Not-your-fast-food-burrito.

Have you ever had a craving for something that you know is absolutely horrible for you?

That's me and mexican food.  I have moments where all I want is a giant burrito, filled to bursting with deliciousness and a big serving of tortilla chips on the side.  So good, but so, so bad for you. 

While I could debate the merits of Moe's and Chipotle respectively, and probably get in an argument or two over which is better, I tend to appreciate the Chipotle style of burritos more than Moe's. From either restaurant, I do enjoy the "naked" versions, or the bowls that have everything you would put in a burrito, without the tortilla.

Except, there is not a Moe's in the town I'm living in now. Or a Chipotle.  So today when the burrito-train hit me full force, I was lost.  Until I regained my senses, and remembered that I can cook.  A quick trip to the store, and I had embarked upon my mission to make a healthy, low fat version of a burrito from Chipotle.  Given that my dad ate one in under 5 bites, and approvingly licked his fingers, I think I succeeded.

Here is the recipe (makes like, a million small burritos. And rice-beans-chicken-and-mushroom bowls. I made a lot of the filling to keep and use for quick lunches and such.):

- 4 cups rice, cooked (I added a splash of lemon juice and some cilantro, a la Chipotle)
- 1 can diced chicken, we get the big cans from Sam's Club, Member's Mark brand
- Salsa verde, amount to taste
-1 medium package of pre-sliced mushrooms
- 1 can pinto beans, drained
- Whole wheat tortillas
- low fat shredded cheese, mexican blend

1. Heat the shredded chicken in a pan with seasonings to taste (I used some chili pepper, cilantro, even some creole seasoning) and a bit of salsa verde.  When the chicken is warm, add mushrooms.  Cook until mushrooms are desired tenderness, and chicken is shredded and super tender.
2. Heat the pinto beans to desired temperature (I just nuked 'em.)
3. Layer the burritos!
    - Rice
    - beans
    - Chicken and mushrooms
    - cheese
    - a little more salsa, if desired.

I left out sour cream and guacamole because I'm always tempted to put WAY too much on.  These had a lot of flavor, but weren't too spicy, but easily adjustable if I want spicy later on.  One small one (I used the 'soft taco' size tortillas, and it created a decent size burrito) was enough to fill me up, and I resisted making a second because really, I knew that I could eat it, but I would be uncomfortably full later on.  I didn't even need chips with it, since there was all that fiber from the beans, mushrooms, and the tortilla, with the protein of the chicken.  I'm tempted to put the chicken and mushrooms on eggs for a breakfast tortilla tomorrow.

It's versatile, it's tasty, and it's healthy.  I'd say that one of these burritos clocks in at way under 500 calories, compared to the nearly/over 2,000 that one from Moe's or Chipotle does.  I am content, and my tummy is happily full of good noms.

Now I'm back to enjoying my day off, watching my lettuce pot garden (more on that in another post!) grow, and reading my library books.  I get to see R. tomorrow, so I'm very happy today.

-A

Family secrets.

So, there's this thing.  Called "Grandma jelly."

My entire childhood can be summed up in this phrase.  Grandma jelly.

In the backyard of my Grandma's house, there grows a gigantic fig tree. And every summer, the fig tree grows and grows, until it's so heavy with figs that we don't have to worry about fighting the squirrels, birds and bugs for the figs because we already have buckets and buckets of them.  It is from this tree that Grandma Jelly begins.

I don't know how my Grandma decided to make Grandma jelly, but I'm glad she did.  It's a mixture of fresh figs, mashed and mashed and mashed (we did it by hand, and she still does, because food processors are only good for certain things) and mixed with sugar and strawberry gelatin, cooked until perfect, then canned.  The result is this figgy-berry-chunky-seedy-spreadable-wonderful-concoction that was christened "Grandma jelly."

The tree hasn't been producing as much as it has in the past, which means that Grandam Jelly production has slackened somewhat.  Combined with the fact that she just doesn't have the demand that she used to, with the grandchildren almost all grown up and gone away, the stock of Grandma jelly has dwindled.  But she still makes it, fresh batches that leave the house with a lingering sweet fruit smell for a week afterwards, from the end of June to middle of July when the figs are at their ripest.

