November 4: 3 of My Favorite Meals

Alrighty, so I figured since I shared my favorite foods I should share my favorite meals as well. Surprisingly, none of them contain chocolate or goat cheese and usually not a whole lot of garlic! Lol! It happens?! They also go across a wide spectrum of styles.

1~ Chicken and Biscuits from Cheesecake Factory

So stinking yummy! There is so much food there and you usually can’t finish it but it is so delicious that you can’t help but take another bite. It isn’t until 5 bites later that you realize that was not a good idea. Lol!

2~ Beef Kofta with Baba Ganoush

Oh man! After working in a Lebanese restaurant on my summers home from college I was hooked. Kofta and Baba Ganoush is so delicious! I am always on the lookout for this delicious dish no matter where I live.

3~ Fresh Fajitas (usually chicken) with Guacamole

So so yummy! I love delicious, fresh hispanic food. I also have a love affair with guacamole. Oh man, I love guacamole almost as much as garlic. Haha!

So there you have it, my favorite three meals! What are meals that you can’t get enough of?!

See ya!

November 3: 3 of My Favorite Foods

I am such a sucker for food. Not just to keep me going but I love amazingly delicious food! I love certain flavors in particular. I am drawn to them when I see them in a recipe. I am drawn to them when I see them at a restaurant’s description of a dish on their menu. I just can’t help myself! Here are the top three that I love:

1~ Garlic

I love the smell, the taste, basically everything about garlic. Love love love!  I could use garlic is just about everything if TJ were more of a fan! Lol!

2~ Goat Cheese

The taste of goat cheese is so comforting to me. It has just such a wonderful flavor. Don’t you think? No? Oh well, I love it! Plus it really goes well with Garlic. Teehee! So yummy! I love it on pizza, stuffed in mushrooms, on toast with garlic. You name it, I will most likely eat it with goat cheese.

3~ Chocolate

You cannot leave out my bestie! Chocolate makes the world go round, I am convinced. You cannot have a world without chocolate. I know I know, women say that all the time but its just true. Life without chocolate would just be so depressing.

Anyway, what foods do you love? Do you have some weird ones that most people don’t like?

See ya!

Just Had to Share

I am having such a delicious  lunch that I really needed to share! It is so yummy!

A glass of lemon water (a newly acquired taste), some hard salami, some amazing strawberries from Whole Foods, and some goat cheese stuffed mushrooms.

This is seriously one of my favorite lunches! The strawberries are some of the freshest I’ve had in a while and the mushrooms! Yum!

Just had to share!

The Month of February Has Begun

I can’t believe that the shortest month of the year has already started AND that we are already four days into it!!! How crazy is that?! I feel like sometimes life just goes by so quickly. It was two months ago that I said I was going to try and take the month of December a little slower and enjoy the holidays. We all know how that turned out. Although life is going by super quick as it usually does, I have been taking time to enjoy things over the past month or so. After reading The Happiness Project (I know, I know I really should stop talking about it. ) I really wanted to change things to enjoy life a little more. Some small, some daily, some a little more daring, but mostly just being able to say no.

I realized I was saying yes to things that I did not particularly enjoy or things that really did me no good. In January, our membership to the rock climbing gym expired. We decided to let it expire. We did not want to renew because we realized we weren’t using it. At first, we were both really torn. We felt like we should renew but we did not really want to. After it expired, we had a little money to ski. That monthly membership fee was no longer coming out and that freed up a little bit of play money. Then we found out we had free skiing at a mountain not too far. Oh man, we have gone skiing at least once a week for the past month. Amazing! It was such a great decision. Not only am I happier but I am getting out more and being way more active than I was with the gym membership. So that being sad, we will be social rock climbers but it is not something that we are desperately pushing for. I said no to something that was just nagging at my brain and said yes to my favorite activity ever! So much happier!

