Trials of a Long Haired Girl

Happy Tuesday!  I hope that everyone is having a great week so far!  It was a bit crazy yesterday, but I made it through.  I made a decision earlier this month that I could not go another year without making my Mom's traditional candy.  So this past weekend, I did two parchments sheets of turtles and 2 batches of fudge.  I didn't take a picture of the fudge, but I did one batch with nuts and one without.  It doesn't look professional or pretty, but they are definitely tasty.  This was always one of my favorite things around Christmas time.  I felt like if I didn't make them this year, I would feel like I was letting my Mom's legacy die and I just couldn't do that.  I also made some Grinch cookies for the Sunday School class.  I will share a picture of those along with the recipe.  What "candy" traditions do you have in your family?  Hope everyone has a great day!  

Happy Tuesday, friends!  One part of this journey is learning how to live life without feeling like you are deprived.  We had a wonderful event yesterday with much food!  I could not eat everything and found it difficult to track everything because there wasn't really anything that appeared to be the same.  I did the best I could.  I am a work in progress.  My sweet husband bought an air fryer so that we could make Poutine for an event at church.  Why Poutine?  He's from Canada and our event yesterday was for All Nations Sunday.  I got a suggestion from my mother-in-law for a dessert bar, which was really good.  I made  nanaimo bars  as a second option for our potluck with church.  They turned out well and were enjoyed by many of my church family.   Here is something that I've figured out for myself.  I can go really hard with this plan, working out daily or multiple times per day, eating fat free or the...

  Happy Tuesday, friends!  A week or two ago I was reading blogs and ran across one talking about the new Trader Joe's cauliflower crust.  I mentioned it to my sweet hubby and he decided to pick up a cheese pizza with a cauliflower crust for me.  We finally had it Saturday evening.  This definitely gets 2 thumbs up from my DH, DD15 and myself.  In fact, my DD15 liked it so well that she almost didn't believe that it was not a standard "pizza" crust.  Next time, I think I will probably put something else on it, but I did enjoy it just as it was.  Honestly, I really suggest trying it for yourself. And in other news...I have been making a point to steer clear of sugar filled treats.  I have been using honey along with fruit to sweeten my Greek Yogurt.  It has truly made a difference.  I decided to get myself a small treat for when I was craving something sweet.  We purchased some little mini peanut butter cups.  The se...

Good evening friends!  At the end of last week, a young lady at the T-Mobile store asked me about my Mom and my memories of her.  I do indeed have some very fond memories of my Mom.  She asked me to share some with her...which I was happy to do.  There are truly so many and I shared only a few.  One of which is when we couldn't afford to pay attention, she would tell me to get dressed.  Once I would get dressed we would head south to the Dallas area and we would go window shopping.  There were nights when we would stay home and play Yahtzee or rummy.  Other nights we would create ornaments out of pipe cleaners and beads or make bracelets with leather and beads.  These are only a few, but were such fond memories for me. I was getting a little lax again and my friend Kate invited me to a FitBit challenge that I had not done before.  It really gave me a kick in the behind and I've managed to exceed my goals most days.  I am trying ...

Do you have a Kroger card?  Have you participated in the Free Download Friday electronic coupons?  I can't say I have tried all of the things that have showed up, but I recently took advantage of the free Chobani Greek Yogurt Flip that they offered during that promotion.  I also took advantage of a sale at Tom Thumb and purchased some different flavors, which got me a rebate on Ibotta.  Since I've been doing well with my meal planning this week and pre-tracking, I realized I was going to end the day with far too many Smart Points left and wouldn't get my blue tracking dot for the day.  Left with this dilemma, I promptly went to the refrigerator to see what we had that would use up a chunk of those remaining Smart Points.  While this one is rather high on the Smart Points scale coming in at 9 Smart Points per serving, I had them to use.   Here's my take on it.  I'm not certain quite what I expected, but it did have the salty sweet flavor t...

My apologies for not keeping up with my posts, but I never found the time.  Last week, we decided to try going meatless all week at dinnertime.  I tried several recipes last week, but I wound up letting my husband handle this one.  We used this recipe as our "base":   Black Beans and Rice .   We truly took the recipe's suggestion to "use what you have on hand" to heart.  We used brown rice and omitted the corn as we have a family member that is allergic.  We replaced this with some riced broccoli.  Have you tried this?  I love mixing it in to things for an added veggie boost.  I have also used the Cauliflower rice to make some of my recipes lower in Smart Points in place of regular rice.  How do you bulk up your recipes? Here's a picture of the broccoli rice: 

