Morning Water

I think that it’s widely known that water is very good for you.

I’m also pretty sure that I’ve mentioned the fact that I cut sodas from my diet? Instead of soda, I drink lots of water, my morning coffee, coffee or tea in the afternoon, and sometimes dairy or nut milks.

Now that I think of it, I should probably do more to get more calcium in my system…

Anyways, after I read about something on Pinterest, I did some more research (lots of Googling) and decided to give it a go.

After I do my sideways walk to the bathroom, I head to the kitchen and make my current morning drink. I measure out a cup of warm water and add a spoonful of raw honey, a sprinkle of cinnamon, and some lemon juice. I do this before I eat anything and before I even have my needed coffee.

I know this doesn’t sound very exciting, but there seem to be many health benefits to it so I figure it’s worth a try. And I haven’t been doing it for even a full week yet, so I can’t report any results.

Here are a few things that this beverage can do for you from this article on Mind Body Green:

1. Immune system boost
2. Weight loss help
3. Reduces risk of heart disease
4. Helps your digestive system
5. Gives you energy
6. Improves your skin

Read the whole article for more details and so some research of your own before you decide I’m crazy for trying this. And I’ll report back if I notice any differences.

Avocado

This fruit is something that I had to acquire a taste for. I went from hating it to finding it acceptable in some forms, to seeking it out in some forms, to just straight up liking it.

Over the weekend, I bought a couple of avocados and I’ve already used one to make my own guacamole. It was so good that I ate the whole bowl in two sittings.

Want the recipe? Well…I didn’t use exact measurements…

I’ve taken to eyeballing spices, which I should probably stop doing if I plan on sharing it with you.

If you’re alright with winging a recipe, you’ll need one ripe avocado, salt, pepper, garlic powder, a fork, a sharp knife, and a bowl. And also this video that teaches you how to get into the flesh of the avocado.

Cutting into an avocado for the first time can be fairly daunting, but it really isn’t that difficult. Use a sharp knife to cut it in half length wise, you’ll be able to tell when you hit the seed. Then, twist the avocado to separate the two halves. In the video, there’s a nifty to way to remove the seed and make pretty avocado slices. I just scarped it out with my fork into the prep bowl, including the half with the seed.

Once you have your avocado flesh in your bowl, mash it up with your fork. Then, add your seasonings. I suggest you start out with a little, maybe a teaspoon of each? After you’ve stirred those spices in, taste it and see if you need more spices.

If you want a more precise recipe, here’s classic Mexican guacamole from Avocados of Mexico.

Give the avocado another try, or a first try. And tell me how you prepare it!

Something else that I’ve made with avocados in the past–it been a while so I’ll have to make it again before I can share how I make it–is egg salad. Avocado is a great replacement for the mayo that typically goes in egg salad.

(I like my egg salad best when it’s fresh and warm and I put it on tortillas instead of bread).

Here’s a recipe that I might use next week minus the onions.

I want to make some more guacamole this week too and I might even give avocado toast another try as I mentioned before.

Breakfast

The most important meal of the day?

I think it is for some people, but whether or not you eat breakfast all depends on how you feel about it.

For me, it sets the tone of the whole day as far as food goes. Right now, I’m eating a Nature Valley granola bar (they really have improved their crunch, by the way) with my coffee. By starting out the day with something small and relatively healthy, I’m more likely to make better choices throughout the day.

But breakfast is also dangerous for me because I adore breakfasty foods. They’re my favorite. I could eat some variety of “traditional” breakfast food three meals a day and be happy.

I am honestly enjoying my granola bar, but part of me would rather have some bacon with eggs fried in the bacon grease…

Or a fried egg over rice…

Or an egg fried in a piece of bread…

Or a stack of pancakes with tons of butter and syrup…

Or…or…or…

Breakfast is a tasty tasty danger zone for me! So I find good, healthy to semi-healthy breakfast options to start my day out right. But there are days that I splurge, particularly on the weekends.

I go through phases with these and my current favorites are the afore mentioned granola bar and smoothies.

