Saturday Morning Snow Storm Smoothie

So sadly I have to work tonight but I woke up wanting to "make" something. I thought about using up some fresh cranberries and making pancakes, but i have to hit up the gym before work and didn't really think that pancakes would sit well on a treadmill run :(

I opted to go with my typical oatmeal and then make a banana smoothie with some frozen bananas i had in the freezer. I love making smoothies, but in the winter it's not a typical occurrence in my kitchen.
I modified a HG Banana Breeze smoothie and made up my own below (warning title is lame!)

Simple Banana Smoothies: serves two! (1 WW point each)
1 frozen banana (i freeze mine with the peel so just microwave it for 30 secs. to make it peelable)
1 cup of skim milk
6 packets of splenda
1/2 tsp of vanilla
8 ice cubes (i think it always helps to know exactly how many cubes to add for the right consistency!)

These hit the spot with a warm bowl of oatmeal. Erin and i make another smoothie using peanut butter, banana and granola that made her suggest using graham cracker or i thought even gingersnaps to give the smoothie another texture.
the possibilities are endless!

Happy Blending.

Key Lime in a Snow Storm

We are snowed in!! I love the snow so I don't mind snow storms at all.
I officially started Christmas vacation today AND my office closed early due to the looming snowstorm in New England! Erin also got out of school early and by the time she got home the snow had begun...

Now on to the title of this post. Since we were home at an odd hour, and dinner was a few hours away, what a perfect opportunity to sample another Larabar flavor! I wasn't as hungry because I had a late morning bowl of oatmeal, so I let erin pick the flavor. Key Lime Pie. Now I would have leaned toward Gingersnap or Cinnamon Roll, something "holiday" or a "festive flavor". But since I was only taking a sample I went with erin's pick.

IT WAS DELISH! At first bite its like you are biting into the crust of the pie, then the more you chew you get the tartness of the lime. Its really good and really true to it's name. Again the ingredients are all natural so the textures are wonderful and chewy. I even asked for a 2nd sample...so not like me :). I think this tops my list so far, even in the middle of winter. Erin says this is a close 2nd for her...

Which ones next....

Brown Paper Pacakages of POP CHIPS

About a month ago a got an email to send a friend a gift of Popchips. Basically you had to be one of the first 100 people to respond to an email to send someone samples of popchips. Not only had I never tried Popchips, but I knew that erin would love to try some healthy chips as well. She is really good about trying anything I bring home and we both love chips.

I had actually forgotten about this until erin called me the other day and said that a large box had arrived for her called POPCHIPS! I was psyched.

When I opened the box i was shocked by how many bags they gave us! Typically when you order "samples" they send you one, which is fine by me. Free is free. There were five different flavors: original, BBQ, salt and pepper, salt and vinegar and Parmesan garlic. They have about 120 cals. and 4 grams of fat. The portions are per bag, which I always love, and they give you a nice amount. I love salt and vinegar chips so I was especially excited to try that flavor...they were really good!!! If you have ever tried Soy Crisps they were almost exactly the same in taste and texture. Both erin and i liked them and would absolutely pick them over greasy chips.

I love getting mail! let me take it one step further, I love getting food mail! I love trying new products that are delicious and good for you. It is so reassuring to know that there are companies out there looking out for not only our health but our taste buds too!!

If you send it...i will eat it.

Larabar UPdate of flavors....

I recruited erin to help me sample the Larabars and so far we have sampled two!
I knew it would be hard with all the holiday snacks to stick to healthy ones, so we opted to try them together so they didn't have to be our entire snack time.

I started off with the flavors that I have duplicates of first so that I wouldn't be as disappointed if I loved the flavor but didn't have it anymore in my cupboard. May sound strange to you but erin totally knows me and suggested the exact same thing.

