Eliminating Processed Foods

My current desire is to be thinner, be healthier, and just be a better me. I am going to have to start making better decisions to do this.


I have decided that I want to work really hard to eliminate processed foods from our diet. I realize that this is a tall order but I was inspired by Lisa @ 100 days of Real Food. I took her 10 day challenge and said that I was going to start when Hannah and I get back from Spring Break (we will be blogging our trip we are heading south with no plans or reservations next Saturday). One of the goals of that trip is to keep it cheap so this will be more challenging during the trip, but I still intend to try.


When I decide something is a good idea, I have a really hard time not just starting...so, I have been channeling my baking into fixing real food for the week so that we can meet this goal. Yesterday I decided to play around with making a cabbage salad with all kinds of veggies and beans added and make up my own dressing using some of the oven dried tomatoes from the summer that we put in oil. This looks and tastes amazing and it is lunch for this week! 

1/2 head purple cabbage, 1/2 head green cabbage, 5 sliced carrots, 1/2 each red, yellow, and orange pepper sliced, 4 stalks celery sliced, 2 cans black beans (save 1/2 cup black bean juice), and 1 can white kidney beans.

1/4 cup olive oil (I used the oil from my oven dried tomatoes) 6-8 sun dried tomatoes, 1/4 balsamic vinegar, 3 Tbs Rosemary garlic mix, 2 Tbs lime juice, 2 Tbs honey, 1/2 cup black bean juice (I reserved from the beans when I drained), 2 Tbs spicy brown mustard. I tossed the salad in the dressing next time I will wait until I am ready to eat it to add the dressing.

I also made a vegetarian chili with a TON of beans in it for fiber...this dinner this week. 

1 can whole tomatoes pureed in food processor, chili powder, cumin,  and red pepper flakes to taste, place in stock pot and add four cans of my favorite beans, 1/2 each red, yellow, and orange pepper chopped, 3 cups pureed zucchini, 2 cans chopped tomatoes. This is SO amazingly yummy and filling!

I started today with baking some whole grain, high fiber, low fat bread that I found @Annie's Eats...

Mixed up and ready to rise!

This stuff is AMAZING...this is our new bread...next time I will add some fresh rosemary when mixing the bread.

some whole wheat rolls (I substituted honey for the brown sugar as sweetener)that I found @So Good and Tasty that I am making look like sandwich thins. 

This picture is not the best they are not yellow but really soft brown. The really remind me of the sandwich thins that are out...but I can pronounce EVERY single ingredient!!

Next up is some whole wheat corn bread that I found @Food.com to go with the chili this week.

These are so yummy!! I will definitely make these from now on! 

We bought berries from Sam's that are WONDERFUL and apples, pears, and pineapple. I would love to be buying these locally and organically...I hate the idea that there are pesticides on my fruit but I need to get more fruits and veggies and less meat into my diet.


I sliced up red, orange, and yellow peppers to go with carrots and mushrooms and hummus (Jeff makes this from scratch and he is VERY good at it!).


So these are my plans for the week. I already have homemade vanilla bean non-fat yogurt to go with my homemade granola for breakfast, fruit for a snack, cabbage and bean salad for lunch, hummus and veggies for a snack, and then veggie chili with whole wheat corn bread for dinner this week. I am a creature of habit and have no problem eating the same things all week. 


My husband can do this with me and my 20 year old daughter won't eat any of it the first time...I just cannot win with her.


I am going to attempt to share my recipe for the cabbage and bean salad with dressing (I suppose it needs a name)I really played around until I got the dressing to taste so yummy!

Busy Busy!!

I have been busy baking and have a Banana Carmel Cake that I made and I will be sharing soon as well as some oh, so yummy cupcakes that I made this weekend. But I wanted to talk today about some experiments that I have been running.


My daughter will eat very little in the way of variety...she asks me every night "what's for dinner?"...she's 20 and I find this question very annoying at this stage of her life. Considering that I spend the better part of the last 20 years working hard to make sure that "Miss Picky" would eat...I have had a somewhat restricted diet too. I also work five days a week and cooking during the week becomes a chore. I love to cook and refuse to have it become a chore. So, we eat a lot of sandwiches on Fiber One bread (something that I plan to do myself one day too) and fix big pots of stuff over the weekend and eat that until it is gone.


My step-son's birthday was Friday and he came down to visit with us for his birthday last night. I made the oven stew (I have made some adjustments to that too that I will share...my goal was to keep the wonderful flavor and cut the sodium) yesterday so that dinner would just be ready when he got here and made vanilla bean white velvet cupcakes with the icing that he requested. We went to the meat market down the road for the roast yesterday and they had chicken tenders really reasonably priced so I picked up two pounds with the intention of making baked chicken strips and freezing them so that Hannah can quit asking me "what's for dinner" and I know she will be eating good for her food.