The inspiration for these smoothies comes from Sally’s Baking Addiction. She taught me that the key to a deliciously creamy smoothie is frozen banana slices and that you can pack a ton of protein into a simple breakfast drink.

I’ll have more on my new smoothie obsession another day, back to healthy breakfast basics…

Sometimes, I’ll just eat a Greek yogurt or a couple of hard-boiled eggs.

I also really like taking those two hard boiled eggs, mashing them up with some mayo, mustard, and salt and pepper, and eating them on a tortilla. Warm egg salad makes me happy.

I haven’t quite gotten the hang of it, but egg salad can also be made with an avocado in place of the mayo.

There’s also this magical thing known as avocado toast. It’s apparently a thing. I tried it once and didn’t really care for it, but I think I’ll give it another try and will report back with results.

Sometimes I even get on a frozen breakfast kick, but I’ve really been trying to stay away from frozen, prepared foods.

What are your go-to healthy breakfasts?

Reasoning…

It gets pretty easy to tell yourself “I’m going to eat this chocolate cake because I had a bad day” or “I’m going to skip the gym because it’s cold outside” or “if they get a cheeseburger, why shouldn’t I?”

My reasoning for the past week has been that I’m sick and therefore deserve delicious foods. Makes sense to me…it also means that I’m lucky I had to work on Saturday and couldn’t make it to WW to weigh in this week.

I have the sinus/sore throat crud that’s being rather persistent. On top of that, I’ve been in pain this weekend from my first tattoo Friday.

By the way, Topper’s is amazing!

I’m still sick, but I need to suck it up and reenter adulting mode. Anyone want to do the dishes for me? Just kidding! I love dishes. (Not really…)

This morning, the hubby and I both had smoothies for breakfast. His consists solely of banana, strawberry, and milk. Exciting? Not really, but he likes it. My smoothie, on the other hand, has a banana, some strawberries, some chunks of mango, Greek yogurt, powdered peanut butter, and almond milk. Healthy and delicious! It’s protein packed too so it should last me until lunch.

I started making smoothies like this after seeing the recipe for Peanut Butter & Jelly Protein Smoothie on Sally’s Baking Addiction. If you haven’t checked out her blog yet, you need to! She has a ton of healthy and not so healthy delicious recipes on her blog.

Also, I just pulled some Gorton’s Smart and Crunchy Fish Sticks out of the oven to have for lunch. Haven’t decided what I’m going to have on the side yet though. Maybe some pretzel sticks?

I’m trying to start the week off right. Besides these healthy choices, I’ve also gone ahead and tracked all of my food for today. I’m thinking about making butter chicken for dinner.

Here’s to a great Monday leading to a great week!

PS if you want to see pictures of what I’m eating, of what my cat is doing, and of random things I’m doing in my life, follow me on Instagram.

I’m Back

Good morning, fellow early risers,

I’ve been on a hiatus for a while, but I suddenly had the urge to start blogging again yesterday morning. Why wasn’t this posted yesterday? Because it had been so long since I had logged on that I had to reach out to WordPress’ Happiness Engineers to help me out.

But now we’re back online as nopennyrequired.wordpress.com!

This blog is still going to be about food, but I’m going to get a lot more personal. It’s going to be a sort of food diary for me.

Here’s my relationship with food in a nutshell–I love it. Food makes me happy. I love cooking and eating it. I’m a smell and texture sort of person who loves spices and loud flavors.

Food doesn’t always like me though.

I have acid reflux and gastroparesis. The former is more than likely something you’ve at least heard of. When I eat certain foods, eat too much in general, or don’t take my medicine, my stomach acid decides to travel up my throat and it’s very uncomfortable and pretty gross. The later is something that I actually had to go to a gastro doctor and do a fancy test for. It means that my food doesn’t digest at the same rate as the average bear’s stomach, so food just kinda chills in my gut for longer than neccesary. This is also uncomfortable as I can feel full and bloated for days and potentially get compacted. This can also be set off by certain foods, eating too much in general, or not taking my mirilax. Both of these also flair up at times simply because they feel like it.