To recap what I said last week, Halo Top has been recommended by multiple Weight Watcher friends.  This is my review of their Sea Salt Caramel: Honestly, this was not as creamy as what I would get from Baskin Robbins or even Blue Bell.  It was very sweet and it definitely helped curb my sweet tooth.   While it isn't what I would have every day, it is nice for a change of pace when my sweet tooth hits!  Again, this flavor is 3 SmartPoints per serving, based on putting the information in the Weight Watchers calculator.  I have included the picture of the container and Nutrition Facts from their webpage.   If you want to check out their other flavors and the specifics for each one, you can find it  here .  I have heard good things about most flavors.  I would definitely have them as well.   INGREDIENTS: Milk and cream, eggs, erythritol, prebiotic fiber, milk protein concentrate, sugar, buttermilk, butter, honey, vegetable glycerin...

 Halo Top has been recommended by multiple Weight Watcher friends, so I finally decided to give it a try.  Here's my review: Since I have been trying steer clear of most processed foods of late, but my sweet tooth has been getting the best of me.  I finally decided to give it a try.  I bought 3 flavors, but decided to try the Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough first.  Things I noted about it vs. Baskin Robbins or any other cookie dough ice cream I have had is that the pieces were much smaller.  It also tasted very sweet to me.  This particular flavor is 3 SmartPoints per serving.  I have included the picture of the Nutrition Facts from their webpage.  If you want to check out their other flavors and the specifics for each one, you can find it  here .  I have heard good things about most flavors.  I would definitely have this again, but it had a very sweet flavor to me.  Perhaps it tasted so sweet to me because I have been ste...

Today's edition of Try It Tuesday is about my first experience with try to do the Monthly Meal Planning/Preparation.  Let me start by saying that I am aware that I probably should have started smaller.  Doubling up my weekly meal plan for instance, but be that as it may, this is my experience...failures and all.  After a trip to Costco to purchase 2 Fryer Chickens and 4.5 pounds of grass fed beef and a trip to Walmart to buy disposable pans.  I should have known when I couldn't find the Glad Ovenware that I wanted that things were not going to go the way I wanted.  Honestly, I wanted this to work so much, but it didn't go as planned.  What happened?  I was unprepared and life happened.  On a positive note, I got to go with my future daughter-in-law to pick up her wedding dress.  *insert "EEEK!" here*   Am I giving up?  That would be a big old NO!  I am determined to finish cooking what I need to to get us through for the ne...

I'm back!  For this "Try It Tuesday", I have two things to share.  I have heard so much about using garbanzo beans in smoothies, so I finally decided to try it.  I discovered that it does help me stay fuller longer.  As I'm doing WW, I have only been using 1/4 cup (65 grams), which is 3 SmartPoints.  For me, I am finding that it is worth it.  It sustains me until lunch, if I need it to.  I am still using the Honeyville Organic Powdered Peanut Butter as well.   Something else new I tried this week, was homemade macaroni and cheese.  I am trying to make sure that I find a recipe that works for me and my family that I can also freeze for a future meal.  I am not a fan of having crunchy stuff on my macaroni and the recipe that my friend shared with me did not have any crunchy stuff on it, it was topped with more cheese.  My family enjoyed it and I suspect that I will need to tweak it a little bit for my crew.   As some of you...

So sorry that I did not post last week, but with preparations for Thanksgiving and such, I did not get around to trying something new with my smoothies or anything else.  So my original plan was to continue with the smoothies, but today I tried something new and decided I would blog about it instead.  We purchased this macaroni and cheese from Costco.   Side note here, I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE macaroni and cheese.  As a small child, I could tell if it wasn't Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.  Honestly, I know it frustrated some of my family greatly.  After my son came along, we switched from the "blue box" to Velveeta Shells and Cheese.  I've tried some of the generics and they are not all bad.  But I have really been trying to move towards real food.   What first attracted this to me?  I would have to say the price and amount in the box.  I've bought the organic options before and they are expensive.  After looking at the ingred...

I have decided to try something new, pun intended, and right now, I'm trying to find a way to decrease the amount of time that I am spending putting together my green smoothie each morning.  I am open for suggestions.   I am starting with a suggestion that I read in a blog about someone that freezes their smoothies.  I prepared 4 smoothies on Saturday.  Two were mixed antioxidant fruit green smoothies and two were cherry green smoothies.  The first thing that I figured out is that it generally takes longer for my frozen smoothies to thaw.  I have found that it has been taking about 2 days for them to thaw completely.  Things I noticed about the one I had this morning are that it was not as flavorful as the fresh ones.  It also had clumps in it.  I decided to run it through the blender again and added a couple of chocolate chips and a little more ginger.  It was still not as flavorful, but it was tolerable.  I will try a dif...