Eh Veggies and then some amazing Leftovers.

Sunday night was some veggies over rice and some leftover layered salad.  It was edible.  We finished off the veggies and salad and stored the rice for later use.  I always make lots of rice.
Anyway the veggies consisted of onion, mushrooms, zucchini, a couple of the little sweet peppers and one of the larger green peppers.  cooked up in some hearty veggie broth and a little bit of flour to make it gravy like with salt and pepper.  I think it would have been better with more mushrooms and salt.  I am usually very stingy when cooking with salt.

Monday, the girl child didn't have school so I cooked up some eggs for me and the kids.  I made mine with onion and topped it with some of the grape tomatoes. And had a piece of toast with local honey and a mandarin orange on the side.

Then Monday night was once again Krav night.  So I made some "burgers" out of the leftover rice and some garbanzo beans, sweet peppers, onion, celery, garlic, salt, an egg and oats for the boy to pop in the oven before we got home.  I also put him in charge of making a fruit salad to go with it.
He made a lovely fruit salad with some pineapple, strawberries and apples.  He made a lot of it.  I know what I am having for lunch tomorrow.

A Somewhat Healthy Lunch

Lunch today is not leftovers, mainly because the soup I have leftover is actually on my meal plan as part of dinner tonight, and I was craving hummus.
Lunch is a roasted red pepper hummus sandwich with butter lettuce on toasted 9 grain bread from the co-op and an orange.  If I am still hungry afterwards I might make a dessert out of an apple and some peanut butter.
I am not sure if you have noticed that I keep my meals pretty simple.  The easier they are to fix, the less likely we are to eat out.  That is the bane that we really fight against.  That thing that kills our budget and our health.
The food still needs to be tasty, and needs to have variety to keep us from being too bored with it to also eliminate the temptation to eat out.  The co-op helps with that, since I have to figure out how to make meals from what they give me and it prevents me from getting in a rut of  buying the same produce over and over again.  What I buy outside the co-op is the same foods over and over.  I get my long grain brown rice, my frozen corn, my frozen peas, canned oragnic tomato products, hummus, Jif natural peanut butter (crunchy for me, creamy for the husband, the kids eat either), pasta ect.  Only rarely will I get something unusual, and that is usually something we probably would do better to forgo anyway.  With the co-op we are getting variety, and it is a healthy variety.  Food allergies make it all the more complicated with variety.  Not just our allergies, but those of close friends too.

A Potluck Contribution

I love game night.  Not only is it a good time, but there are just lots of cool people involved.  But when you get lots of cool people together for food, there are food issues to deal with.  Our Sunday night group have folks on Paleo diets, vegetarian diets, allergies to corn, soy, shell fish, and dairy.  So I like to bring fruits and veggies. 
Tonight's offering is a simple fruit salad.  I have 2 apples and 3 blood oranges from the co-op, and a 3 berry frozen mix and some frozen strawberries that I quartered.  I will slice a banana to add just before serving and I added some lemon juice to it all to keep the apples from browning.  As the berries thaw they should make a nice bright sweet sauce for the fruit salad.
The husband added some sugar.

Reworked Leftovers - Stuffed Bell Pepper Edition

Last night's lentil stew was mixed with equal parts brown rice and stuffed into bell pepper halves and topped with tomato sauce and baked at 350 degrees until the peppers were nice and tender, which was nearly an hour.
For a side we cut up 2 apples, a pear some strawberries and tossed with some blueberries and the juice of half a lemon and called it fruit salad.

There is lots leftover for lunches.  I will confess to having two peppers (BTW, that is a salad plate you are seeing, so while a large pepper, we are not talking something too huge).  I had a larger breakfast that usual and missed lunch, and was starving by dinner, which ended up late.

In other news I finally made it to the gym for the first time in two months.  I got my release from the doctor yesterday and couldn't wait to get back to some activity.   I met up with a friend and we spent a full hour in the pool.  Not swimming, but walking.  I am working up to my activities again after all.

I also weighed myself since I was at the gym and access to a scale.  I continued to loose some weight and am down a whole 27.5 lbs.  About 8.5 since my surgery in early December.  Which means that while I have lost an average of half a pound a week since joining the gym, I have been loosing a bit more than a pound a week since I went dairy free.  My weight loss did pick up after going vegetarian, but not as much as it has since going diary free as well.  Of course that 27.5, does include the fibroid that was removed, which does skew the half a pound a week average.  I think before going vegetarian, I was only loosing a pound a month.

I would like to keep my weight loss average at about one pound a week.  With the gym I want to ton, build my stamina back up and get myself active again.  I think it would be nice to take up running again.  That would be much easier on my knees if I weighed just a bit less.  And I think some other activities would be fun too.