SINS, day two

I'm really thankful that I planned and prepared healthy quick meals this week!! If you would have told me this past Sunday that I would be entering the SINS Blog Transformation Challenge on Wednesday I would have laughed. I would have thought I couldn't hang with such amazing athletes. Then I got really inspired reading about it and realized that I'm an amazing Cathlete in my own right. This challenge is really one to myself and becoming accountable via my blog to other awesome and fit-minded bloggers. I've gotten a lot of encouragement from those other bloggers already. It's fantastic, inspirational and motivating! Thanks everyone!!

When stress peaked out this afternoon I thought about shoving a bunch of M&Ms in my mouth. I didn't, though, because I knew it would mess up my carb percentage for the day and I just wouldn't 'give in' on day 2 of this challenge. Oh, and I also had 2 healthy and ready to eat meals in the fridge. YES!! I love when my planning skills rescue me!

One of those meals is Kale-Bean salad, and the other is Deluxe Tuna Salad from Holly Clegg's Trim & Terrific cookbook.

It starts with these ingredients

Add a couple of these, too

And turns into this beautiful dish!

It's delicious! I love the veggies in it!

Those 2 anti-cancer packed mini-meals gave me the fuel to jump my way through Cathe's 4 Day Split Bootcamp cardio workout this afternoon. My post-chemo knees usually avoid this one due to all the jumping. However, since I've been doing Cathe step workout sans the step lately my knees have been happier so I decided to follow the rotation schedule and give it a go. I felt incredibly energetic and my knees held up very well (though tomorrow I may be singing a different song!?). My almost 3 year old niece jumped and ran along with me off and on. She was so cute, and it was fun to have someone to high 5 after a few of the drills. 

Onto Day 3 of 60.... 

Remembered what I Forgot and then Some

I remembered the post I partially wrote in my head this morning. Chemo-brain is such a weird thing! I'm ready for my pre-chemo brain to come back- just for the record.

This past week I've had a cold. Why is this post-worthy? Because it's my first cold since chemo and it didn't put me in the hospital. Chemo tanks your immune system and messes with your mind in the process. During chemo my family and I were extra clean. I didn't kiss anyone, and no one was allowed to kiss me. Everyone washed theirs hands a lot. The house was Lysol-ed often. I did my very best not to touch other people, or touch any thing on the rare occasions I left home. That level of protectiveness was necessary because even catching even a little cold or infection could have easily put me in the hospital with a much bigger problem. My body just couldn't fight any infections or colds off. A hard way to live, but eventually I grew accustomed to it.

I've been done with chemo for 5 months and I'm slowly learning that it's okay to let go of that level of protectiveness. Getting a kiss from one of my nieces or nephews is extra sweet now and so is holding their adorable tiny hands. I still wash my hands a lot. I still instinctively avoid touching people and things when I'm not home. My hands look a lot older now thanks to all that washing.

 I survived my first post-chemo cold! When I first started getting sick I panicked a little, I'll admit it. Thankfully, it seems that my immune system is up and running nice and strong again. That's a victory to me!

One of the main ways I help my immune system to stay strong is by eating cleanly and healthfully. Honestly, I've been short on veggies the past couple weeks. I didn't plan to include veggies in my week, so they didn't make much an appearance. Veggies are funny that way. So I made a veggie packed meal plan for the next several days. Many thanks to Holly Clegg and her Trim and Terrific cookbook! Lunches will be either Deluxe Tuna Salad or Diana Dyer's Kale-Bean salad. (I am in love with this blog!) Dinners will be Black Bean and Spinach Enchiladas, Cheesy Shrimp Rice Casserole and South Indian Curried Chicken.

You may be wondering what's for breakfast? I either have 1 whole Eggland's best egg plus 2 egg whites with a slice or two of reduced-carb whole grain no HFCS added bread with 1/2- 1 cup of fruit and green tea, or oatmeal with 1/2 cup of fruit, whey and greens protein powder, ground up flax seeds, sometimes a tablespoon of chia seeds and green tea. Yum!

Pictures and recipes coming over the next few days.... No drooling on your keyboards!

How do you welcome veggies into your meals?

Experimental Food Blog

I made the broccoli soup yesterday and decided to pick up the camera to try out food blogging. Here goes!!

Broccoli Soup from Holly Clegg's Trim & Terrific (original) cookbook:

The Goods:
4 cups fresh broccoli florets
1/4 cup water
1 onion, chopped
2/3 cup all purpose flour (not shown)
1.5 cups skim milk
28 ounces fat free vegetable broth or chicken broth
1 cup shredded reduced-fat Monterey Jack cheese
salt and pepper to taste
1/8 tsp dried thyme

Cook broccoli in a microwave dish in the water, cover for 8- 10 minutes or until tender (mine were tender in 6 minutes). Drain and set aside.

In a large pot coated with cooking spray, saute the onion over medium heat until softened, about 3- 5 minutes.