I also started saying no to so many sweets and sodas. I love soda. It really is a weakness for me. One of the resolutions I made this year was to avoid soda 3 times a week. I thought to myself, this should be a piece of cake. No way. I did not realize how much I love soda until I started cutting it out of my diet. This has been the hardest resolution for me to keep. There have been times when all I want is to drink a soda! But I am in week 4 of my resolutions and so far so good! I have managed to avoid soda twice this week so only one more day and its only Tuesday! I know it may not seem like a lofty goal but I find it better to start small and incorporate it into life that try and go cold turkey because then I just get frustrated.

Another thing that I gleaned from the book that shall not be named is she did resolutions each month. She focused on an area each month and worked on it. I have decided to attempt that for February as least. I don’t know if it will continue into the rest of the months but this month it will happen. The rooms that I live in day in and day out tend to get really cluttered and messy. That is only 5 rooms (not counting the basement or Matt’s room) that I need to focus on. I want to de-clutter this place. I want to focus on eliminating items that I don’t use or use up items I forget about and buy something similar in place of. I want less things to end up cluttering up my bedroom floor and to be able to breathe easy after a brief clean-up at the end of the day. So, February is de-clutter month in the Parnell household. I am sure you will hear about my victories and failures throughout or at least at the end.

Anyway, off to look for a car!

See ya!

V- Very delicious and Very healthy!

I love dessert. I feel like we have had this conversation. I love sweets too. Yum yum! So when I stumbled upon this quinoa apple bite recipe, I was sold. It is really pretty healthy for you and it is super tasty! Yum!

You can find the original recipe here.

It is dairy free!

Ingredients:

1 Cup cooked quinoa
1 Cup quick oats
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
3 tablespoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
1 Tablespoon maple syrup
1 cup chopped apples
2 eggs, lightly beaten

You mix all the ingredients together until just combined. Make sure you add them in order so that the mix well!

The you place about a tablespoon of the mixture or so in a greased mini muffin tin and you bake them for about 15-20 minutes.

Easy and delicious!

Give it a shot and let me know what you think!

See ya!

P.S. sorry about the quality of pictures as of late. I have been taking pictures with my phone because my camera charger cannot be found and when I am out and about I forget to get a new one.

L- Love Me Some Ice Cream!

As I may have mentioned, I love ice cream! I could eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The only time I ever refuse ice cream is if I am feeling particularly queasy. But, I love ice cream! I like most flavors! I love adding things, including edible bowls that I can eat them out of. So, when I saw this post on pinterest, I knew I had to try it!

Sugar cookie cups! It was originally used for fruit cups but I figured ice cream would taste just as good. And it did. 🙂

So I took the log of cookie dough partially out of the package and sliced it in circles. I then placed them on an upside down cupcake pan. I only made four because there is only TJ and I. 

I did not push them down around the edge or anything. Just set it on top.

 

I put it in the oven at 350 degrees. I just kind of kept an eye on them, I did not keep track of the time. My bad.

I just waited until they were getting golden. They smelled delicious!

Perfect for one scoop of ice cream! So yummy and so much fun!

Give it a shot!

See ya!

H- Ham and Cheese Pretzel Bites

Oh my goodness, I am excited about this post. I love pretzels. I love ham. I also greatly love cheese. I could stop right there and we would be set. But I found this recipe that is to die for. Granted I am not perfect when it comes to the kitchen so some of these pictures resemble my imperfections. Bear with me. They were super tasty though.

You can find the original recipe here.

Her pictures are wayyyyyy better. Even she admits though that she had some trials and tribulations with her batch.

There you can see I have the dough all mixed and let it sit and rise for about a couple of hours.

 

After it was done rising, I rolled it out in semi-thin sheets. Seriously, my prowess in the kitchen is unparalleled.

I then put the ham bits and shredded cheese in the middle of the sheets. This next part was not easy. I must say.

 

You then need to TIGHTLY roll it up. Mine was not tight enough…. my contents were spilling in the next step.  Cut them into pieces.