So there are certain foods that I can’t or shouldn’t eat that actually make it hard for me to be healthy. I’m not supposed to have fresh fruits or veggetables. No salads for me.

Because of my love for food and my restrictions on some foods, I’ve gained more weight than I would like. Because of this, I joined Weight Watchers last year with my mom. I lost 10 pounds and then I gained about 18. Now I have more weight than what I had when I started WW. This is entirely my fault, not that of the program’s.

Proof of this is my mom who has lost enough weight to make her feel healthier and to allow her fabulousness to shine even brighter because she’s always been beautiful.

I keep saying over and over again that I’m actually going to try this week, but then I wind up doing another half assed attempt. My hope is that doing this so publicly will help me to hold myself accountable and keep you entertained along the way.

Expect recipes and restaurant reviews, which were here before, but also confessions of late night tortilla chip binges and sometimes the results of these descrepencies in self control.

Confession number 1: I had leftover tres leches from Chuy’s for breakfast this morning. This was over an hour ago and a still have a slight belly ache. Though the belly ache could be due in part to the fact that I ate way too much delicious food at Chuy’s when I went out with a friend last night…

If you’ve stuck around this long, thank you and you just might want to have that tested…

Now you’ve have to excuse me while I finish my mandatory daily cup of coffee.

Pulled Pork

Last weekend, Kroger had pork boston butt (ie pork shoulder) on sale for $1.99 a pound. I decided that I wanted to buy one.

I already had some Kraft Sweet and Spicy Barbecue Sauce that I had recently gotten for free from Kroger. Why not buy some hamburger buns and make pulled pork sandwiches? We did. And it was marvelous!

Since all of the pork shoulders were kind of huge (I found one of the smallest ones), I had the butcher at the meat counter cut it in half for me before I took it up to the counter. I don’t know if this is something that will happen at every grocery store, but, at least at my Kroger, this was a wonderful free service. At home, I put half in the freezer and half in the fridge.

The next morning, I made a spice rub that I had found online, put my half a pork slab in said bowl, and then proceeded to massage the mixture of brown sugar and spices into the meat.

Then I put it in the crock pot with 1/4 cup of water on low for exactly 8 hours.

I’ve read that, for most recipes at least, you can put something in the crock pot on low for 8-10 hours or on high for 4-5 hours.

I was so excited about the mouth-watering smell coming from the crock pot that I made sure to check it at the 8 hour mark. When I touched it with a steak knife, a piece of meat just fell off the rest of shoulder. And that is a very good sign.

Using a soup ladle and a fork, I transferred the meat to a big bowl. Then, I shredded it using two forks to pull it apart. Using my meat moving ladle, I scooped some of the meat juices from the crock pot into the bowl of shredded pork to keep it moist before adding an entire container of my sweet and spicy BBQ sauce and mixing it all up.

Did I mention that I noshed on perfectly cooked pork while shredding it? It was soooo good that I couldn’t resist!

Then, with that fiery sweet sauce, it was delectable on a hamburger bun. Kevin and both of our moms also very much enjoyed it and I am planning on making this again. I’m so glad that I tried it in the first place!

Spice Rub Recipe provided by HarleySmoker on Smoking Meat Forums

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 4 tbs paprika
• 1 tbs black pepper
• 1 tbs salt
• 1 tbs chili powder
• 1 tbs garlic powder
• 1 tbs onion powder
• 1 tsp cayenne pepper

I had considered buying a spice rub or even putting the meat in the crock pot without any sort of rub, but I did a Google search instead of making a hasty decision. When I found the above recipe, I realized that I had all of those ingredients so there was really no reason in my buying something that I could so easily make myself.

With all of those delicious spices and the spicy BBQ sauce that we had, I was concerned that the sandwiches would be way too spicy. But I thought they were wonderful. The spice rub did lend a delicious flavor to the pork, but it didn’t make it outrageously spicy. If you talk to my mom, she’ll tell you that her mouth was on fire, but she enjoyed every bit of it and couldn’t stop eating. One of those hurts in a good way moments.

