-- buying all of the ingredients and making meals that were just too unappealing to eat--we ended up eating canned spaghetti sauce on pasta or going out for fast food more nights than I would have liked. I think for something like this to work it would have to be a lot more tailored to the preferences of the family (sounds a lot like meal-planning myself).
Lately I have been trying to get back to the gym. Until this week with a nasty cold, I have been pretty good about it, dutifully making the gym my first stop on the way home from work. This leaves me energized and feeling good about myself, but STARVING when I get home at 6 or7 p.m. and in no shape to whip up a home-cooked meal. We fell into our old rut of frozen entrees and eating out, so I tried http://www.myfitfoods.com/. This is a great crutch for weeks when you can't cook. It's pretty tasty, healthy food. It is reasonably priced ($60 bought us a week's worth of healthy dinners for way less than we would have paid eating out), but the food is a little too spicy and a little TOO healthy to be our everyday routine.
Here I am complaining, so let me use this four-step plan from this month's O Magazine:
1. Pushback: Planning myself week after week isn't working, and the easy ways out aren't tailored to our food preferences. They are too overly healthy for us to eat every day. I'm not interested in deprivation--we're not trying to lose weight, just be healthier and eat real food.
2. Possibilities: The most outrageously awesome possibility I can think of is having my own cooking classes (or maybe even a TV show!) for newlyweds and other newly grownups who need to learn to cook healthy everyday comfort food. It would be my full time job to plan out healthy meals, I would become awesome at it, and I would probably have a staff to cook my own recipes for me when I didn't feel like it ;).
3. Preferences: It seems like I prefer having the time to become more awesome at this. And I probably do. I think the secret is concentrating on the time that I WANT to spend cooking (and there is a lot of it) so we'll have something to eat when I DON'T want to cook. It could be a whole new project...
4. Pinpoints: These would be the little ways in which I could make the above happen. I can think of a couple:
a. spend time perfecting a few seasonal meal plans (3 each for winter, spring, summer, fall would cover a whole year!) that cater to our preferences. I could publish these here... maybe with some step-by-step instructions for basic techniques. The best way to learn to cook is to COOK! I have learned so much through Abby/Betty and this would be a good new project.
b. spend time when I do have time to cook making some easy, frozen, heat-uppable healthy meals for us. I like an idea from this month's issue of Martha Stewart Living (not yet available online that I can find) for making TV dinners to freeze--salisbury steak, mashed potatoes, spinach, berry crisp. This is exactly what I'm talking about when I say healthy comfort food. It's healthy enough (carrots, spinach) but comfort-foodie enough (because this girl grew up on meat and taters and I'll never feel satisfied by a diet of all steamed veggies and quinoa!!)
New project in the works for Abby?? Maybe...
I started with meal -planning myself. This left me with way too much or too little food, leftovers that were too repetitive... With two people it is hard to cook four meals in a week. You will end up with way too many leftovers unless you do some major recipe-halving magic. If you cook two or three meals a week and try to eat leftovers, trust me, you will want something else by the time Thursday and Friday roll around.
I thought that http://www.thefresh20.com/ was the answer. We tried this for a while. This is a GREAT concept, but the recipes just aren't very tasty. After being burned several times-- buying all of the ingredients and making meals that were just too unappealing to eat--we ended up eating canned spaghetti sauce on pasta or going out for fast food more nights than I would have liked. I think for something like this to work it would have to be a lot more tailored to the preferences of the family (sounds a lot like meal-planning myself).
Lately I have been trying to get back to the gym. Until this week with a nasty cold, I have been pretty good about it, dutifully making the gym my first stop on the way home from work. This leaves me energized and feeling good about myself, but STARVING when I get home at 6 or7 p.m. and in no shape to whip up a home-cooked meal. We fell into our old rut of frozen entrees and eating out, so I tried http://www.myfitfoods.com/. This is a great crutch for weeks when you can't cook. It's pretty tasty, healthy food. It is reasonably priced ($60 bought us a week's worth of healthy dinners for way less than we would have paid eating out), but the food is a little too spicy and a little TOO healthy to be our everyday routine.
Here I am complaining, so let me use this four-step plan from this month's O Magazine:
1. Pushback: Planning myself week after week isn't working, and the easy ways out aren't tailored to our food preferences. They are too overly healthy for us to eat every day. I'm not interested in deprivation--we're not trying to lose weight, just be healthier and eat real food.
2. Possibilities: The most outrageously awesome possibility I can think of is having my own cooking classes (or maybe even a TV show!) for newlyweds and other newly grownups who need to learn to cook healthy everyday comfort food. It would be my full time job to plan out healthy meals, I would become awesome at it, and I would probably have a staff to cook my own recipes for me when I didn't feel like it ;).
3. Preferences: It seems like I prefer having the time to become more awesome at this. And I probably do. I think the secret is concentrating on the time that I WANT to spend cooking (and there is a lot of it) so we'll have something to eat when I DON'T want to cook. It could be a whole new project...
4. Pinpoints: These would be the little ways in which I could make the above happen. I can think of a couple:
a. spend time perfecting a few seasonal meal plans (3 each for winter, spring, summer, fall would cover a whole year!) that cater to our preferences. I could publish these here... maybe with some step-by-step instructions for basic techniques. The best way to learn to cook is to COOK! I have learned so much through Abby/Betty and this would be a good new project.
b. spend time when I do have time to cook making some easy, frozen, heat-uppable healthy meals for us. I like an idea from this month's issue of Martha Stewart Living (not yet available online that I can find) for making TV dinners to freeze--salisbury steak, mashed potatoes, spinach, berry crisp. This is exactly what I'm talking about when I say healthy comfort food. It's healthy enough (carrots, spinach) but comfort-foodie enough (because this girl grew up on meat and taters and I'll never feel satisfied by a diet of all steamed veggies and quinoa!!)
New project in the works for Abby?? Maybe...
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
took lemons and made lemon squares
On my pre-Christmas trip to H-E-B, life gave me lemons. I needed one lemon for the lemon sage chicken, but I had to buy a bag of about 15 organic lemons because that was the only thing they had left. Mom gave me a Martha Stewart cookies calendar that came with 12 cookie recipes for Christmas--one of which was for lemon squares, so I made them tonight. I have a killer cold and can't smell at all, so I also pretty much can't taste... I'm pretty sure these are some REALLY lemony lemon squares, but I'll get back to you when I have a fully functioning upper respiratory tract :).
Monday, December 26, 2011
de-Christmases the apartment
I pretty much hate Christmas. I guess I would rather embrace the little things than be forced into mandatory fun, pressure to cook and decorate, and present-purchasing. I do enjoy the family time involved though, and had a great Christmas this year. Still, I was anxious to de-Christmas the apartment ASAP.
I took apart our pretty flower arrangement, took out all the red flowers and Christmas tree boughs, and re-assembled it. I took down all the Christmas decorations and put up some pretty new non-holiday ones. All this was fueled by a homemade whole-wheat bagel that I baked yesterday...
Also included in pictures today-- The slice I acquired when prepping lemon slices for my lemon-sage chicken yesterday. Woops!!
Sunday, December 25, 2011
our first Christmas dinner
Lemon sage chicken, sweet potatoes, onion rings, and table settings from Crate and Barrel and Williams-Sonoma :).
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