Wednesday, January 11, 2012

something new

Earlier this month I posted my resolutions for the year. Of course one involved losing weight. I've set my goal to lose five pounds a month. It's January 11, and I just weighed for the first time. Now I've got to really get busy to lose those five pounds by the end of the month. Crap!

And I resolved to exercise 30 minutes a day for at least five days of the week. Maybe I should just change that to four. Four seems to work so much better for me. Four it is.

So, I'm not doing so great with those two, but it's not all a fail. I have been cooking some new recipes. This requires me to do a bit lot more meal planning than I have normally done. But I've picked some yummy recipes to try.

Tonight I cooked a recipe from a Rachel Ray cookbook. It was a black bean soup (or as she says stoup) and monte cristo sandwiches. In all my years of eating, I've never had a monte cristo sandwich. Why is that?



The soup was pretty easy. Chop some garlic, jalapeno, onion, celery, and bell pepper. Throw these in a pot with some olive oil, add some cumin, bay leaves, a can of tomatoes, three cans of black beans, and some chicken stock. The recipe called for coriander. I didn't have any. The grocery store didn't have any. The soup didn't get any. Oh, and some Tabasco - it did get Tabasco.

One reason I chose this recipe is that my daddy and step-mom gave us some Harry and David's jellies for Christmas. The monte cristo sandwich needed a pepper jelly. I had a pepper and onion relish that I thought would work.


The sandwich also had turkey, ham, and pepper jack cheese. I dipped it in a milk and egg concoction that was spiced up with some more Tabasco, then cooked it like a grilled cheese sandwich.


Add a bowl of soup and it was a meal.


Tonight's supper was a win. Just a bit of chopping and the rest of the soup was opening cans and dumping them in the pot. And the sandwich was just a fancy grilled cheese. It only took about 30 minutes to prepare it all. And there's enough soup leftover for lunch tomorrow.

Any suggestions for next week's new recipe???

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