Broccoli and onions are great cancer fighting foods!!

In a small bowl (or measuring cup) mix together the flour and milk.

Stir the flour and milk mixture into the onion. Gradually add the vegetable broth (impossible to photograph since I was home by myself) and the broccoli.

Stir to combine. Cook over medium heat until the mixture comes to a boil, stirring constantly *this is important!*, for about 5 minutes, or until thickened.

Transfer the soup to a food processor or blender, puree the soup, and return to the pot over low heat.

Three cheers for food processors!!!

Be careful!! Hold on to that blade! Don't let THIS happen to you! Okay, so it wasn't really that traumatic. I didn't hurt myself at all, but it was a pain to have to fish out the blade from the hot soup. Try to avoid it.

Add the cheese, salt, pepper (another cancer fighting food!), and thyme, cooking until heated through and the cheese is melted. Serve immediately. Or you can do what I did, leave it on low heat and stir it every few minutes until everyone is ready to eat.

Somehow I didn't get a picture of the final product. Bad food blogger, bad bad!! So here's a picture of the leftovers. It's a very yummy soup! Give it a try!

The nutritional info: Serves 6- 8.
Calories 121, Protein 9g, Carbs 15g, Fat 3g, Calories from fat 24%, Saturated fat 2g, Dietary Fiber 2g, Cholestrol 9mg, Sodium 576mg
Diabetic Exchanges (I love that Holly Clegg includes this!): 0.5 lean meat, 0.5 starch, 1.5 vegetable

Since I was in the kitchen anyway I decided to roast the squash for future use. The butternut squash is for the Butternut Squash Enchiladas that we'll eat for family dinner on Sunday (along with a Taco Pie for those members of the family who require meat). The acorn squash is for something else, but I'm not going to tell you what just yet. Hehehe!!

Oh winter squash you roast up sooo beautifully!!! 

    

A Yummy Plan

I did one of my favorite things last night. I surrounded myself with issues of Clean Eating  and Eating Well magazines along with one of my favorite cookbooks Trim & Terrific by Holly Clegg and put together an eating plan for next week. I also ended up throwing in a Vegetarian Times  recipe that my Mom found last week.  After 2 hours I had a plan and felt that ol' familiar feeling of control over my eats. I like it a lot! 


The part I love the most about Clean Eating magazine is the chart of 2 weeks worth of meals and snacks in every single issue complete with a shopping list and nutritional info for each day. Isn't that awesome? It's simply brilliant!! It helps for planning, of course, and it also helps on days when my mind has gone blank and all I can think to eat for lunch requires mayonnaise. You can check out a free 7 Days of Clean Meals chart on their website, click on the menus and recipes tab.


On a side note, I do not receive ANY income or benefits whatsoever from the products I talk about in this blog. I'm just sharing my humble opinion.


My lifetime food goal is to eat more vegetables. I'd like to average at least 5 servings of veggies each week for right now. So, I'm always looking for recipes that include veggies and, therefore, find myself making all kinds of salads. I like my salads to have it all- whole grains, protein, just the right amount of healthy fat and vegetables. It's just easier for me to make whole-meal salads than to figure out how to make 3 different foods work together. Sometimes salads start out as one thing, and then transform into something else. That's a different post, though. 


The salad I chose for this week is called Merrill's Tuna Rice Salad from Clean Eating's Nov/Dec 2010 issue. It's a simple chop and mix recipe:
2 6oz cans of tuna, in water, drained
1 stalk of celery, chopped
3 green onions, chopped
1 jalapeño pepper, chopped (I'll probably only use 1/4 of a pepper thanks to chemo-induced heartburn)
1 clove garlic, minced
1 T lemon juice
1/2 tsp celery seed
1 T low-sodium soy sauce
2 T 100% apple juice concentrate
1 tsp dried basil
1 cup frozen peas, thawed
1 8oz can water chestnuts, drained and chopped
2 large carrots, grated
2 cups cooked brown rice, cold
1 tsp finely grated fresh ginger
2 T minced fresh parsley
Combine all the ingredients. Refrigerate several hours. Enjoy! Makes 7 one-cup servings. 


I'll also be making Butternut Squash Enchiladas and a Broccoli Soup recipe from Holly Clegg's original Trim & Terrific Cookbook. I've also got hard boiled eggs, non-hard-boiled eggs, oatmeal, raw carrots, apples, dried cranberries & blueberry mix, bananas (per my oncologist's orders), my favorite reduced fat lactose free yet somehow still delicious and rich tasting Cabot cheese, a couple cans of healthy low sodium soups, frozen green beans and spinach, natural peanut butter, frozen tilapia, walnuts, organic flaxseeds, nitrate free low sodium ham, and frozen organic chicken breasts to create a healthfully clean cancer cell killing week of eats. I'll be sharing how I put it all together next week. 


Do you have an eating strategy for next week? How many veggies servings do you average each week? How do you do it? Share with me!