Baking Failure :(

Hey Guys,
Good morning. Hope you guys had a great day yesterday! Thanks for all the encouragement yesterday about my feelings on the meals of other healthy bloggers. As silly as it was, it was wholehearted honesty. It really helps to know that you guys are listening and are willing to offer your words of wisdom! So keep reading! I always like to know who is reading and would love to follow you, your meals and your thoughts! Making new friends for me is what my blog is all about, and I am so grateful to have made a faithful few (Christina, Sarah, Haphazard Inspiration, Laurie and Kelsey) in the last few weeks! :-) You guys rock!

So onto my yesterday...

Notice that I have not been posting many meals on my blog this week like I did last week. That is because I work one heavy week (70 hrs) and a light week (10 hrs). When I work a heavy week, all of my meals usually take place right before work and during work. It's easy to photograph all of them when they are grouped together like that, and I am still getting used to blogging and developing my own style. When I am on my light week, I tend to make dinner every night as well, and usually (very badly) skip lunch....which is something that I need to work on! And when I do eat lunch, it's usually, yep you know me well now...leftovers from dinner. I decided to shake things up a bit! So this week you guys are seeing my experiments with healthy foods at dinner time with my husband!

Yesterday though, I decided that I was bored midday, and wanted to bake something. Lo and behold, Tina had a recipe for Sweet Potato Blondies around lunch time that I decided to try, sounds great, huh?....epic fail.

I got all my ingredients together from her list: EXCEPT that I only had white flour.

Then I looked around and realized that I didn't have the right pan that her recipe called for, so I decided to double the recipe and make kind of a bread of sorts instead of bars (because this pan was waaay bigger).

into the bowl they went...

swoosh, swoosh, swoosh, mix, mix, mix...

into the bundt pan...looks good so far, right? you just wait...it's comin'

yuummy? not quite, hold tight...this is only what it looked like right out of the oven.                    fluffy, doughy goodness...

...then it happened...it fell dramatically in the ten minutes that it was cooling

...and turned into this weird kinda flat doughy thing that fell right out of the pan, and was pretty much uncuttable...I had to rip it up in pieces.

looks ok, but tasted verrrry funky.

I guess the flour choice really does make a huge difference. Lesson learned. On to more tasty things: Dinner!

I had been weirdly craving hot dogs lately (nope, not preggo yet, but thanks for thinking of me), and I literally have not had a hot dog in years and as an adult coming to know what they really are, have grown to be quite disgusted by them....but cravings are cravings...so I decided to try something new for our meatless options: Veggie Dogs!

...and with only 45 calories, no fat and 8 grams of protein, how can you beat that?

I split one for myself on a whole wheat bun, half with mustard and relish, and the other half with some shredded cheese. I paired the dogs with a side salad and some roasted butternut squash. This was the first time we had this also, and surprisingly they tasted a lot like sweet potatoes, with waaay less calories! More bang for the buck, sign me up!

The dogs tasted like a light version of a real hot dog, and smelled exactly like one. So we were very happy, craving satisfied! :-)

This was a nice and light dinner, and a happy ending to my cooking disaster of the day!

My Question for You: What was your biggest cooking disaster? ;-)

Fast Food at Home

Good morning Bloggy Friends,
So here is the deal. I read food blogs a lot...A LOT. I learn from them and try to utilize the recipes in my life in order to incorporate more healthy options for my husband and I on a daily basis. I try to help him not feel as deprived as one would think when the words "eating healthy" come out of someone's mouth. Reading blogs have really helped me in that sense. Granted this reading (and posting of my own) is very time consuming, it has become very rewarding as well.

I will say this one thing about reading other food blogs, though....sometimes I get a little jealous of the more popular ones who seem to...I don't know...have this healthy eating down cold. You know what I mean? Like I still have to convince myself that I should eat this and not just order a pizza or just eat cheese for dinner. Is that a crazy feeling or what? Obviously these people have their stories about how they have come so far in their journeys, but I just sometimes don't see an ending to me craving the worse things and craving a nap instead of the gym. I don't know. I just feel sometimes like I may be the only one who feels these strange things.

Anyways, onto something that I have recently learned from a blog....Emily's blog! I took the recipe from her blog, along with the tofu tutorial to enhance our meatless dinner options. Here's my crack at it last night.

First I used Trader Joe's Extra Firm tofu, drained and cut it into 8 pieces, then laid it on a towel.

I folded the towels over it and put books on top of it to press more liquid out.

I cut them into more cubes.

I put them into a pan sprayed with olive oil and salted and peppered them.

Then I popped these bad boys in the oven.

After that, I started the brown rice.

Zapped my frozen veggies for a couple minutes

Then I went back to my browning tofu and turned each piece.

Emily made a sauce from scratch, which I thought was good the first time I tried this, but my husband REALLY likes this sauce. It does have more calories, but what are you gonna do? My husband agreed to eat tofu....need I push for more? So last night, into the pan it went!

...in goes the veggies.

...and then we plate it all together.

...yuuuuummmmmmy

 Thank.You.Emily! Cheap, healthier fast food at home. To die for!

My Question for You: Have you experienced any negative self talk while reading blogs? How have you dealt with that?