I love Grandma jelly. There isn't a single thing on this earth that it isn't good on.  Waffles, ice cream, PB&J sandwiches, hell, I've even used it as a sweet glaze on steak and chicken before.  It's amazingly versatile. I don't know what she does, or how exactly she makes it, but it's seriously one of my favorite things in this entire world.

R. has never had Grandma jelly.  But I managed to get a small jar from Grandma to give to him (how to tell she really likes him, yeah?).  It may come to him opened with a few spoonfuls taken out, but it will make it.  And he will enjoy Grandma jelly for the first time. I'm considering whether or not he likes it being a deciding factor in whether or not I can spend the rest of my life with him (I'm kidding! ... Maybe.).

My favorite story to tell of the power of Grandma jelly is this:
I had a supervisor at a store I worked at one summer who I really liked, J.  She was a tough broad who had a sweet side when she wanted to show you, and I really enjoyed working with her. One day we were bored, the store was empty, so we started talking about our shared passion for cooking.  Being summer, I shared that I was excited for the first batch of Grandma jelly to make it's appearance, and J. begged me, begged me to get her a jar.  Grandma relented and gave me a small jar for her, only because J. had just found out that she was pregnant for the first time, and my Grandma is a sucker for babies and their pregnant mommas.  J. rejoiced when I brought her the jar, and then two days later, she was on me like a drug addict begging for more -- she had used up the whole jar, on everything she could think of.  Waffles, ice cream, pancakes, bologna sandwiches (Hey, she was pregnant!), and she wanted, no, needed more.

Are there any foods from your childhood that are family staples like Grandma jelly? What are they?  How are they unique?

-A

Tea and poetry.

One of my greatest loves in life has been constant and true, never failing: Tea.

It may be pandering to a stereotype of Southerners by saying that I love sweet tea more than any other beverage, but it's true.  At least when the tea is brewed, not made from syrup in a soda fountain. Good tea. Not bad tea.

Is there really a difference between good tea and bad tea?  Isn't all tea packed with the antioxidants and flavanoids that make it such a health benefit?  Well, possibly, and I'm not a scientist to make any kind of solid comment on that front, and I'm feeling too lazy to do any research on the subject at present (I will probably end up doing some, though, just because not knowing something is one of my greatest irritations in life).  But I know that there is a definite taste difference that leads to the conclusion that a glass of sweet tea is Good tea, or Bad tea.  Just ask the Brits. They'll tell you.

I started out my life drinking sweet tea and sweetened hot tea at my grandma's house (any surprise there, folks?).  The hot tea was mainly because I could sneak a few extra scoops of sugar into the mug, and then be left with the grainy melty sweet stickiness at the bottom of the cup when I had finished the tea.  Sweet iced tea has always been one of my favorite things about Grandma's house, though.  Even though I know that she doesn't do anything special, doesn't buy anything other than the cheapest brand of tea and use regular sugar, somehow it just tastes better.  Maybe because it's made with love? (*wink*)

As I got older, I began to experience new kinds of tea. Flavored black teas, herbal teas, and green tea.  As a singer, I developed "magic tea" which is a herbal tea mixed with mint, honey, and a little bit of lemon that just plain made a sore throat feel better, and saved my voice on occasion.  I like green tea when I'm drinking hot tea, mostly because I've managed to convince myself that it's better for me, and I do enjoy green tea with lemon iced.  There is nothing that holds more meaning of cold weather happiness to me than a big mug of chai tea, inhaling the cinnamon and clove scent, luxuriating in the complex flavors of a good chai. 

I'm trying to cut back the caffeine in the evenings, since I do have to get up at a regular time these days.  I drink a lot of water at work (it's seriously hot outside in Florida, y'all.  Seriously. And humid. Water is my best friend), and I like to have a good herbal tea at night just to break up the routine of water, and it's something other than soda to give it flavor.

