Back to Work

My gym bag is packed, the coffee was brewed when I got up (love the timer!) and I'm getting ready to head back to school this morning.  The warm weather disappeared overnight and the high today is supposed to be 25 instead of the 50-60 it was the last few days.  I just want to stay in, snuggled up on the couch with Hazel.  Instead, I am getting dressed and heading out to work.  It's 1 week to the concert so I am in overdrive all week.


I woke up almost an hour before my alarm today, though I didn't get out of bed.  Does this happen to anyone else?  I call it my Sunday night sleep, because I rarely get a good night's sleep on Sunday.  I can't turn off my brain and I start to think about all the things I should have done and all the things I still have to do.  I did everything I could last night to outwit this.  I set out my clothes, put together a lunch, even washed and dried my hair so I only have to touch it up this morning. It used to be falling asleep that was the problem, now it's more that staying asleep is.  Is this just getting older?

Immersion Blender

I am such a dork that I asked for an immersion blender for Christmas.  It was all I had imagined and possibly more.  So far I've made parsnip puree (inspired by all those episodes of Top Chef) and last night an acorn squash soup.  Thanks to this nifty little blender I was able to make some healthy veggies even more delicious without ruining how good they are for me.  I used a little tip that I got from the nutritionist at Canyon Ranch and substituted broth for most of the cream/milk in each of the recipes.  I totally forgot to take pictures, so you'll have to trust me that they look as good as they tasted.

Do you look at recipes like I do?  I knew what I wanted to make for each of these but couldn't find recipes to match.  So I looked at quite a few and created my own using the amounts of liquid, etc from 2-3 recipes as a guidelines.  Here's what I came up with for the soup. (I used an Alton Brown recipe, a couple of random recipe websites and what was in my fridge to create this)

Ingredients

1 Acorn Squash, cooked-almost 2 Cups 

1tps olive oil 

1/2 Onion, chopped 

2 C vegetable broth 

Salt and Pepper to taste 

dash of ground ginger 

dash of ground nutmeg  

dash of cinnamon 

1/2 C light cream

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cut squash in half, clean out seeds. Place flesh side down in a baking dish. Fill with water up to about 1/2 inch. Bake for 45 minutes.

When cooked through, scoop out flesh and set aside.

Finely chop onion and sautee in 1 tsp olive oil in a medium saucepan.

Add 1/2 cup broth and then cooked squash. Stir in the rest of the broth and spices. Simmer for about 10 minutes.  This made a giant mess until I turned the heat WAY down...it's very thick so the burbles and bubbles will made a mess of your stovetop!

Using an immersion blender, blend soup together and blend in the 1/2 Cup cream. When blended, simmer another 10 minutes

Serving Size: make 3 1-Cup servings

Number of Servings: 3

New Year's Resolutions 2012

2 years ago I started my first blog about my New Year's Resolutions.  I had 10 of them for 2010 and I don't think I did well with most of them.  I finally finished dropping those 10lbs just last week...2 years is better than never, right?  I did do some good reading and have expanded my repertoire of healthy recipes. 

This year I'm not going to make quite that many but here are the three I've come up with that I am planning to keep.

1.  Continue to work on living healthier.  Running, cooking and eating well and losing a few more lbs are all part of this.
2.  Not stressing over things I can't control.
3.  Enjoy life with Sarge when he gets home.  Appreciate the little things!

I know they're simple and not exactly "trackable" but it's what's in my heart.  What, if any, are your resolutions?  Happy New Year!!