Some Familiar Places in Charleston

While on vacation, we enjoyed each other’s company, time with my hubby’s family, the beach, the history, and the food.

I love trying new places, especially when it pertains to food, but there were a few places that we can technically get in BG that we had while in South Carolina. For some reason, I didn’t get any pictures at these three places. I guess I figured you wouldn’t want pictures of what you could see here?

Krispy Kreme

The night before we were going to attempt to venture downtown by ourselves, I was playing on my phone, looking for somewhere that we could stop for breakfast on our way there. For some reason, I thought of Krispy Kreme.

It was out of the way, but we decided to go there for breakfast anyways.

I had a chocolate cake donut and a frozen mocha while Kevin had several original glazed donuts and a bottle of orange juice. The donuts were excellent–they were cooked well, exactly what you’d hope for out of a fried sugar bomb of deliciousness.

My coffee was good too. It was strong, but sweet and creamy.

What’s ironic about our visit to this donut place is that we have yet to eat at the one in BG. It’s been open since late last year and we haven’t eaten at it. But we’ll drive a little ways out of the way to eat at one in SC…

We had several plans in mind for our jaunt downtown, but the a sudden rain storm meant that we were only able to get the first, and main, adventure done–The Aquarium.

As you can see on the left, Kevin did not prevent me from getting eaten by a shark…

Panda Express

When we left the fishes, we were torn about where to have lunch. Should we try to find somewhere downtown or wait and see what there was in North Charleston, which is where our hotel was. We decided on the later.

As Kevin was driving in the pouring rain and the two fo us were pointing out different restaurants in the area near our hotel, I suddenly made it very clear that I wanted to eat at Panda Express by freaking out a little about it. Just a little bit.

We both had their famous orange chicken and fried rice. There was enough chicken left on the line that one of us could’ve eaten before the fresh chicken was done, but we both opted to wait for new chicken. And it was well worth the wait.

The chicken is cooked perfectly with a crispy fried breading drenched in a luscious spicy sauce. Yes, friends, I am rather in love with this chicken.

A little irony here: I was the only one who was hungry. Kevin was going to wait until we had dinner to eat, but once we stepped inside Panda Express, he had to get some orange chicken for himself as well!

Sadly, the only one in BG is on Western Kentucky University’s campus.

While I love this place and it would be a joy to see many of the staff in Garrett along with my professors from Cherry Hall, parking is a nightmare. Which leads us into another restaurant on WKU’s campus that we never frequent.

Popeyes

I can’t remember the first time that we experienced Popeyes; maybe in Nashville or Gatlinburg?

Anyways, we both felt that this was a necessary stop during our vacation and made sure to go there one day after having seen a movie.

We both had spicy chicken tenders, cajun fries, and a biscuit. And it was fabulous.

The chicken had a fiery spice to it that built the more you ate it with crunchy breading and the perfect amount of chicken in each bite. I tore of buttery, flaky chunks of biscuit while eating in an attempt to calm down some of that delicious spice. The cajun fries were cooked wonderfully with their own kick to add to the chicken’s game of fire.

Despite very much enjoying this meal, I was quickly reminded of the fact that I can’t handle spice quite the way that I used to. I love it, but my body doesn’t.

South Carolina

I know I’ve been a scattered blogger, but I had a good reason for the last couple weeks–I was on vacation!

Kevin and I went to Charleston, South Carolina the week before last to celebrate our first anniversary (has it really been that long??) and to visit his family. And we had an awesome time! 🙂

And why didn’t I blog last week? Because I was tired…I actually had a 2-3 hour nap on Saturday.

In the hopefully near future, I’m going to share some of the places that we got to eat at while we were there.

Planning Your Grocery Trip

One of the ways that I’ve learned to save money is by studying the grocery sale ads every week to see who has what on sale before/while I’m making my grocery list.

