Thrifty, Tasty Tuesday... on a Wednesday?

         I know, I know, it isn't Tuesday! Sadly, I couldn't get near my computer yesterday because a certain young man was finishing up a book report. Apologies for the delay! Last time on Thrifty, Tasty, Tuesday, I talked about grilling and freezing chicken to have on-hand for quick dinners. Here's a soup I pulled together using pre-cooked chicken and things I had in my pantry. It was easy to prepare because almost everything comes from a can. Now, I'm not a fan of canned vegetables as a rule. Fresh or frozen is usually the way I prefer to go. However there are some exceptions to the rule and they're all in this recipe.

Tex-Mex Chicken Soup

8 cups low-sodium chicken broth

1 T. cider vinegar

½ cup brown rice

1-1 ½ cups of cooked chicken

1 can corn

1 can tomatoes with jalapenos

1 can Kuner's Chili beans

1 can black beans

2 teaspoons chili powder

½ teaspoon chipotle powder

salt & pepper to taste

Bring chicken broth to a boil in a large saucepan.

Add brown rice and simmer for 45 minutes.

Add remaining ingredients and cook for an additional 15-30 minutes.

Serve with tortilla chips and shredded cheese. 

      If you're looking for more quick and thrifty meal ideas, check out my new recipes page.

The Zucchini that Took Over the World

...maybe not the world. Just my garden...

            No matter what we plant in our garden, the thing that grows most abundantly is zucchini. Zucchini is best when it is picked small—no more than 8 inches long. But it grows FAST. If you skip a day or two in the garden, your zucchini (which ironically is Italian for little squash) ends up looking like this…

Last year's bumper crop.

            When zucchini gets that big it isn’t as tasty, the skin is tough and the seeds are really big and unpleasant to eat. But it doesn’t have to be destined for the compost pile. They can be used in recipes that call for grated zucchini. Be sure and slice the zucchinis lengthwise and scrape out the seeds with a spoon before grating. The King Arthur Flour Company has this wonderful recipe for zucchini pancakes. This version of the recipe calls to add oil to the pancake batter. Omit the oil from the batter and fry the pancakes in olive oil. It’s sort of like the Italian answer to the latke. I serve it with pasta and marinara sauce. I’d love to tell you they’re a great way to get kids to eat their vegetables, but some children I know (not mentioning any names) see the green and are automatically suspicious.  Zucchini Pancakes freeze really well so you can make a big batch and put some aside for when zucchini is out of season.

            I’ve mentioned before that I make muffins every Saturday (unless we have an 8:00 soccer game—I’m not Super Woman). This week I tinkered around with a few variations on zucchini muffins and came up with this recipe. Everyone in my house thought they were delicious—until someone noticed the green specks. I may start blind folding one of my children before he eats.

Zucchini Spice Muffins

Dry Ingredients

2 cups All Purpose Flour

1/2 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. baking powder

2 tsp. cinnamon

1/2 tsp. nutmeg

1/4 tsp. ground cloves

2 beaten eggs

1/3 cup vegetable oil

1/2 cup buttermilk

1 tsp. vanilla extract

1 1/2 cups grated zucchini

1.) Spray muffin tins with non-stick spray and set aside

2.) *Preheat oven to 500º

3.) Wisk dry ingredients together in a large bowl.

4.) Mix remaining ingredients together in another bowl.

5.) Gently stir the liquid ingredients into the dry. Do not over mix. Over mixing quick bread batter makes tough muffins.

6.) Fill muffin tins approximately 2/3 full.

7.) Put into oven and lower temperature to 375º

8.) Bake for about 20 minutes. Muffins will be golden in color and a toothpick inserted into one will come out clean.

9.) Let your muffins rest for a few minutes before removing them—they’ll come out of the tins more easily.

* Preheating your oven to 500 degrees then dropping the temperature helps the muffins rise.

            Do you have an abundance of anything from your garden? What do you do with it? I’d love to hear your ideas.

Eat, Drink and be Merry… for Tomorrow we Diet

            I’ve never been a big fan of New Year’s resolutions. If you want to change something in your life, just do it. Why wait for some special date on the calendar. Besides, most resolutions involve giving up some form of comfort—food, nicotine, sitting around on your butt. Who wants to do that during the darkest, coldest time of the year? One of my favorite bloggers (who happens to be my niece) once wrote, “I think January is a terrible time to resolve anything. January is cold. January is long. January is when you lie in bed and eat pie.” The only resolution I ever really enjoyed keeping was one I made before my children were born. I decided to stop buying boring underwear. That was a fun resolution—but I didn’t even keep that one for long. A few months later I was wearing maternity underwear.

