A FRIDGE FULL OF FOOD...

My Nannie's Devilled Eggs

Do have recipes in your recipe box, like me, that have been handed down or that you've been making for so many years that you completely take them for granted and assume that not only does everyone else in the world make the dish but makes it exactly the way you do?  This is one of those for me.  This simple Devilled Egg recipe is exactly the way my mother taught me, and exactly how Nannie taught my mother (and Auntie Miranda).   It's a given at any family gathering at my house.  Our potato salad, Devilled Egg Potato Salad, is very similar to this as well.

The thing that bemuses me, though, is how often I get compliments on the recipe when I make these for friends. Like I said, I take the recipe completely for granted and assume everyone makes them the same way. But apparently not because this is one of those dishes that, without fail, I am asked for the recipe every time I serve it outside of the family. Here it is for all of you who have asked lately that I've said "Oh yeah, I've been meaning to blog that!"

Breakfast Starts the Day off Right. Right? Right! Cornbread Frittata

 

One of the things I've been changing about the way I eat since I've been following the Mediterranean Diet path is the way I approach breakfast.  Like a lot of people I either tend to skip breakfast or eat all the wrong things.  For example, I work the night shift so when I get off shift in the morning I'm starving and ready to eat pretty much anything and everything. Technically, for nightshifters, the a.m. is our dinner time.  We eat breakfast when we get up around 4pm, lunch at 1am, and dinner for breakfast, but I've really been trying to get back into a more traditionally routine eating pattern even when I work, especially since working 12 hour shifts, we don't work a five day work week.

What I've found through experimentation is that when I choose wholesome whole grained foods for breakfast that also contain a serving of fruit and/or veggies I have a much better day over all whether I'm up or sleeping for the day.  We all know basic nutrition.  Whole grains and fresh produce last longer in our systems because they're nutritionally dense and take longer to break down, creating a more even supply of glucose instead of the normal sugar/caffeine high and low of Krispie Kremes, Cocoa Puffs, and Caramel Mocha Coffee.  Weight Watchers call these nutritionally dense foods simply "filling" foods.  I'm experimenting with a lot of different things but I'm finding, so far, that egg dishes with fresh veggies and cereals like Irish oatmeal or Grapenuts with a side of fruit hit the spot and last all morning.

Photo Diet Diary: The Chimichurri & Garlic Diet

 

Indulge me.  I've started a new diet. It's called the "Common Sense" Diet and it's of my own making.  Maybe I'll write my own book someday called "The Common Sense Diet:  Put Down the Bullshit Books and Use the Brain God Gave You by Glenna Anderson Muse."   (I like it.) 

I'm tired of reading books with complicated theories that promise that if only I will eat this and not that and take some special supplements and be a pain in the ass to every restaurant and friend's hospitality, THEN I'll be healthy, happy, and skinny. 

No, the uncomplicated truth is that if I eat good, real, fresh, unprocessed, unchemically saboutaged food then I'll be healhy(er).  Happy is up to me. No promises on skinny unless I put down the fork appropriately while getting off my ass at the same time, a complicated move here in Lazytown.  Sometimes I just need to remind myself that it's really NOT all that complicated. 

(Hmmm...I've said "ass" twice in two paragraphs. Perhaps I should have titled this the "ass" diet post.)

Here's a photo tour of my food intake from yesterday:  Gorgeous 4 oz filets with home-made  Chimichurri from parsley on the back porch. Equally beautiful 10/12 prawns sauteed in browned butter. Ceasar Salad.  Roasted Garlic Mashed Potatoes.  Wow.  The all garlic meal! But it was fabulous.

  

Lunch:  1/2 Price's Pimento Cheese Sandwich on Sara Lee White Wheat Bread & Musselman's No Sugar Added Applesauce

Snack:  Fiber One Oats & Caramel Bar (Really good. Too much sugar but a good alternative for other crap I could have eaten!)

Breakfast for Two:  Ham, Tomato, Potato, Green Pepper, & Onion Frittata.  This version with 4 eggs, 1/2 cup skim milk, a whole tomato, etc, and split by Gene and I, is 6 Weight Watchers points. 

By the way, I'm not much of a "meetings" person so I use weight watchers online to keep track of my food diary but I've only been to one meeting.  Ten years ago.  Never went back. I was too afraid from the gleams in the eyes and hands clasped to breasts that someone was going to speak in tongues and it just scared me a little.

That was my day with the exception of one 12 oz Coke, 2 glasses of water, and 4 glasses of iced herbal tea. 6 glasses of non-caffeinated beverages, five veggies, and having to pick fresh green stuff out of my teeth after dinner is a pretty good day in my book...

Easter '09 Wrap Up

 

Lamb for Easter. Perfect!

The family Easter party was on Saturday and we fed them sandwiches and potato salad but on Sunday, Aunti Miranda and I sneaked away for an impromptu late Easter evening dinner at Outback.

Made sense to us and it was yummy: great food and even better conversation.

 

(Holli eyeballing me over her egg cache.  Didn't they do a great job?)

Warm Fluffy Frittata on a Too Cool Spring Morning

 

Dear Winter,

Are ya done yet?

Annoyed, Glenna

So I'm hoping that's our last frost and we can get the garden in the ground soon...in the meantime, am up early this morning and decided I needed eggs to ward off the spring chill in the air.

No real recipe for this one but I'll walk you through how I do it. 

The Path to His Heart is....Bread Pudding?

 

 

(The first pic is of the regular bread pudding with cherry sauce that I took to work. The second pic is the Evan Williams Egg Nog bread pudding Gene, Aunti Miranda, and I shared...with a little extra floating pool of EWEN, of course!)

