Thanksgiving Shopping Insanity Test

Holidays are especially rough when you don’t live near family. You look out the window and see that everyone’s driveway in the neighborhood is full with visitors. Meanwhile, your house is nearly empty. Just a tad bit depressing. My parents know this, so whenever they can, they try to spend some of the holidays with us. So I’m really glad they’ll be coming for Thanksgiving this year. They won’t be able to stay too long, just the long weekend – but I’ll take what I can get!

My mom usually cooks dinner – even if it’s at my house. I don’t mind. I’m not the greatest cook, so my daughter and I act as her “sous chefs” 😉 But because they won’t be here until the night before Thanksgiving, I’ve been tasked with going out and getting all the ingredients. As fate would have it – I just haven’t had a ton of time to get out and do this task and have scheduled to do it tomorrow morning. Wednesday. The day before Thanksgiving.

I know, I know… it’s going to be insanity at the grocery store. I’m just hoping that everyone else in this town is more organized than me (which is probably not too far from the truth). I DO at least already have the turkey! It’s been sitting thawing in the Fridge – so I’m not completely out of my mind. (I already made that mistake one year. If I recall correctly – we had to try to “quick” thaw the turkey with hot water. NOT an easy task with a huge turkey!!) But the rest of the ingredients are staples that I just can’t expect to suddenly disappear from the shelves. Green beans? Sweet Potatoes? I don’t really want all this food sitting around my house until we need it. We don’t have room!

Maybe this will be another year a “lesson” is learned. I’m hoping not. Either way, the available time just isn’t there.

In any case, I’ll be enjoying company the next few days. (Hopefully with all the food we have planned! LOL!) Hope you all have a Happy Thanksgiving!!

Tracking Calories. Again.

F

I still think MyFoodDiary.com is great, but I want something more simple. I know that fats and carbs play a role, but what I found to be the most significant issue was plain old calories. (It’s important to note this will be different for different people – and even for me, there was a time I was more concerned with carbs than anything else. Right now I think I have the carbs under control – but really just want some help watching the straight calories). So I’m going to give that “Lose It” (free) iPhone app a try. I’ve heard people rave about it – and if just watching calories is what you need to do – then this program seems pretty good. For the foods that it has in the database, it does include additional nutritional info (Fat, Cholesterol, Sodium, Carbs, Protein). But entering in your own custom foods doesn’t entail a long form to fill out. Just enter the name of the food, the serving size, and the number of calories. Done. This is perfect for what I want to do right now. (An additional note: For those people that want to track those other items, the simplicity of Lose It probably isn’t a good thing as I could not see a way to enter that additional nutritional data in for custom foods if I wanted to) figured it out: you can track these other nutrients, you have to just turn that feature on if you want it.

Anyway. Back on the wagon…

If you’d like to try Lose It too, here’s the link on iTunes. (It’s free)

Cupcakes do not need to be dressed up

Why do all the parenting magazines I get focus on food presentation? As, if I make the carrot look like a caterpillar, my kid will suddenly be interested in eating it.

REALLY? I mean does any kid really fall for that? Mine doesn’t. I’m so desperate to get Zach to eat vegetables, that I even bought that book Deceptively Delicious. Even if he can’t see the vegetables, even if can’t taste the vegetables, he still somehow always knows when they’re there. It’s like he has Veg-dar or something. If he sees so much as a microscopic green parsley leaf in his food he has to pick it out. (oh, and whine about it, too)

How did I end up with a kid that hates vegetables this much? I love vegetables. I’m not exaggerating – I could sit and eat a head of lettuce, just like that, with no dressing. Just pick off the leaves and munch them like they were potato chips. (Spaghetti Squash may be the only vegetable I really don’t like).

But then the parenting magazines will take things too far. They’ll make cupcakes look like little turkeys for Thanksgiving.

REALLY??? This is one thing that doesn’t need to be dressed up. We don’t have any problems getting the kids to eat cupcakes. While it may be FUN to dress up a cupcake to look like a turkey, it doesn’t need to be done, he will eat it anyway, and my time is probably better spent trying to make the turkey look like a cupcake so he’ll eat that. (He’s not big on meat either. I honestly don’t know how he survives.)

As I posted on Twitter – I told Zach if he ate asparagus, it would make his pee smell. He thought that would be really cool. It almost worked. In the end, he chickened out.

I think what we need is more Popeye’s. I remember as a kid, watching Popeye cartoons, I was encouraged to eat spinach. Of course, I don’t know why. It’s not like I really wanted to look like Popeye. Zach does like that “party in my tummy” song – it so cracks me up. (If you go to that link, and get the song stuck in your head, you can thank me later) 😉 But it’s not enough. I think the real solution is that we need more vegetarian super heroes! (and less turkey cupcakes!) Captain Cucumber saves the day!!!

Or maybe not.

Trick or cute little useless toy?

I‘ve been debating for a few weeks about the possibility of getting cute little (useless) toys to hand out at Halloween instead of candy. On one hand, not buying candy means not having something very tempting in the house that *I* am very likely to eat (and really need to NOT be eating). As well, I feel guilty handing out food I myself am trying not to eat because it’s unhealthy. (Well, at least in mass quantities anyway) 😉

My one fear is that while I will not be personally contributing to the obesity problem in our country, I’m afraid the neighborhood kids might respond by deciding to contribute to the lack of toilet paper in the area around my house. Heh.

On the other hand, what would I hand out? I could hand out fruit or something – but what?? Or some kind of little prize/toy … which would surely end up in the garbage before too long and then spend the next 100 years in a landfill somewhere…

Maybe I’ll go middle of the road… and get little packages of goldfish crackers or something. It’s not sweets, it’s not THAT bad/unhealthy, and (except for the little package/bag it comes in) it’s mostly biodegradeable…

I know at least for my own kids – the real fun isn’t even the candy they get. It’s going around, showing off their costume, getting something (anything, they don’t even care WHAT) from all the neighbors. Most of the candy gets thrown out because they don’t even like it anyway. Zach usually has one bite of each thing and then spits it out. He’s a lot of fun to hang out with on Halloween! Very appropriate for the holiday: very scary! LOL! At least something like goldfish crackers… I mean, who doesn’t like that??

Sloppy Joes

This recipe was really yummy. Made it tonight. Rachel had seconds (a sure sign I actually made something good!)

Super Sloppy Joes