This year, however, my physician has told me that I need to drop fifteen pounds. Normally, if given medical advice, I follow it immediately. It’s one thing when your favorite jeans are snug.  It’s another thing altogether when your weight raises your physician’s eyebrows. My dad had his first angioplasty when he was in his mid-fifties and his father never saw sixty-five. I take heart health very seriously. Since Dr. M’s orders came mid-way between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I went home and started making fudge instead of starting a diet. I don’t diet at Christmas. I enjoy myself. I eat prime rib and apple pie on Christmas Day and my Aunt Diane’s meatballs and my uncle Brad’s chicken cutlets on Christmas Eve and my husband’s rugelach whenever no one is looking. I wash it all down with red wine or bourbon. I. Love. Christmas.

            Now even the beef and barley soup made from the bones of the Christmas roast are gone. It’s time to follow doctor’s orders. Exercise won’t be a problem. I love putting in time at the gym. I love getting sweaty and really earning a long hot shower. I really like being able to do more push ups than some of the big scary looking muscle heads at the Y. Sadly, I can’t out-push-up the muscle heads these days. For a variety of excuses reasons I haven’t been my exercise fanatic self for the past few months. In addition to not being quite so svelte, I’m also not as strong as I was a year ago and that bothers me more than anything. I’m also not as fast. I ran a 5K on Thanksgiving and added eight minutes to my time since my last 5K two years ago. Eight minutes—plenty of people can run a mile in that time (not me of course—maybe if I were being chased by a gun-toting bear I could run that fast for a whole mile).

            My challenge is going to be food. You know how some people say their weakness is sugar or chips or fried foods. My weakness is… food. All of it. I can’t stand the idea of giving up a particular food group like carbs or fat. If I give myself too many rules, I’m going to break them. I think I’ve found my best bet. The editors of Prevention magazine have come up with a book called The 400 Calorie Fix. The idea is pretty simple. You get to eat four, 400-calorie meals a day or three 400-calorie meals plus two snacks that equal 400 calories. 1,600 calories a day is a long way from deprivation and still a big enough cut from the way I’ve been eating. Mixing that with a renewed commitment to working out should get me started. I’ll let you know how it goes. But I promise not to be one of those people who talk about nothing besides their diet. But I’ll tell you this, the minute I can do more push-ups than the guys at the gym, I’m telling everyone.

Run Vickie! Run!

            I’m a runner. That sounds weird to me. I didn’t start running until well into my thirties. I wasn’t a high school or college athlete. The last time I played a team sport was intramural basketball in the 5^th grade. Some of my former teammates read this blog. Maybe they can tell you about the only basket I ever made—into the wrong net. Who knew you changed sides at the half (everyone but me apparently)? If I hadn’t been the shortest girl in school my athletic skills still would have been lacking. One might even say hopeless. Even though sports were a mystery to me I was in pretty decent shape. I danced and did Jane Fonda’s workout daily during high school—sometimes twice a day. I guess that’s why I stayed under 100 pounds. I was a little obsessed. I didn’t even know I was thin. There is no skinny like teenaged skinny and there is no stupid like teenaged stupid (apologies to my nieces of that age who are a thousand times smarter than I was back then).

            This week I realized that the running shoes that I bought right after the kids went back to school in September were still looking really new. I think they had only been on my feet once or twice. Not coincidentally, I noticed that my church clothes were uncomfortably tight around the waist. I try to avoid stepping on scales—it makes me crazy, but I knew I had packed on a few pounds. The holidays are rapidly approaching and this is no time to diet. Who am I kidding? Diet—is there a good time to diet? It’s time to rev up the old metabolism. So on Wednesday, I strapped on those still-shiny Saucony running shoes and headed for the Y.

            I got a lot of “Gee we haven’t seen you in a while” sort of comments from the folks at the gym. I work out in the middle of the day so almost everyone else there is a retiree. They are a chatty bunch and they seem to like me. I think they think I’m funny—watching a tiny girl lift heavy things makes them laugh. Plus, I find it very motivational to see old people running and lifting weights. I figure, if they can get there I have no excuses. One day I ran into my uncle (great uncle actually) when I was on my way out of the Y. He said, “I come here every day and I’m 87 years old.” I said to him, “You’re 87 years old because you come here everyday.”

            So I picked my favorite treadmill—second one from the right and pressed manual. I set the incline on 0.5 and the speed at 3.5 to warm up. I popped in my ear buds and started walking.

            At 3.0 minutes I started getting bored. Was it time to up the speed? Surely I don’t need to warm up that much. But I kept walking until after Darius Rucker finished his first song.

