A Deliciously Simple #Lowcarb Day!

Because we were saving up for our anniversary celebration trip I didn't do a big grocery shopping in August. Besides, if you've read my blog for long, you already know that I keep a good stock of foods on hand so that I can "shop" each day for whatever meals we are in the mood for - or have the time to make. At any given time I have a minimum of several weeks' worth of frozen meats and vegetables; once a month I fill in gaps in my stock and buy sale items to add, and several times a month I fill in with fresh produce and dairy.

So I didn't do a bigger monthly shopping in August, and didn't even do any smaller shopping trips the week before the trip. As a result we are getting low on our stock and have had to be very creative to make our meals until I get a chance to do a BIG shopping on Saturday...

I'm not into breakfast, as I've mentioned...but late mornings I start to get hungry. Today I had to really dig around to figure something out for a quick and easy meal for Pete and I. I ended up with some chicken breast strips (it is ALWAYS a great idea to keep a few pounds of chicken breast - bought on sale, cut into strips, roasted, and frozen - for last-minute meals!) and a bag of broccoli/cauli/carrots. I tossed those together with a partial bottle of salad dressing from the back corner of the bottom shelf of the fridge...in this case, a balsamic vinaigrette...and heated it all through. It was simple, quick, cheap, and delicious!

Suppertime I used a few "fabricated" black angus beef patties that had been in the freezer for a while, and fried those in a little olive oil on my griddle. I also sliced up our first tomato from our tomato plant (this is the first time we've grown anything, we just had a single tomato plant and are just now starting to get a few tomatoes) into 4 chunks, and threw those onto the griddle also. Then I made these - and they were AMAZING! Saved the whole meal, really. They don't have a chewy bready texture, but I thought they were rather like a cross between garlic breadsticks and crispy hash brown patties. Hard to describe, but absolutely delicious! They were easy, but not cheap at about $4 for the 6 sticks, so I'm not sure how often I will make them. But I was very pleasantly surprised!

And this evening I'm about to make one of my Lovely Loaf bread loaves, that I use for Pete's sandwiches for work. I rarely buy lunch meat because of all the junk in it, but Eckrich bologna was on sale for 59c/package a few weeks ago so I bought 4 packages, 3 are still in the freezer. Thankfully it's only 2 more days until I shop!

We can do this, we can make it through the day tomorrow, we will make it through Saturday! :)

Yeah, it's been a month. I sort of took a week-by-week hiatus from blogging altogether. It was a busier month than I can recall in recent history, and anything internet-related (Facebook, email, blogging, games) had to take a back seat to real life. I did well all month, made some really tasty dishes - and thought, "I need to blog this recipe!" but then of course real life took over again and I didn't...no worries, there are plenty more where those came from :). Then over Labor Day weekend my husband and I went to Marquette, MI for a few days to celebrate our anniversary. My meals in all of the restaurants ran the gamut from spinach salads to hamburgs and onion rings. The good thing was that the lovely motel where we stayed had a nice breakfast buffet, and every morning had real eggs, meat, and melon among the many offerings. We only ate one other meal each day, in the late afternoon, so that helped...but did have snacks in our room that definitely were not lowcarb. (I don't have a big sweet tooth but a bag of fritos turns my knees to jelly!) So I'm up 7# and that'll take a couple of weeks of really low carb and really high fat to get back off - but it was worth it, and I don't feel badly about it at all. Plus I got a lot more exercise that I do at home, which was awesome because now I CAN do just about anything I want to do, compared to the last few years when I was so sick! So things should settle back down again now, I've missed blogging (in all 3 of my blogs) and it feels GOOD!