So the first flavor we tried was the Coconut Cream Pie bar. This one was also highly reviewed by Tina so I couldn't wait to try it. Erin and I both really liked it!!! It had such a unique texture and the flavors were quite striking. I could really taste the coconut flavor along with an almost graininess that shredded coconut can bring to dishes. I wasn't sure how erin would fare with these because in my mind they are quite "healthy" tasting, which I love! She normally shy's away from these type of products but she really really enjoyed the texture/flavor as well. She mentioned that it was more like a chewy cookie than a healthy granola bar. Well put! (that's why she is technically the writer and I am just a humble blogger). I saw the ingrediants were: dates, almonds, unsweetened coconut, coconut oil and cashews. I mean of course it's good!!

Next we moved on to Peanut Butter Cookie. I thought for sure erin would pick this over the coconut flavor but she still says that the first one "takes the pie" so to speak :). I don't think it had the peanut butter flavor i was expecting...with that said it was still great. Honestly the textures of these bars really shine!

Which flavor shall be next....I'm thinking something festive like Gingersnap perhaps...
Stay tuned...

Thai-tastic Tuesday Dinner

Although I have been doing alot of baking and making recently I haven't really made a meal in quite sometime. Between the holidays and parties most of my cooking has been snacks and cookies! Not that I'm complaining but eating soup and sandwich can get a bit boring! So when erin suggested that i cook something for our Tuesday date night I loved the idea...now what to make.

I spent my breakfast time perusing the usual sites to see if something grabbed my interest. I quickly decided I wanted to cook an ethnic dish, but quite frankly felt that i had exhausted all my Mexican dishes lately. I moved onto Indian food (which both erin and i love) but most of these had quite a bit of ingredients that I would have to purchase. Finally I remembered a recipe from my Hungry-Girl Recipe book: Rockin Shrimp Pad Thai. Unfortunately I can't link the recipe because you have to buy the book to see this one, but it's soooo worth it.

This recipe uses Tofu Shirataki noodles, which are extremely low in calories and high in fiber! I made a few alterations to my dish adding: brussels sprouts (surprise surprise), mushrooms and I add a bit more of the sauce to ensure all the veggies were coated. I stuck to the two packages of Tofu noodles as well as the measurements for the scallions and bean sprouts. I used egg whites instead of egg beaters just because that is what I had in the fridge! I know this isn't as helpful without the recipe but seriously, BUY THE BOOK. You won't run out of things to make!


It was a HUGE success! First off the recipe serves two and we even had leftovers (I think because I added so many veggies). At first bite the chili sauce is quite powerful. Now erin loves spice so she really enjoyed it but I had to thin mine out a bit with some soy sauce. Also we both agreed that although the sauce was great you didn't get a strong peanut flavor from this as you might expect. I think next time around I might cut back on the chili and up the amount of peanut butter. Something to note however is that I read alot that when you want to lose weight to add hot spices to your food as it can cause you to slow down/limit the amount of food you eat...that sure worked last night.

It was really good though! Both erin and I commented on how nice textures of the egg whites and bean sprouts were in the dish.

I must say...It was Thai-tastic!!

Christmas cookies, crafts and cocktails (or mocktails)

What's better than cooking/crafting and cocktails with a Christmas theme? That basically sums up alot of my loves (and erin was there so that's all of them!). When erin and I were invited to a day of Christmas fun in Peekskill, NY not even a three hour car ride could stop this Rudolph mobile from heading there! Our friends Terra and Scott were gracious enough to host this extravaganza and our friend Katie joined us with her sewing machine in tow!

As the title suggests Katie and Terra had planned out a day full of baking and christmas crafts. I definitely stuck to the baking, but erin took the day to hand paint everyone individual ornaments. She also took a break to help decorate some sugar cookies...which is where my baking day begins. Terra had picked up a table full of goodness to create goodies with. We had a long laundry list of baking to do so after a quick trip to Micheal's (for crafting supplies) Terra and I began the baking. She swears by the packaged Sugar cookie mix and instead of using butter she substitutes a 1/3 cup of oil and a tablespoon of water. Because we were doing roll-out cookies I had to add alot of flour to the mix while rolling them out (thanks katie!). The first attempt at rolling out was quite frustrating because the mix was way too sticky, but after katie's tip I just kept adding flour until i got the consistency needed to keep a nice cookie shape. we had picked up a large tin of Christmas cut outs so we had alot to choose from!