            At 5.14 minutes I upped the speed and started jogging. “Wow,” I thought to myself. “It’s been a while.”

            At 6.14 minutes I thought, “Maybe I should have walked for longer.”

            At 7.32 minutes I thought, “Damn, my knees hurt. Maybe I should walk for a while.”

            At 9.02 minutes I thought, “Okay, I’m almost to ten minutes. When this song is over I’ll let myself walk.” But the next song was “Sin Wagon” by the Dixie Chicks. I can’t walk during that song—it’s a running song if ever there was one.

            At 15.17 minutes I thought, “Hmm… that wasn’t so bad. Too bad this sports bra was designed by someone who had never been the victim of gravity, aging or a nursing child. I think I can make it through one more song.”

            By minute 18 or so I reached that runners high people talk about. Those endorphins start pumping and you feel really good. The trick is to get there. Before I was a runner, other runners had told me the first mile was the hardest. It got easier after that. I didn’t believe them until I pushed myself beyond a mile. Once you get to that mile, you want to get to another one and another one. Something might hurt—but it doesn’t bother you enough to stop.

            So I ran that day for about 40 minutes. I talked myself into sticking with it, one song at a time. Each moment my body made some excuse for me to stop, but I talked myself into running for one more song until I didn’t want to make excuses anymore. I managed to run a little over three miles. It wasn’t my best time, but I did it and I felt great.

            A lot of things are like that in life: starting a new job, cleaning the attic, teaching a child to ride a bike, directing a play. It’s always the beginning that is difficult and scary. Once you make some progress and find your rhythm it all comes together. You just need to ignore those aches and pains (whether they are physical, psychological or emotional) and keep on running. You’ll get there.

My fantastic coach and husband with me at my first race. He graciously agreed to run at my beginners pace.

Party Hardy

(...or as we say in New England "Pahty Hahdy")

I come from a BIG family that loves to celebrate. “Eat, drink and be merry” is a motto we take very seriously. Whether it was a family picnic or a first communion or a graduation party, all of the festivities I can remember from my childhood featured tables ready to collapse from the results of many hours of labor in everyone’s kitchens. The food was wonderful and so was the company. At some point in growing up and owning a home and starting a family I forgot that it was the social part that was important. Yes, the food was amazing. But hanging out with my cousins and other relatives was a blast. We left every occasion thinking that we ought to do this more often.  

When my son Owen was born I pulled together a party to celebrate the day of his Christening. There were sandwich platters, pasta salad, potato salad, cole slaw, and all kinds of sweets made from scratch. All this while I had a newborn who nursed every two to three hours—he was born late (2 weeks), huge (9.8 lbs.), and hungry. I’m not telling you this to brag about my catering-while-sleep-deprived skills. I’m telling you this to illustrate how stupid I was. I never actually asked for help. And when I accepted the help that was offered I was less than gracious about it. Thank God my mother has thick skin and understands how psychotic a new mother can be. She would have been more than happy to help—she’s an amazing cook, a former caterer, and a retired Home Ec teacher. Did I ask her for help? Nope. See? Stupid.

This was the Christmas I decide to keep it simple by just having dessert. Psycho.

While clearing away the debris of our pre-trick-or-treating Halloween party this morning I reflected on how much more fun I have when I throw parties these days. It’s been eight (fast moving) years since Owen’s Christening and I’ve gotten much smarter—about entertaining anyway. It all started last spring. One of my fantastic neighbors held an Easter egg hunt for all the kids. They ordered a couple of big sheet pizzas and some calzones from a local take-out place. Someone made cupcakes and a few people brought beverages. No one stressed and everyone had a great time.

Owen’s First Communion was a few weeks off and I hadn’t planned a menu yet. While we were walking home from the egg hunt I said to him, “Hey Owen. How would

 you feel if we had pizza for your First Communion party?”

            “Great! From where?”

            “It’s your party. You get to choose.”

            “Yay! Papa Gino’s” he yelled.

            I ordered pizza and calzones and a cake. I made a huge salad and a few appetizers. I asked my mother to make up a fruit platter (she claims she isn’t creative but her fruit displays are works of art). I didn’t break my back or stress everyone out.

It isn't as fancy, but a call to the bakery is better than Valium!

            Something cool happened. No one missed my psychotic display of homemade goodness. Owen was excited we were having the food of his choosing for his party. We still ate, drank and were merry. I thoroughly enjoyed my little bear’s big day. I relaxed, drank wine and ate food that someone else made. Most of all, I got to enjoy the company of some of my favorite people—my family.