So far I have absolutely been horrible at the new year resolution of blogging more, still hoping to get better at this! 🙂 Let me catch everyone up to speed with what has been going on in the month of January and February. Loren got a smoker from his parents for Christmas, so that has been like the best thing ever. For super bowl, Loren smoked a pulled pork and it was amazing of course! These past two months have basically been us getting back into the swing of things with school, and hanging out with family. A couple of really exciting things have happened though, one, my cousin got confirmed last Monday and she asked me to be her sponsor. That was a really special time for me in my life and I was so honored that she asked me to be there on her journey. The other really exciting thing is that my wonderful co- worker (the one that I helped throw the gender party for) had her beautiful baby boy, Bradley Royce Hansen, he was born on February 20th. My whole team went to go see them the next day. It was the greatest thing being able to hold this sweet little boy; I cannot wait to see him as he grows.
How precious is he????
SO proud of her!
As you know, another resolution that I have is to loose some weight and try and have a better/ healthier lifestyle. I have started running again which has always been a love hate relationship with me. I love it because it is such a great way to loose weight, but hate it because, well it is running. I have also been trying to eat a lot healthier, which is hard because I love food. Loren is really great about eating healthy so that is a plus for me. I still eat what I want for the most part, but a big thing in portion control in our life. Everything is okay for you to eat if you control your portions. so that is a big part of my healthy eating. Another tip is getting sauces on the side. If you go out to eat and your dish comes with a sauce ask for it on the side. You would not believe how much of the sauce you actually eat (hint: it is not as much as they drench your food in). For the most part, during the week we eat at home. I got very lucky because Loren loves to cook, so he does most of the cooking. We are usually pretty good about having all meats in the house, we love to mix it up. We typically eat chicken and really the only replacement we do is ground turkey for ground beef, to me it tastes the same.
Lately we have been into cauliflower. I know we have all seen the pinterest posts about mashed cauliflower and cauliflower pizza, etc, so we wanted to see what all the rage is about. So the couple of things we have tried in rice cauliflower and mashed cauliflower. Now, the rice cauliflower is great. You basically chop the cauliflower up in the food processor and the put it in a skillet on the stove to flavor to your liking. The great thing about this is you can choose to season as you like. The past couple of meals where we have used it when we made Asian food. For the first meal we had it with stir fry which was amazing, instead of the rice we did the cauliflower, couldn’t tell the difference. The second time we did fried rice cauliflower, which basically consisted of some soy sauce, chicken, and egg with some few other spices and seasonings. It was great! As far as the mashed cauliflower goes, not the biggest of fans. I think more of its natural taste comes through. When I eat it as rice, we are mixing other things with it so you kinda forget you are eating cauliflower. With the mashed cauliflower, not so much. I just went about making the mashed cauliflower as I would regular mashed potatoes. We boiled the cauliflower, mashed it (I put it in the food processor to chop it up more), and added milk, butter, and salt. One thing I noticed when making the mashed cauliflower, it pretty much soaks up the milk; I ended up adding more milk than I would if I was making mashed potatoes. It wasn’t the worst thing ever, but I don’t know if I could replace mashed potatoes with cauliflower. It was my first go at it so I might just need to look up some recipes to see if I can improve. If you are looking for an alternative or trying to find replacement food for those heavy starches, I would definitely give cauliflower a try since it is way lower in carbs and calories than rice and potatoes. I am excited that we gave cauliflower a try and can’t wait to try out more recipes. If you have had any success with cauliflower please leave a comment, I would love to try it out!
Until next time…
Love always,
Amie
between the Gray margins 