Dinner

 Tonight's dinner: Homemade turkey burgers with guacamole, mashed sweet potatoes and veggies.

Turkery Bugers:
Mix extra lean ground turkey with minced garlic, finely chopped white onion, chopped parsley and salt and pepper and form them into burger patties (or a heart like mine...) Cook burgers in a frying pan over medium/high heat about 7 minutes each side or until internal temp reaches 75'C.

Guacamole:
In a food processor blend 1 ripe avacado, 1 tbsp diced onion, 1 tbsp diced tomato, a small squirt of lemon, a generous squirt of lime, a dash of garlic powder, salt, pepper and chilli flakes and a little squirt of white vinegar.

Mashed Sweet Potatoes:
Wash and peel potatoes, chop into medium sized cubes, boil until tender, mash and add a bit of salt and pepper to taste.

Baked Tomato-Eggplant...Thing

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I have very few dinners that I enjoy and can have on this diet and Baked Tomato-Eggplant...Thing is one of them. It's essentially Eggplant Parmesean but without the parmesean, bread crumbs, flour, oil or egg. It's just baked eggplant, layered with homemade tomato sauce and whatever else I have laying around, usually topped with pine nuts or crumbled cashews to add texture that is then baked again. Here's how I make it...(Recipe makes 2 servings)

Ingredients
1 large eggplant or two baby eggplants
5 medium tomatoes
1/4 white onion
2 cloves garlic
Pine nuts or crumbled cashews
Italian herbs and spices and salt and pepper to taste

Directions
Sauce: Start the sauce early as it needs time to boil down. Wash and dice tomatoes and put them in a large frying pan or sauce pan over medium heat add some salt if you like. Let them cook for about 5 minutes. Then add chopped onion and diced or minced garlic. Let this mixture cook/boil down until after onion and garlic are soft. Then I like to puree everything in a food processor and place back in the pan to reduce and thicken more. (Careful-hot) Add herbs, spices, salt, pepper or anything you like until the taste of the sauce is to your liking. (I use basil, oregano, salt, fresh ground black pepper and dried chilli flakes.) After 1-2 hours of cooking the sauce should be ready, but leave this to your own judgement as I am not an expert, if it tastes too tomatoey keep cooking.

Eggplant: Preheat the oven to 375 C. Wash and peel the eggplant. (The skin is toxic when un-cooked so resit the urge to gnaw on it while cooking....) Cut the eggplant into discs approximately 1 to 2cm thick. I then place eggplant into strainer and sprinkle salt on it because I once read you need to let it sweat out its bitterness... Then I rinse and dry it. Place eggplant onto non-stick cookie sheet and bake in the oven 5 minutes on each side.

Baked...Thing: I use a meatloaf pan for the next step. Layer eggplant and sauce in pan. Sometimes I add spinach or chicken. When you run out of eggplant do one last layer of sauce and then you can sprinkle pine nuts or crushed cashews on top. The nuts brown nicely in the oven and add texture and more flavour to the dish. Place in the oven (which is still at 375 C) and bake for 30-45 minutes depending on how thick the slices are and how deep the layers go.  You can serve it on a bed of fresh spinach for extra points.

WARNING: If you are not on a diet/lactose intolerant/allergic to gluten please eat regular eggplant parmesean and not this. Thankyou.

This week in one sentence...

Brunch for grandma, studying, freshly-groomed puppy, finishing my final final in under half an hour (!!!), sleeping in, hiking too hard and ending up with the hips of a one hundred year old woman, sleeping in, passport office, sister, sleeping in, cashew butter, sleeping in.... :)

Chips!

I love chips. I haven't had real chips in over a month now. How do I cope? Yam chips. Like yam fries, but not. Andrew makes them for me which makes them taste better. They can be a snack or an appetizer.

Ingredients:
1-3 long(ish), thin(ish) yams (actually orange sweet potatoes, real yams have bark-like skin)
1 Tbsp Olive oil (or other veggie oil)
Salt, pepper and chiplotle seasoning (optional)

Directions:
Preheat oven to about 375-400 C. Wash and peel yams, and slice them into discs as thin and as uniform as possible so that they will cook fast and evenly. Coat a cookie sheet in a very thin layer of oil and spread yam-discs out in one even layer on the pan. Sprinkle with a tiny bit of salt, pepper and chipoltle powder. Place in the oven and watch closely. Cooking time will depend on how thin your yam chips are, usually less than 20 minutes will be needed. You can flip them if you want them crispy on both sides, I'm not picky. If some start to burn you can take them out and put the rest back in. Remove pan when they "look" crispy or when they have all browned just a bit. I love the burnt ones and the smushy ones. Let them "sit" for a minute to cool a bit and crisp up. Sweet potaoes have lots of carotenoids...which are good for you*...so enjoy!

*If you want to make this not-so-good for you deep fry them or have the chips with Chipoltle Mayo dip! One part mayonnaise, one part sour cream and chipoltle seasoning to taste....

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Proud wife

I am so00OOoo0o proud of my smart, talented and super-handsome husband. He just recieved early acceptance into the teaching program he applied to! Over 100 apply, they select 30, he was one. YAY!

That is all.

This week in one sentence...

Saw my husband reunited with his BFF after one whole year apart (We'll never forgive Australia and it's seductive little Au Pairs!), had a very productive study date with a classmate, wrote and handed in a paper on "Abnormal Synapse Formation and Elimination in Fragile X Syndrome" (soO0oo interesting...), aced my Infant Development final, started studying for my Biology final (Boo) and tonight I will say Happy Birthday/Bye-For-Now to a very sweet name-twin. :)

Diet Update

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I am still in the middle of a very stressful final exam period but felt obligated to post as I have reached the halfway point in my diet. I am on day 20, of 35, and I just reached 10.2 pounds lost! This week I had reached a plateau and wasn't losing, but I started working in a little bit of low-impact excercise (walking the dog more often, haha) and not eating after 6:30, rather than 7:00. My main craving these days has been for fruit, I eat so much fruit I sometimes wonder if it's healthy...It is still hard not to eat after dinner, but from the time I wake up until after dinner I don't even feel like I am on a diet. My favourite time of day is still in the morning with hot black coffee in my "You're my Favourite Deputy" mug, fruit and eggs. There's just over two weeks left and I think I am going to have to keep up the excercise, maybe introduce more, and even bump up my food curfew to 6:00 if I am going to keep losing and get to 15 pounds lost by the end. Wish me luck! :)

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