And there is no other past time in my life I enjoy more than curling up with a book and a mug of tea, even in hot weather.  Since I got two new books from the library today, I think that's what I'll do. 

What are you favorite beverages? Do they hold any meaning to you?

-A

Well, hi.

It's been a while.  Over a month, actually.

I didn't mean to take that long of a hiatus, but my life has been kind of moving along at a pace faster than I can keep up with, so I let the non-essential activities slide by the wayside in order to continue to be able to handle the important things.  You know, work, eating, paying bills, sleeping.  That kind of thing.

The move back home as officially been completed, and R. is safely off to his internship.  It's going to be a very long six months of only being able to see each other on occasion when our schedules line up (if it ever happens.  I'm crossing my fingers!), if the two months where he was back in California were any indication.  I miss him. He did, however, leave me the pancake mix and chocolate chips.  He did this while knowing full well how terrible I am at making them.  I'm going to take this as a sign that he'll be back for them.

Most days, I work.  Which means breakfast in the morning, a packed lunch of whatever I can grab while rushing in the morning, and dinner of some kind.  My job doesn't allow me the ability to snack at all, which means I've had to adjust my eating habits since snacking was one of the main ways I was able to keep hunger at bay, and continue to make smart eating choices.  That is, when the snacks were smart to begin with.  But now I've learned to adjust to three meals a day, not overloading one or the other, and keeping things healthy.  A sandwich for lunch, or leftovers, possibly some rice with chicken and salsa verde and a few Babybel cheese wheels melted in.  Breakfast is oatmeal mixed with greek yogurt for protein, and dinner is usually a protein and carb, and a vegetable if I can get my hands on it.  All well and good.

I admit that there are downfalls.  Like the fact that even though I know I get lunch, I never really know when I'm going to lunch -- so it could be earlier or later than I expected.  If it's earlier, I'm starving by the time I get off work, and stopping by Chick-fil-A or Great Wraps is a much more appealing option for dinner than coming home and wasting time cooking.  Take time to cook while hungry, or have instant gratification of waffle fries in mouth?  It's a difficult conundrum.  There are days when I eat late and I'm still starving.  I have managed to keep the worst of those at bay with an emergency Luna protein bar in my lunch box for desperate times, but there are only so many protein bars you can eat in your life before you hate them. Even tasty ones like Luna bars.

I haven't been very creative with cooking lately, so I don't have any good recipes to share with you.  But I promise that I will, very soon.  I'm working on writing up some of my old standbys that I usually just make from memory.  Some of them I don't think I ever wrote down, I just created.  It's about time I wrote those down.

Life is good, even if the future seems lonely right now.  I'll try not to get sappy on you guys, but I will say that I feel like Bonnie without her Clyde right now.

-A

P.S. R. managed to get my Grandma to allow him to cook in her kitchen.  She refused to sit down or "not help" the entire time, but it's still a pretty amazing feat.  It's things like this that make me love him!

Basics.

We all know that some skills in the kitchen take time to learn.  No one (except maybe, say, Emeril.  Or some other ridiculous chef) was born with the innate ability to julienne vegetables, perfectly sautee mushrooms, or anything else.  I know I wasn't, at least.  It's all a learning curve (something I've been struggling with, in and out of the kitchen.  Learning my way around a new job is always frustrating). 

One of the skills that seems so very basic but actually takes practice is making rice.

Yep, rice.

The white grains of cheap goodness.  Requires skill.

I'm not talking Minute Rice, where it's not really rice at all, and easily microwaved, and magically perfect.  I can do that.

What I'm talking about is making rice on the stovetop, the kind that comes in the bag and takes a good 20 minutes of simmering in order to get it right.

I've also failed at making rice more times than I can count.  But unlike other culinary failures of mine (ahem, pancakes, I'm lookin' at you!) I have successfully managed to conquer rice.

... Most days.