Hope everyone had a lovely Valentine's Day. I could say that I spent all day Saturday in the kitchen whipping up a gloriously gourmet meal for Gene but that would be a lie, although we had a lovely evening nonetheless.  I slept in all Saturday morning and then we hooked up with friends Corbin & Jennifer and James & Lynn to go to Rodizio's for dinner.  Rodizio's is one of those Brazilian themed restaurants where they serve a cold salad bar and then carvers come tableside with a dozen different grilled meats "on a stick" as Gene says. The boys were in heaven, and although I'm not normally a huge meat eater, lamb is one of my favorites and they do a couple of beautiful fish dishes and a grilled pineapple that's to die for. We all ate a wonderful meal and then came back to our house to sit and chat for a while.

Lynn stayed over at our house since James had to be at work at 4am which I greedily offered her the chance to stay with us so we could girl talk until 4am while Gene slept and then we napped and got up and went to breakfast at Ziggie's.  Hey, it's a girl thing but made for a really fun Valentine's Day for us.

On the other hand, the week before was filled with two, TWO, different huge home-made bread puddings so it's not like Gene didn't get his sweet tooth on last week!

I had a box full of stale croissants and a loaf of french bread I didn't want to waste so I ended up making an Evan Williams egg nog bread pudding and one regular with cherry topping.

Like a lot of people I don't really use a recipe anymore for bread pudding because there are so many choices that depend on what's in my pantry but I'll walk you through how I do it.

Fried Eggs: Tip of the Day

This was a fluke but I'm going to do it again. I was in a huge hurry yesterday before leaving for work and when I grabbed a skillet in the stack to fry my egg in it for a quick breakfast, I didn't realize I'd grabbed my wok skillet.  But guess what? It makes  a perfectly shaped fried egg.  I was just a little impressed with myself. It was beautiful!  Hmmm...love it when mistakes turn into tips to keep in mind for the future!

But, Mom, Everybody Else is Doing It

I've heard this called a couple of different things, Toad-in-the-hole is the most commong but I've also heard it call Campfire grilled eggs.  The premise is easy. Take a piece of bread, tear out a hole in the middle, butter both sides, grill it with an egg in the center to whatever degree of doneness you want, flipping it once.

I had some really nice home-made bread leftover, and since I didn't sleep well, this seemed the perfect thing to start my day. Plus, I've seen at least two, if not three other blogs making this and I simply craved it. 

The only difference I have in the way I make mine is that the little perfectionist Glenna comes out of me and forces me to use a small juice glass to twist the hole out of the center, as if I were cutting out biscuit dough. What can I say? I like the perfect edges. Then I grill the center piece of bread along with the rest.

One of the blogs I read cooks the egg hard (I hope) because she uses this as a breakfast sandwich to eat in the car.  I like my fried and poached eggs as soft as the yolk can be if the white is completely cooked.  I can imagine me walking out to the car with my version...or more accurately, I can imagine the first bite of my soft cooked egg sandwich in the car. And then the act of turning around so I can go home to change clothes for the day.

A New Year Dawns: ARF/5-A-Day

Cate, over at Sweetnicks, hosts a really nice event called ARF (Antioxidant Rich Foods)/5-A-Day that's always inspiring us to remember to eat our veggies and other foods that are good for us. Does that make Cate our blogging Mom? I don't know either but I'm determined to eat healthier this year with only occasional lapses into Little Debbie land. Head over to Cate's place later in the week and check out all the other wonderful dishes being blogged about that also happen to be healthy for you!

For a change of pace today for breakfast I made Gene and I egg salad on low fat sourdough English Muffins.  Eggs are very good for you, the whites are made of albumin, which I found interesting in physiology class, albumin is the same protein in your blood stream.  Wild, huh?  And even though most people shy away from the yolks because of the fat, especially if you buy free range chicken eggs, the yolks are loaded with lots of goodies like omega oils and vitamin E. To me, that's worth the fat grams.

Gene likes this recipe a lot. Because why? Because he's a wonderful man but basically lazy. He says this egg salad is like eating deviled eggs with a spoon out of the bowl or as a sandwich. Funny, I never thought eating deviled eggs was that much work in the first place but I'll take the compliment and smile all the way to work this afternoon with it.  I know he meant something nice when he said it because he was being all touchy feely at the time and men never have hidden agendas with compliments, right?  Yeah, I didn't think so  either.

Click below for the recipe and a tip for lickety split egg peeling a hotel chef taught me years ago.

Ham & Cheese Crepes: Breakfast Blogging

I'm going to bend the rules a teeny bit for breakfast blogging. I neither made this homemade, nor did I eat it on the weekend, but it is breakfast and it is a meal that's near and dear to my heart and memories. These ham and cheese crepes from Village Inn powered my year through respiratory school.  I can't tell you how many mornings my body woke me up at 4am (always!) even after I'd finished a hospital clinical the night before at 11pm and needed to be at class at 8am.  It would have been easier if I could have slept in an hour or two more but my head is just wired for 4am no matter what time I go to bed.  So on class days, if we had a test, I allowed myself Village Inn for breakfast. No matter how many times I looked at the menu and decided on something different I always ordered "Ham and Cheese Crepes".

The inside is stuffed with scrambled eggs and cubes of country ham, the top covered in cheese sauce and sprinkled with paprika.  Their hashbrowns are my favorite in town, soft on the inside and just barely crunchy on the outside, perfectly browned. The cheese sauce on top of the hashbrowns is my request. It's an indulgence that got me through the day, or at least through until lunch.  Our lunches during respiratory school were...another story for probably never another time but they are good memories.

Breakfast blogging is hosted fortnightly by Nandita at Saffron Trail located in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. Be sure to check out the round-up of international breakfast dishes she'll be posting soon.