You then need to boil them in baking soda water. This is where those rolls needed to be rolled tightly. The ham was all in the bottom of my pot. Oh well.

You then bake them for about 15 minutes. When they are nice and golden, brush with some butter and sprinkle with some chunky salt. And you get this!

Again, not an easy task. Delicious, but not easy. I might try my hand at just some regular pretzels next time. We shall see.

Enjoy!

See ya!

The Dreaded “B” Word

Sorry I have not posted in a while! Life has been busy. Working at REI during the holiday season is quite the bear. Working in any retail location during the holiday season is a beast! Shopping or even just going out for groceries is a little more difficult during this time of the year. But work is good and having customers is good so that I can keep my job so I won’t complain. It just means that posting is a little more difficult. I am hardly home and when I am, I usually have laundry or dishes or something else to catch up on. The To-Do list is never ending! 

But I was thinking tonight. TJ and I want to buy a house and we really just feel the weight of our student loans looming over our heads constantly! I mean I know that we have less than others out there but it still is not an amount that one can pay off in a month. It takes time, especially when one or both spouses work retail. So, I am really trying to zone in on where we can cut back and what we can do to maybe bump up our income a little. I will probably be pretty honest here and also looking to you for suggestions, tips, encouragement. 

One of our “weaknesses” I guess you could call it that, is eating out. In PA, there weren’t too many restaurants we were desperate to eat out at. Sheetz was our issue out there. Once we moved to the Metro Denver area, dude, there are so many restaurants and places that we really really want to eat at! It is ridiculous! We are always able to wiggle some justification into the situation. Lol! So, one are I am definitely focusing on eating at home more and cutting back on our eating out expenses. I started creating a menu! Really trying to keep on track and keep our expenses down! If I want to pay off our loans, I would rather skimp on eating out that dealing with this big cloud over my head all the time. 

I read this book called The Art of Eating In, where this lady cooked at home or had house parties with her friends for a whole year instead of her usual eating out. She saved a ton of money and honestly built more meaningful memories with her friends as well. It’ll be a challenge but I want to aim in that direction. Try a bunch of different recipes. Only have a date day once a week with TJ where we make it a special occasion to eat out. 

I will keep you up to date on the budgeting. Share with you the challenges and the victories. 

See ya!

Eating: A.K.A. My Version of Dieting

As women we are always looking for some new way to lose weight. We want to find out the trick to staying thin and young looking. This is definitely not a bad thing. However, when we start depriving our bodies of certain things or pursuing a lifestyle that is drastically different than our own that is when it starts to get our of hand and starts backfiring. 
I have tried a variety of different exercise routines and cutting out certain foods but honestly I have just been miserable and hated whatever I was doing or not doing. It never stuck with me. I started looking around for something else to do, or something else to eat, or something else to exercise with. Nothing was really working because I would do it for a little bit and then I would just hate it so much that I would give up because I did not want to keep this up. I hate running, I love sweets, and I love soda among many other things but those are my top three reasons for my way of life. 
Now, don’t get me wrong, I think being healthy and strong is a good thing. It helps prevent health problems as you get older. It helps you with more energy and such. The key to being healthy and strong is that it has to integrate into your current lifestyle. A lifestyle change does not happen overnight. It happens little by little. I have tried to completely cut out sweets or soda over night but it was horrible. I couldn’t take it. I have learned that honestly, I just need to cut back not out. I think about what I am eating. I love good food. I love trying new recipes and restaurants. I love new desserts especially! (My pinterest is full of desserts to try!) I just look at when I am going to behave and be naughty and do my best to even it out. 
I also found something that would keep me active, that I enjoyed! I love rock climbing. I love the strategy and the problem solving and the relatively low impact that comes with rock climbing. It is seriously the best! 

So, I do not recommend dieting to anyone! I say, make the healthy changes in your life little by little. It will stick longer and you will enjoy the journey more!

Speaking or eating, I’m hungry….
See ya!