I find that my way of making rice works best when I have a pot that is almost too big for the batch, with high walls so that it won't be able to boil over that easily.  I also use a bit too much water, and if the rice seems really dry, I'll even rinse it before I throw it in.  It's a process that becomes unique to everyone.  I don't get it perfect every time, because different stoves, pots, etc. are all unique.  Like today, I made a big batch of rice in order to have something I can just nuke and pair with a protein for an easy dinner when I get home from work, and while the majority of the large batch was perfectly fine (I love my rice kind of sticky), there was the fact that some of it was stuck to the bottom of the pan.  Oh well.  At least it wasn't burned on, per se.  Just stuck.  It wasn't a non-stick pan, either, so it's not a huge loss.

Everything in life takes practice.  If I wasn't so dang frustrated with my previous failures at pancakes, I might practice more. But I practiced at rice because there were a few long stretches where rice made up the bulk of my food availability -- it was cheap, and easy to buy in bulk, and make ahead of time.  A lot of meals have centered around "What goes with rice that I haven't eaten six times this week already?"   It's a staple.  Pancakes aren't so much of a staple.  So at least I've conquered something important, right?

-A

A debate on food culture.

Earlier today, I indulged in an awesome meal: Shrimp and grits from a small resteraunt in town.  It was absolutely delicious.  There is a certain art to the food culture of the south, based in strong flavors, large chunks of vegetables, meat, a good strong sauce, and a solid starch to pair it with.  It's something that I've always loved about the way that Southern cooking is -- it's home.  The best kind is when you can tell that a person actually prepared the meal instead of cutting open a package and putting it in a pan to warm.

Ignore my foot, I was eating sitting down.

But my love of grits sparked a moment between R. and I -- he being a good California boy who swears that the California border is covered with checks to keep people from bringing in contraband grits.  Obviously, he's not a fan.  I believe his words to describe grits is that they are "just like undercooked oatmeal sans any flavor, necessitating smothering with butter and cheese. The butter and cheese are what people like."  (Personally, my favorite grits dish is simply cooked plain with a swirl of good maple syrup.) 

Shrimp and grits vary from place to place in the south, with the versions as wide ranging as the land mass you cover seeking out the variations.  I love seafood, but I admit to being a snob and not really willing to eat it unless I know it comes fresh.  Having grown up watching seafood walk off the boats and into resteraunts, it's difficult for me to accept frozen seafood that has been trucked in.  The shrimp I had tonight were HUGE, and being as I see shrimping boats heading out each morning as I go to work, I know they're fresh and local.  The vegetables were chunky, and there was even a gratuitous chunk of andouille sausage floating in the sauce.  Mixing the thick gravy with the cheesy grits made it perfect for eating with a spoon.

Someday, I'll get R. to understand.  Grits are an acquired taste, and are only really good when they're made from scratch, not instant.  It's the same thing with oatmeal -- if it comes out of a little paper package, it's not going to be good.  My favorite breakfast these days is to make a half cup of oatmeal, then mix it with a cup of greek yogurt for protein.  I love how creamy it makes the oatmeal, and I get a great dose of fiber and protein which keeps me full until my lunch break.  The same thing works with grits -- I've been known to mix my grits with scrambled eggs in the mornings and eat them all together.  I don't think cream of wheat really works the same way, since it tends to be a bit thinner, but I do love the creamier texture some days.  It works really well with sweet toppings like strawberry jam, or Grandma Jelly.

That reminds me to do a post later this week on Grandma Jelly.  I went over to my Grandma's house earlier today and found a big bucket of ripe juicy figs from the tree in her back yard ready to be made into jelly, and a few new jars already sitting on the counter.

I missed summers at home. I'm glad I get to spend some time here, with the food and family that I love.
-A

There is an art to eating well.

I know that I promised I wouldn't turn this blog into something that is all about my journey to eating well, and losing weight.  But I think this post needs to be done -- and simply because it flies in the face of everything the weight loss advertising executives want you to think.

You don't need a fancy program in order to control your eating habits and lost weight.

There. I said it. 

