I found a recipe for spaghetti squash.... but no, I wanted lasagna. I found one that uses Butternut Squash for the noodles. Great.... I'm good to go. Here's what it looked like.
That's when I hit my first snag. There were no seeds in mine. Oh well, there was a hole at least where the seeds should have been. Onward..... my recipe then said to cut the squash into 1/8 inch slices using a mandoline. At least I had that tool. I set the dial to 1/8 and started. First attempt and I was successful. One beautiful slice, though a little misshaped. Two more good ones, then a problem.......the next slice got stuck in the mandoline. I had to pry it out. See, the outside of the squash was a hell of a lot softer than the inner part. I ended up using a huge knife to get my slices finished. I didn't meet the 1/8 in size, but they were less than 1/2. I spritzed them with olive oil, used a little Kosher salt, and roasted them in the over for 20 mins. I pulled out all the ones that were actually cooked (can you believe all the ones that were 1/8 inch were perfectly cooked?) and put the others back in for some more cooking. Finally they were all done.
I assembled the rest of the lasagna recipe, my normal one, and substituted the squash for the noodles. I baked it, and then Gary and I headed for the patio with our Proseco Champagne is hand. It looked so pretty. First bite? Well, let me tell you this.... it was definitely a diet dish. You wouldn't want to eat more than one portion,,,,, and then maybe only if you were starving. Gary finally found out the secret to making it delicious. You eat the sauce and cheeses separate from the squash noodles. Honestly, the roasted squash is delicious. It is just too sweet to mix with lasagna sauce.
My recommendation is NOT to try this at home. Anywhere else for that matter. We did enjoy the proseco.
I got up this morning, feeling terrible. Man, I ache all over, especially my lower left side. I immediately drank a "healthy" protein shake, then joined Gary for coffee and reading The Dallas Morning News. I made a decision to NOT exercise first thing, but to go for a bike ride with Eric (my son-in-law) sometime after 4 pm, when he gets off work. Instead of exercising in the am, I decided to go practice my golf game.
Off I go for Firewheel, in Garland. I get my bucket of balls, and hit about 15 balls with my warm up club, my 7 iron. Every ball went like it had wings, beautiful draw. I decided why mess with perfection, cause I could only get worse, and headed for the chipping area. I managed to get thru half my bucket before my lower left back started hurting. NO, WAIT ! It's not a new ailment, or one that is unique to me. It's the nature of the beast when practicing your short game. See, you're basically putting all your weight on one side. So instead of making myself really sore, I just quit and came back home.
Gary and I had a pretty uneventful day. No grand kids, no visitors, no arguments. Yup, it was that boring. I thought about chewing him out about something just to have something to do, but then I looked at the clock and it was 4pm. Instead of aruging with Gary or calling Eric about a bike ride, I decided to cook dinner. I braved the fiasco from last night, and decided to make diet meat loaf. Okay, healthy stuff. The wildest I got was using sauteed carrots, onions and celery. I was thinking "filler" when I did this. I continued with my normal recipe, using 1 pound 4 ounces of 90% ground beef. I got it in the oven, then I sat down with my recipe nutrition counter app, and guess what...... the total meat loaf only has 1990 calories. Damn, it didn't look that big, nor did I think I added that much junk. Hmmmm.
Anyway, I ate 1/4 of it, which was really too much,but it was damned good. Here is a picture of Gary's plate. He gets lots more rice than I did, and the same amount of meat. Also, I don't do the hot rolls or salad, and tonight I didn't do the wine, cause I was running too close on calories.
After dinner, Angie, Chloe and I went for a short bike ride. We rode thru the woods for about 25 minutes. Not that long, but I cannot ride immediately after dinner. Didn't know that until tonight, but I should have thought of that. Oh, the things we learn when exercising and dieting.
There is one thing I want to share with everyone. I have microwave popcorn in the house at all times. I found out today what one of the preservatives is.... TBHQ. What you may ask it that?
TBHQ stands for Tertiary Butylhydroquinone, which is a form of butane used to preserve foods, cosmetics, varnish, lacquers and resins. Though the FDA allows amounts of up to 0.02% of the total oils in food to be TBHQ, it's still -- well, made of butane. Consuming high doses (between 1 and 4 grams) of TBHQ can cause nausea, delirium, collapse, tinnitus, and vomiting, and has been proven to produce precursors to stomach tumors and damage to DNA in lab animals. Prolonged exposure can even be carcinogenic.
TBHQ is unrelated to another chemical that has caused quite a bit of controversy surrounding microwave popcorn -- diacetyl. Used to create artificial butter flavoring, this chemical cost flavoring manufacturers $100 million in damages from 2002 to 2007, due to an epidemic of lung disease among factory workers believed to be caused by diacetyl. One consumer actually ate enough butter-flavored microwave popcorn that he developed a serious lung condition. The good news is that popcorn manufacturers have been removing diacetyl from their recipe since 2007, making it a far safer product for consumers.
So much for my "healthy" snacking of popcorn. That WAS my go to snack when I was craving something salty. Well, I guess I'm going to just start popping it the old fashioned way. That will be a separate post, and aren't you glad.
I'll close with a quote from my friend Sharon...
"Apparently, I'm supposed to be more outraged by what Mitt Romney does with his money than by what Barack Obama does with mine."
No comments:
Post a Comment