I made two batches of these suckers and we all took a break to decorate them in all of our...um...creative ways :). I'm not going to lie some were kinda scary, who knew that snowmen look frightening with red sprinkle eyes? haha. And you know when you are sick of decorating when you start just adding sprinkles to everything. Oh another katie tip: if you want to make brown reindeer, red and green frosting make a nice 'reindeer brown'!

While I was making these Terra stirred up some tasty, and easy fudge using the recipe on the back of the Fluff container. who knew?! We didn't add the nuts to this and almost added twice the chocolate needed but Terra rescued it just in time. But i do wonder...could there ever be too much chocolate?

The next baking, or should I say making, task was No-Bake Cookies! I added the ! point to emphasis how much I was looking forward to helping out with this one. I might have asked Terra about five times when we were going to start these. They were so easy to make, and so easy to eat too! For some reason i always thought that no-bakes had to sit for awhile to solidify but we sampled these after only about 1/2 hour of sitting. The nice part about this too is that you can make them as large, or as small as you want. This is NO baking involved so these are good to work on while you have something else going in the oven. YUM.

After baking all these recipes I thought I would share one of my own with the group. I sorta figured that we had plenty of goodies to eat, but what about something to drink? Over breakfast i confirmed that we were all egg nog lovers, so naturally I wanted to make my HG Egg Nog. The ingredients are pretty simple and its A-MAZE-ING. You basically just combine all of these in a blender:

5 cups Light Vanilla Soymilk ; 1 small (4-serving) package Jell-O Sugar Free Fat Free Instant Pudding mix, Vanilla ; 6 no-calorie sweetener packets (like Splenda) ; tsp. rum extract or imitation rum extract ; 1/2 tsp. ground nutmeg

I doubled this recipe and I also DO NOT add the rum extract. I don't partically like the flavor of rum so that was a no brainer. I also eyeball the nutmeg and always end up adding wayyyy more. It's just so flavorful! Obviously you could add real rum to this recipe. **one important step is to let it sit in the fridge for at least an hour. This allows the pudding to make the mix a bit thicker giving it that authentic egg nog creaminess.

Couldn't you just drink the whole pitcher?:

We had an amazing day! festive and fun.
We all vowed to make this a new Christmas tradition.

Amish Friendship Bread...is not my friend

I mentioned in my Thanksgiving post that erin's mom had shared Amish Bread with all of us. On top of that she also picked me as one of the "pass along" friends to continue the recipe.
I was super excited to try it and when you pass it along it comes with a page of instructions as well (i linked the recipe above because it also explains where the tradition originated).

In true fashion when it came to add in the next ingredients (you spend a few days just stirring the starter up) I wanted to try and make it a bit more healthy.

On Day 10 you:

Add 1 cup flour (I used whole wheat)

1 cup sugar (splenda)

1 cup milk.

Stir. Take out 3 cups and place 1 cup each into three separate plastic containers. Give one cup and a copy of this recipe to three friends. To the balance (a little over one cup) of the batter, add the following ingredients and mix well.

1 cup oil (applesauce)

1/2 cup milk

3 eggs

1 tsp vanilla

In a separate bowl combine the following dry ingredients and mix well:
2 cups flour (1/2 wheat and 1/2 white)

1 cup sugar

1-1/2 tsp baking powder

2 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp baking soda

1 - (5.1 oz) box instant vanilla pudding (the only thing I had was Fat free/sugar free)

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup nuts (omitted, erin doesn't like nuts in bread)
Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients. Mix and pour into two well greased and sugared bread pans. Bake at 325 degrees for 1 hour.

Okay so...didn't turn out as good as Mrs. K's. I think that too many substitutions and primarily the whole wheat flour caused it to be a bit dense. The flavor was okay but it just didn't seem to have the airiness that I think it needed.

Also in full disclosure I didn't use a ceramic bowl which the recipe clearly calls for!

I think i may have messed a bit too much with this one. I ended up freezing one of the loafs to take home for Christmas (it turns out my brother is a HUGE fan of this bread). I think I will see what they all of think of it as well.

At least friendships don't end over crappy bread!!

(oh and by the way I chose not to pass this one along...:)