I had bought some orange cauliflower last week and I decided to surprise her with low fat mac n' cheese and baked chicken strips. I have seen lots of recipes for both and I have tried a low fat mac n'cheese recipe and thought that it was decent but that I had some different thoughts about how I wanted to do it.


So here are my recipes (I as usual, did not take pics of the process but the finished products will go on here).

Baked Chicken Strip

Baked Chicken Strips


2 lbs chicken tenders
3 cups bread crumbs (I used the heels from my Fiber One bread and tossed in the last two pieces of garlic bread for additional flavor)
1/4 cup parmesan cheese
2 cups butter milk
2 Tbs hot sauce
4-6 egg whites
1 clove garlic minced


I mixed the buttermilk, garlic, and hot sauce in a bowl and put my chicken tenders in to soak for 1 hour (I would have left them longer if I had thought to do it earlier). I took the heels of my bread and garlic bread and put them in the food processor and then added the parmesan cheese to the mixture and pulsed it until mixed well and all very fine (I then took out about 1/3 of a cup for the mac n' cheese). The soaked chicken tenders are then dredged through the bread crumbs, dipped in the egg white, and dredged through the bread crumbs again. I had sprayed my cake cooling rack with non-stick spray, heavily, and put this on top of a cookie sheet to catch any droppings.


Bake at 350 until cooked through.

Low Fat Mac n' Cheese

Low-Fat Mac N' Cheese


2 cups boiled elbow pasta (al dente)
2.5 cups shredded cheese (I used every package of left over shredded cheese in my fridge so it was a big mix)
1 head of yellow cauliflower (maintains the color of the sauce)    steamed until very soft
1 Tbs of butter
1/3 cup of skim milk
1 egg
2 Tbs hot sauce (just to kick it up a bit)
1/2 tsp salt




I put the shredded cheese, steamed cauliflower, milk, egg, hot sauce, and salt into my food processor and processed until I had a very creamy cheese sauce. Mixed with the al dente pasta and put it in a casserole pan sprayed well with non stick spray.  Top with bread crumb mixture.


Bake at 350 until hot, bubbly, and bread crumbs are nicely browned.


Both turned out lovely! They were very yummy and both kids and adults had seconds! I took some spicy mustard and added honey at the last minute to dip the tenders in...wonderful!!

High Fiber Low Fat Baked Chicken Tender

Low Fat Mac n' Cheese

Strawberry Cake

My paternal family is somewhat of a mess. There were 4 boys and a girl in the family and not many of my cousins or myself were raised by our parents on that side of the family be they our father or mother. We had wonderful great-grandparents that worked really hard at creating a family environment for us but they were both gone by the time I was 19 and many of my cousins were very young or not even born before then. 

I have been thinking about my great-grandmother a lot lately and missing her...her name was Zola and she would be very sad about the state of this family. I have kicked up my efforts to try to re-connect with my cousins and create a family for our children in the past months. Many of my cousins are interested in this for themselves and/or their children.

One of my cousin's children was turing 13 on the 13th of this month and it seemed like an ideal opportunity to get together. I am hoping these get togethers grow in number of family members that come! 

I, of course, wanted to do an awesome cake. I wish I had been doing this when Hannah turned 13 or even MacKenzie. I started all these "roses" cakes because I have been planning this cake for months! I needed to see if I could do it at all...these roses are seriously easy!

I have to confess, I did even a worse job of picture taking (none during the process) because my 19 month old nephew was keeping me company and I was a bit nervous about this icing...I was distracted!

I wanted to make this strawberry cake so bad and had been planning it...the recipe calls for strawberry puree and I have strawberries that I put in the freezer at the end of the summer, this is the perfect use for them!

I realized when I pulled up the recipe on my ZipList and had been debating what icing to use. I am chomping at the bit to do a chocolate cake with chocolate icing so I wondered about chocolate icing on this but was afraid that it would overpower the strawberry in the cake. So I decided on a strawberry swiss meringue buttercream recipe that I had found.

Strawberry Birthday Cake with Strawberry Swiss Meringue Butter Cream Icing

This cake was AMAZING! I also forgot to take a picture of the inside. I used 8 inch pans and made it three layer. I used my icing bag to pipe the icing between layers. I used white chocolate melting candy to make the "M."

What I will do differently next time: The icing was wonderful but a bit too buttery for me (no wonder with the amount of butter in it) I think that I will do half light cream cheese and half butter and see how that goes. 

It turned out beautiful! I think this was my best cake yet!