Meats Be Gone

I have been expending so much energy in cooking and photographing but then falling asleep halfway through the blogging part. How sad for me, I am old. So on Thursday I made the alfredo from VeganYumYum. I didn’t like it at first, maybe it is saltier than it is supposed to be since I used regular tamari instead of low sodium soy sauce, but then it grew on me. I doubled the recipe and put it over about 20-24 oz of curly (I can never remember the proper pasta names) whole wheat pasta with some steamed broccoli and peas. It made about 10 servings. And I put less on my plate with other things, which I didn’t realize I was doing until Heather pointed it out. I guess it does help me shove less pasta in my pasta hole.

I told you Alice was a corn monster.

No one accomplished their goals yesterday, besides the puppy, who did indeed lose his manly bits.

Sweetie did not make the dinner because he had “a headache.” But I did make the dinner.

Black bean and Sweet Potato Flautas from Yellow Rose Recipes. I like Yellow Rose because it contains many things where once you make them you just know how to make them and you don’t have to go back to the recipe. We did not have any toothpicks to use to hold them together in the oven so I made them attractive silver aluminum foil belts which worked fine. I mean the tortillas still split while they baked but it didn’t matter.

Today:

We clean the whole house and trim the damn hedges.

I make fake grilled cheese from The Uncheese Cookbook.

Lenny obsesses about his incision.

So. Last April I decided I was on the verge of fulfilling my unfortunate genetic destiny (to be a sausage-shaped Polish lady) and I took all my measurements and bought the 30 Day Shred DVD. Then various things happened where my young-ish and beloved dog Oscar was diagnosed with cancer and had to be put to sleep a month later and I didn’t eat for a month and I lost a ton of weight and felt anxious and depressed and terrible. So now it is 6 months later and I am exactly the same as I was before all that. Except I have a crazy puppy and I am worried that everyone secretly has cancer.

weight 138 (was 141 in April)
boob-waist-hip 36-30-40 (exactly the same)

I was down to 127 for a while there but it is just depressing that the only way I can weigh that much is if I never eat real meals. It’s not about the weight per se but about how I can feel my abdominal meats bouncing around when I go down stairs. So October is my test month where I see if this “exercise” thing people always talk about actually does something or what.

I was supposed to do Day 2 of Couch to 5K today but I had to go to Wegmans and then it was dark out, so instead I did Level 2 of stupid Jillian’s 30 Day Shred. I wish Jillian wasn’t such a huge sell-out. First she was telling everyone to drink 3 glasses of milk per day and now she is selling some crazy fat-burning pills. Jillian, can you please sell-out to a slightly lesser extent? And tell Bob to shut up about Yoplait. I do like to watch The Biggest Loser (or the Largest Fatty-Fatter as I like to call it) but I do NOT like the General Mills product placement. Yoplait! Are you kidding me? Just have some damn pudding. Anyway also I lied before and there is imaginary jump-rope in Level 2 of 30DS UNLESS you quit 2/3 of the way through which I may or may not have done last time. Not this time though. Anyway.

I meant to photograph everything I ate today so I could see the egregiousness of it but I forgot. Instead here is a picture of some stew I made last week. It is still a timely picture because only today I threw out the leftover half of it that was rotting in the fridge.

Please note the quinoa. Anyway this is the African Peanut and Sweet Potato stew from The Vegan Table. I had a minor crisis about this due to goddamn YAMS. I always think of a sweet potato as the orange ones but I always thought that was technically wrong and that the orange ones are yams and the light yellow ones (which I had never had before) are sweet potatoes. I fully intended to buy the orange ones but then I had a failure of confidence in the tubers section of the supermarket and I bought the ones which were labeled sweet potatoes, which are these yellow ones. Then I read about it and apparently everything here is a sweet potato and if you want a yam you have to leave the country or read Things Fall Apart. All I remember about that book is that there were a ton of yams. Thanks, high school education. But I digress. The yellow ones are ok but I like the orange ones better and those are what I would use next time. Also you may want to halve the recipe if your boyfriend is a miserable slacker in the department of eating his allotment of leftover stew.

TOMORROW:

Day 2 of Couch to 5K, which I will have to do by myself, since the puppy is having his balls off tomorrow.

I will eat everything I normally eat and then realize that it adds up to 6000 calories and 0.01 grams of protein.

Sweetie will cook Black Bean and Sweet Potato (Orange Ones) Flautas from Yellow Rose Recipes and potentially melt zero spatulas.

Our upstairs neighbors are very industrious and have converted our overgrown shitheap of a backyard into a lovely garden oasis (I see a trend here). I have only helped to garden a few times, and they are still very nice about sharing their harvests (although that also might be related to the astonishing amount of water they use, which comes from a faucet that we pay for, and we recently pointed this out to them). Anyway, a few weeks ago they gave us a big bag of goodness. I am curious to see if their garden keeps thriving now that they have a one month old baby.

They gave us lots of tomatoes, and my favorite recipe with tomatoes is Tomato Basil Cream Pasta from VeganYumYum. I used whole wheat spaghetti and should have used a little more since there was so much sauce. I used the graden basil as well, and then made a salad with mostly bagged Trader Joe’s lettuce and more garden sorrel. Sorrel is strange, tasty but really tangy. And corn, since Alice is a corn monster. They are growing corn outside, but something is not going right with it, it is like midget little 2 foot stalks that have not really grown in months. Weird since everything else they plant is growing so well.

I also made watermelon mojitos with mint from the garden. They would have tasted better if I was less lazy and looked up a recipe instead of putting in what I thought would make a good mojito.