The two stores that we hit (Mom and I go shopping together every Saturday morning) are Meijers and Kroger. Meijer’s ads run from Sunday to Saturday, so I know to check for whatever new sales they have on Sunday; Kroger’s ads run from Wednesday to Tuesday, so I know to check for new sales on Wednesday. The first time I pull them up online, I just glance at them to see what, if any, major sales are going on, just to get a feel for where I’m going.

On Thursday and/or Friday, I get serious and actually start plotting out my grocery list.

Now, during the week, I try to write down things that we run out of or that I know we’ll be out of by the end of the week so that I hopefully won’t forget something. But I don’t plan my meals for the next week until I see what’s in the ads.

The main thing that I’m looking for is protein. Last week at Meijers, for example, they had bulk boneless, skinless chicken breasts on sale for $1.88 a pound. I bought some chicken. It’s always neat when they have things that are on your grocery list for sale–like when I needed saltine crackers last week.

Meijers also tends to have bonus ads that only run for the weekend. I think that some of these deals might only be displayed on their website because I couldn’t find it on the app and Mom couldn’t find it in the paper.

Last weekend, they had an ad online that was full of BOGO deals. I took advantage of some of this. We were out of paper towel so I bought one pack of Sparkle Paper Towel and got a second pack for free. I also picked something that I didn’t exactly need at the moment–BOGO Meijers pasta.

We have pasta night a couple of times a month so I usually have spaghetti, fettuccini, and maybe something that I consider “fun” pasta stored at my apartment. The week before last, Meijer actually had their pasta on sale for $1, so I bought a box of cavatappi, which I used to make crab alfredo that week. Last weekend, I bought farfalle (or bowtie) pasta and gemelli. So I bought two boxes of pasta for $1.09.

There were a lot of great, tempting BOGO deals going on, but pasta was one that I felt comfortable getting because it will last a long time. I don’t have to worry that I have too many dry noodles because they’ll just hang out until I’m ready to use them. I didn’t want to buy a bunch of perishable items.

When looking at sales ads and creating my grocery list, I should probably broaden my horizons and look at what other stores around town have to offer. But, for now at least, I’m content with my two grocery stops.

Starbucks S’More’s Frappuccino

When I heard that Starbucks had a new s’more’s frappuccino, I knew I had to try one. Add to that the rumor that they were giving away free cookie straws for a limited time, I had to go there soon.

My mom was kind enough to indulge me so we went last Saturday. I had the bacon and gouda breakfast sandwich and a s’more’s frappuccino while Mom had a slow-roasted ham and swiss breakfast sandwich and a caramel ribbon crunch frappuccino.

I’m not sure if I’ve tried any of the other breakfast sandwiches that Starbucks has to offer because I enjoy the bacon and gouda one so much. I talked about it before last year. There’s just something about how fluffy their eggs always, the crispy bacon, and the plentiful flavorful cheese…

Mom said that she really enjoyed the ham and swiss sandwich she had. She offered me a bite, but I’ve never been a fan of swiss cheese. I did, however, try a drink of her frap (from an extra straw because I don’t want her getting my cold). It was really good–sweet and rich with the right amount of caramel. I enjoyed the caramel sauce and crunchies on top. I think it would be even better if they made some sort of salted caramel frap. Hint hint, Starbucks…

The s’more’s frap that I had might just be my favorite that I’ve tried and I’m really hoping that it’s one that they keep around all year. They layer marshmallow whipped cream and chocolate sauce on the bottom, top that with graham cracker flavored frap, and then top that off with more marshmallow whipped cream and graham crackers crumbs.

It was marvelous! It might be something that some would consider too sweet, but those layers worked so well together and separately. I think it’s the perfect summertime coffee drink that needs to be enjoyed all the time to bring on those memories.

As for the cookie straw, I saw a canister of them at the register for less than a dollar. But, in the hopes that the free promotion was still going on, I didn’t purchase one. Alas, it was still not going on…

I will for sure be getting as many s’more’s fraps as I can get my hands on and I will try to remember to buy a cookie straw next time.