In the oven…

I was really looking forward to this recipe. When I give you the ingredients you’ll know why, but it ended up being a bit of a disappointment. Anyway, I’ve got about… ten minutes to do this, so let’s go.

I found this recipe when I went hunting for things to do with chicken. I found it on a site called Paleofood.com. If you’re looking through that massive amount of text to find the OR, ctrl +F for “garlic Chicken.” As usual, the recipe has a dumb name, so I re-christened it.

Lame (Duck) Chicken

And behold, the ingredient list, and the thing which got me so interested in this recpie. As always, the recipe is presented as I cooked it, and if you want the OR, go to the link above.

Ingredients

1/4 cup olive oil
1 large onion diced
pepper to taste
juice of 2 lemons
2 large carrots, sliced
2 celery stalks, sliced
3 chicken breast halves
10 – 20 garlic cloves, unpeeled and left whole (yes, it said “twenty to thirty”!)

The original recipe calls for 20 – 30 garlic cloves, but since I  had substantially less chicken, so I toned it down some. Even I can have too much garlic.

Darcy would like to contribute that putting whole cloves of garlic, unpeeled, on chicken, is wrong.

Directions

Heat the oil in a frying pan. Add the onion, carrots and celery, stirring
constantly, until they are soft.

With a slotted spoon, transfer the vegetables to a casserole dish or a clay pot.

Lay the chicken pieces on top of the vegetables. Sprinkle with pepper and
lemon juice.

Put the garlic around and on the chicken pieces.

Cover tightly with aluminum foil. This is essential, because the chicken must cook in its own juices. Cook in a preheated 350F oven for 30m. Do not uncover until ready to serve.

Quack.

 

It was okay. Definitely edible, but, as I said, a disappointment. The carrots gave it a really sweet taste, and there was absolutely no garlic taste in there at all.

I don’t really understand the purpose of not peeling the garlic, as all the good stuff is inside there. If I do this again, I might press the garlic, as is my usual. Darcy, like I said above, says that the non-peeled garlic is wrong.

Added to a magic salad, this was my dinner tonight:

Quasi-noms.

I gave myself a lot of the chicken because I really hadn’t eaten a lot else that day. Here’s the deal on that:

I usually take an apple with me for breakfast, but due to my upper lip  being kinda-chapped, I didn’t want to take the apple because it would just burn my lip. I decided to get a smoothie at Mollie’s later. Only to find that they were out of the strawberry mix stuff.

Lame.

Then lunch continued the lame-ness. I went into Evans and didn’t see anything appetizing, and so I made another trip to Mollie’s to do my hot-sauce chicken spinach carrot salad thingy. But alas, the line was long and I had left my stuff out on the quad. So I grabbed the Soup of the day which was a VERY salty chicken noodle soup. Minus the chicken. I ate the broth and around the noodles, got hypertension, and just resolved to make myself nommy for dinner.

I ended up not eating the entire plate, which is fine. We all have our days.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to a working weekend, but I’d like to take some time and get straight in my head what I want/need to do. Things that are already on the agenda (that aren’t working):

Tomorrow doing some sparring with Nicki to help her get ready for her belt test.

Saturday going to the TKD belt test to watch Anthony get his yellow belt and Nicki get her orange.

Woot!

Feeling pretty good,

Gina

Food and recognition

I know that I have posted already today, but it’s been a while since I’ve done a food accountability check, so I wanted to do that, and also take some recognition for some non-cosmetic aspects of having lost weight.

First, the food:

Breakfast was in the dining hall again, due to lack of fruitage. I had five sausage links in a cup, and they were tasty. I didn’t take a picture, cause I just took them to work and nommed on them.

Lunch, I did get a picture of. It’s nothing special:

Buffalo chicken salad (a la Gina) and smoothie

This beauty is two chicken breasts a la Mollies with some lettuce, carrots, and hot sauce poured over it. It was pretty tasty, but the smoothie was the best. I am going to perfect the Mollie’s Salad if it kills me.Dinner was another half of a chicken breast with the mesquite marinade that Anthony and I cooked sometime this weekend.

I miss my fruit, though. I’m gonna have too much fun shopping this weekend.

There were a couple of things that I wanted to touch on, also. I’ve been focusing on a lot of the “cosmetic” aspects of losing weight. Essentially, focusing on the poundage. Tonight I did another one of those weight mirror image things, and I stared at it for a while. No joke. I want to shift this focus, at least for a moment, because I believe in the utility of the body being the primary concern, and aesthetic concerns come second. SO, I want to talk about the change I (finally) noticed in my fitness.

The first thing that I started to notice was that things like walking to the Decatur and back did not make me tired or sore like it used to, that walking back from “Shasta” (my zip car of choice) was not a chore. Additionally, trekking up the stairs to my apartment on the third floor does not make me breathy anymore (though my legs still hurt sometimes).

These were all little things that I had begun to notice and appreciate, but it didn’t really hit home till TKD yesterday.

It’s not like it happened overnight, but I was in a good enough place to see it and realize that doing all of the kicking that we did, the forms, etc. was not as debilitatingly taxing as it had been in the past. I was out of breath, but not panting. Hot and sweating, but not faint. Tired, but exhilarated. It is  significant and exciting for me because a LOT of my issues in Taekwondo have been issues of my fitness. Because I got tired so quickly, I couldn’t focus as much as I would like on other things that I wanted to, and I was perpetually upset about not being able to keep up.

I know that there are good days and bad days, but it was deeply, deeply satisfying to have that good day. Now I can start working on my splits and being able to do push ups, and kicking Nicki’s ass (though that will take a lot longer…).

Additionally, as some may have seen on my facebook page, I found out today that I no longer qualify as obese by BMI. Though I really don’t put a WHOLE lot of stock in BMI measurements (seems like a height-weight chart is pathetically simpleton), it’s a cool threshold to reach, and something that I am at least moderately pleased with. I am just closer and closer to being healthy.

Now I must adjourn to put away the laundry that has been sitting on my bed for two days… ><

Gina

Stir Fry

In the world of meat and vegetables, I don’t think that there is a dish more ubiquitous than the stir-fry. That being said, I have never eaten stir fry before and I did not know how to make it. I did, however, by some flank steak at the farmer’s market so that I could be taught. Last night, I got Darcy to teach me how to make it.

It wasn’t really that complicated.

Cut up veggies

You cut up the veggies. Featured here is cabbage, carrots, and celery. You also put in onions, but at this pointwe had already added it to the beef.

Noommmsss

There are also onions involved. Make sure the beef gets cut up into bite size portions.

Darcy cooked the meat and the onions first. Then we through the veggies in. At different points throughout the cooking process we added:

Tasty things.

I think we ended up doing about 6 tablespoons.

I didn’t get a picture of the final product because I was hungray, but there you go.

I have a lot on my plate today. I have quite a bit of writing to get done, in addition to laundry, cleaning my room, and homework. I also want to cook some soups today so that I will have some things to eat during the week and so I don’t have to cook quite as much.

We shall see. 🙂

The rest of my food from yesterday is as follows: some bacon in the morning followed by a smoothie for lunch. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but I was truly not hungry until I went to cook the stir fry for dinner.