I have problems with eating.  It's a battle for me, my relationship with food.  I know that you have seen through pictures my large portion sizes (I promise, I didn't eat the whole half of the pizza that R. and I made, and I couldn't finish the salad since I had accidentally doused it with too much dressing.  My portion sizes haven't become that skewed), and I admit that I grew up eating way too much food.  If you didn't have a heaping plate at family functions, then there had to be something wrong with you. Was there something wrong with the food? Here, have something else to eat.  Catch my drift?

I was on Weight Watchers for the better part of two years, and I lost nearly 70 pounds on it.  One thing that I will say is that WW taught me how to take the food available to me and turn it into something I can lose weight with.  I was living in the dorms, in my first apartment, and my food availability was rather limited, especially with the dining hall situation.  I could eat what I wanted, learned to track what and how much I ate, and soon began making better choices food wise.  But it didn't stick.

My vow from now on is to make it stick.  But I'm not going to shell out money that could very well be spent elsewhere (as my grandma pointed out -- don't spend the money on a weight loss plan, because it takes away money you could be spending on healthy food options to replace the bad ones) on paying monthly fees to WW again.  Especially since in this day and age, there are hundreds of free tools that allow you to do the same thing, just without the handy (and pain in the ass) Points system.

I track what I eat these days through My Fitness Pal, which comes in both an App form and the website.  I use the App for tracking when I haven't planned ahead, following the calorie goal that's calculated for me healthily based on my weight, height and activity level, and the website when I have the ability to plan ahead.  I like planning.  I can set what I'm going to eat, so I'm not rushing around, or craving something and give in (I'm lookin' at you, bag of Toll House cookies...).  When I plan, I know I have something easy to pick and make, so I'm obviously not going to starve.  I usually give myself a couple hundred calories of leeway, in case I do feel the need to have something sweet.

There is no need for a miracle weight loss plan, or to pay all kinds of money for people to do the work for you, or for supplements that don't really do much of anything (or are horribly dangerous to your health!) in order to lose weight.

Burn more calories than you take in.  It's that freaking simple.  If it's not that simple for you, then consult your doctor. When I talked to mine, we ran a blood test and found out that I'm borderline hypothyroid, so yes, losing weight is a bit more difficult for me, but it's correctable.  If I had continued to have trouble after following a strict diet, my doctor said we would look at medications, but she didn't think it was necessary.  I started working out regularly (sometimes, I even made it to religiously!) and doing strength training - the extra lean muscle was just the boost my metabolism needed to balance out my thyroid.

Ask questions. People want to help you. Find a friend to keep you accountable, but don't find that friend who will nag you about every little thing you put in your mouth.  My best friend and I went through WW together, only in the sense that we had our individual Points, we didn't nag about what we ate on a daily basis - and we cheated like hell together.  We literally had a weekly trip to Marble Slab as our one indulgence.  It kept the guilt at bay, and we lost all the more weight because of it.

Losing weight is hard.  It's not SUPPOSED to be easy, because you're SUPPOSED to be changing your lifestyle FOREVER.  Not until you hit your weightloss goal, spend two weeks in your skinny jeans as you revert to your old habits, and find yourself with all the weight back six months later.  If you're going to lose it right, you're going to lose it forever.  End of store.

I love the honesty of Fabulous Lorraine in her weight loss journey.  She works her ass off, and she knows why she's stalled -- because she's not eating right.  It's a balance. A sucky terrible balance.  But one you have to fight your way through.

I fought my way through once, and I slipped. My lovable R. is supportive of my efforts to get myself back under control, but reminds me constantly that he loves me any way that I am, even if I stayed the same.  I need that support, because it means that I'm not changing for what I see as the most important opinion outside of my own: his.  He loves me.  I am not my weight. But I need to lose my weight, because otherwise, I'm afraid I won't be able to be around for him to love, or that I will be limited in such.

I'm doing this for me. I'm fighting my urges, drowning my cravings in water, and taking long walks around my bad days.

And finding fabulous ways to cook through it all.  Here we go, guys.  Here we go.
-A