Cheap but Great Eats ~ Chicken Cacciatore

Shopping day was nearly upon me and all I had left in the freezer was chicken legs. Which is fine and dandy, but I really wasn't in the chicken kind of mood and neither were the kids. So I had to think of something different to do with them.

Cacciatore is not a new invention, in fact it is something that I enjoy paired with pasta, but these days pasta is a no-go, especially since I need to drop a few more pounds. So I altered it a little from when I was a kid. Instead of the sauce being something designed for pasta, I adapted it to be chunky, something you can scoop up with a fork to go with the chicken. Pair it up with a side of steamed green beans and you have a hearty winter dinner for cheap money.

Hot Chocolate Anyone? Low Carb style

I found an old Atkins book, probably from the 80's sometime. It has recipes that the newer books don't have. I made the hot chocolate in it and it is amazing. Okay a little disclaimer, I do not usually have artificial sweetener but in this case, because I am in weight loss mode, I used stevia instead of agave, like I would have normally. Dr Atkins used some unnatural sugar substitute that I don't and would never have in my pantry so the following version is mine.

Hot Chocolate
For each serving:

Baked Stuffed Jalapeños ~ YUM

This weeks adventure took me to a cantina near a ski resort. After karate class, I went with my Sensei (teacher) to meet up with her friends for a margarita. On special, were there lovely stuffed jalapeños that were baked. They came arranged on a plate with fresh salsa in the middle, and lying on a bed of shredded lettuce. They were most delicious and I went on a mission to recreate them.

Baked Stuffed Jalapeños 

Pumpkin Pancakes 2nd Version

I love pumpkin. It is a weakness how much I love pumpkin. I scoured the internet and tried a few recipes this weekend. Using what I learned from the different recipes, I came up with my own. I hope you enjoy!

Pumpkin Pancakes serving 1
Ingredients

Spicy Walnut Cookies ~ New Favorite

At first I was worried about the amount of cinnamon. A tablespoon seemed like a lot, but it really works. If you are using nut meal (which I did with almond meal once), use less meal than you would whole nuts, because it gets heavy. I think I would use 1 3/4 cups of meal instead of 2 cups.

30 Days of Primal Breakfast

Good morning, it is time to rise and shine. No better to start the day than with breakfast. Well, I guess it depends on what you are eating too. As a child, I would stumble down the stairs and pour a huge bowl of sugar laced cereal or pop a tart into the toaster. As an adult, I would usually just have coffee until 11 or 12 until I got something just as quick and bad for you.


Not anymore. Now I eat real food that makes me satisfied during the day. Breakfast can be a hard thing to make, especially when you already have that first cup of coffee. Coffee fills your tummy and tell you it is not hungry, so wait to have your morning joe with breakfast.  

New Years Day, Pantry Raid!

The Battle is ON!

Okay, maybe battle is a string word, but carbohydrates can be addicting. Not so, you say? Well naysayers, you might want to read Can a High-Fat Diet Beat Cancer? from Time Magazine and Carbohydrates are addictive (Dr Eades summery of the Time article). 

Basically what happened in this article, is that German researchers took a bunch of cancer patients and put them on a carb free diet. This was a very small study with dying people. So sick in fact that four died in the first week. Some dropped out of the study, were drying of cancer, but still the desire for sweets was too strong for them to stop. As for five that remained in the program, "the patients stayed alive, their physical condition stabilized or improved and their tumors slowed or stopped growing, or shrunk.". The people who dropped out of the study, couldn't stop eating carbs, even to save themselves. I call that reason addiction.