Category Archives for healthy living

5 tips for making to-do lists

I am an unabashed fan of lists. I like to count things, and I like to see visible progress of my activity by marking things off. Making lists helps me organize my thoughts, keeps me motivated, and helps me to make sure I carve out the time I need. Here are my top tips for lists:

1. keep items clean

This means that “edge lawn” and “mow lawn” are two different items on a list. They are separate tasks that can be done independently and require different tools. I like to keep the items on my list simple. If I’m going to be pruning a variety of plants, I list them separately – this also means if I don’t get to one of them the whole item isn’t left un-done.

2. don’t worry about the order

I make a list as items occur to me. I don’t order them in the order in which I plan to do them because plans change. I can do any item on the list in any order and mark it off.

3. consider groups or sub-lists

This may seem a little counter to #2, but stay with me. I have a front yard and a back yard. The back yard has a pond. The items related to the pond are distinct – so I sometimes make sub-lists of things that are in the house (“wash towels”) the back yard (“treat for algae”) and the front yard (“edge lawn”). By having them in groups, when I finish a sublist I get the joy of marking the whole sub-list done – and I stop thinking about tasks that involve that area. I don’t worry about ordering things in the sub-list.

4. include things you want to do, not just things you need to do

I put “take walk” on my list. I put “ride bike” on my list. Do these things accomplish cleaning my kitchen or making sure I have clothes to wear? No. But they sure make me happy and they are as much of a priority to me as mowing the lawn. By putting them on the list, they become equally weighted to all the other things I plan to do, and not expendable. If you want to put “relax with a book” on your list, you should do so!

5. feel free to make your own rules

Do you want to put “make list” on your list and mark it off when done? Do it! Do you want to add something to your list that you did but wasn’t on it just so you can mark it off? Do it! This is about tracking what you want to get done AND about keeping you motivated. I add things to the list during the day as they come to me and sometimes I add something I already did because it was a big deal to me and I want to celebrate it in my own personal way. Whatever keeps you motivated to get things done and feel good works for me.

Do you have a tip about making lists and keeping organized? Share it in the comments!

I poached an egg!

This morning as I went through my twitter-feed while lying in bed (don’t judge) I ran across a tweet about a perfect poached egg (via @DrQuilter) and thought – why not?

So I favorited it because twitter doesn’t really have a “I might read this later” button and hitting “favorite” even if you’re not sure is the only thing you’ve got. This is annoying to those of us who value precision and accuracy (which are not the same thing, she said accurately) but I digress.

Later I got up and decided Saturday morning of a holiday weekend was a good time to go through a rather long list of “tweets-saved-for-later” and so I read the post about a perfect poached egg. It finished with this recipe:

If you’re going to poach an egg, and don’t want to spend 20 mins cleaning the pan here’s what to do:

  • Get some microwaveable clingfilm
  • Get a cup
  • Push the cling film into the cup, and crack the egg into the cling film
  • You should be able to tie the clingfilm around the top of the egg,
  • Drop egg into boiling water, and poach normally, it’ll taste great, and you wont have to spend ages scrubbing cooked on egg of the damn pan.

Note: I desperately want to correct the typos in this, but in the interest of accuracy I have simply pasted it in. I felt you should know.

Now, I’ve never poached an egg so “poach normally” was not actually useful instruction. I asked the internet and got “4 minutes in boiling water” as an average answer, so decided it must be true (it was on the internet, after all).

[I feel at this moment you might think I’m a pathetic cook. This is not true – I’m quite a decent cook and make up great recipes all the time. I am not a traditional cook in that I learned all the normal techniques one might expect a cook to know. But I can take stuff that is sitting around and make a tasty meal out of it, and usually healthy too. Soups are a favorite thing to make and with the coming of fall I may post a couple of my favorites. I also once took third place at a local chili contest I definitely should have won, but I digress. Again.]

“Well,” I said to myself, “the man is wending his way back home on airplanes and you’ve got a day to do whatever you want even though you already know that means yardwork even though you don’t really really want to do that it has to get done but first maybe you should try this egg-poaching thing.”

I’m a bit rambling when I talk to myself. Don’t judge.

So I went downstairs and got out the required ingredients and put a pot of water on to boil. Boiling water takes a while. I am not that patient, but I persevered. In the meantime I assembled the egg-in-clingwrap:

step 1: put the clingwrap in a bowl

step 2: crack egg into bowl-lined-with-clingwrap

 

Step 3: figure out how to “tie” the clingwrap around the egg

 

Gosh, doesn’t that look yummy?

 

So, I have an egg wrapped up in clingwrap…. And finally the pot of water boils. Woohoo! It’s time to POACH!

Step 4: drop clingwrapped egg into boiling water

 

Step 5: wait

I set the timer for four minutes. Four minutes is a surprisingly long time to stare at a clingwrapped egg in boiling water (yes yes, I took it off the boil briefly for the photo above). I made toast. I made coffee. I wandered outside and looked for frogs (spotted Uptown Frog, if you wondered). I came back in and watched the timer count down to zero.

 

Gosh, doesn’t that look yummy?

 

I set the thing onto a towel briefly to get the excess water off and then onto my plate, where I unwrapped my egg. If I never deal with hot wet clingwrap again, I’ll be fine with that. Also, perhaps some non-stick spray would have been a good idea. I will probably never know, because I am fairly certain I’m not doing this again.

uhm. Breakfast is served?

I got my toast and cut into my egg. Okay, that was pretty cool. Even though I have no doubt that Masterchef would be appalled at the technique, they could definitely not fault the yolk.

Yes. Breakfast is served.

Verdict: this egg tasted great. However, the trouble I went to was not worth the final product and I don’t think I will bother doing it again especially since I have a foolproof way to do eggs-over-easy without actually having to ever flip the egg (I will document this soon because I know you are dying to hear it now). It is much faster and also gets me the lovely yolk to go with my toast, which is all I really want anyway. Also, I make a great omelet. That’s not just my opinion. That’s the opinion of the people who have eaten my omelets. Perhaps I will share that someday too.

Do you have an easy and tasty egg recipe? Share it in the comments!

Avocado WHAT???

A friend of mine on twitter (@NomdeB – and if you’re on twitter you should check her out!) has been trying a lot of interesting recipes lately. She blew my mind when I read a tweet about how much she was enjoying avocado chocolate mousse.

WHAT?

I mean, honestly. I love avocado – a lot. I wish it were a little less calorific, but at least it’s healthy fats and it is very satisfying. I will have half an avocado as a side dish with dinner sometimes. Big fan. But I’ve never considered it a dessert food.

So, I was intrigued. She sent a link for a recipe (there are a LOT of recipes out there – astonishing!) and I bought a few avocados. Unfortunately, they needed more time to ripen because she had made it clear they needed to be really ripe and soft for this to work.

By the time they were ripe, I’d lost the link. She had send another in the meantime, but it was more complicated (i.e., more than three ingredients). I went online and poked around and decided that I could make it up myself. I’m like that in the kitchen. So I got out my ripe avocado, some honey, and some dark chocolate cocoa powder.

one ripe avocado for dessert, please.

I scooped my avocado out of its skin and pulled out the pit. Then I dumped some (okay, maybe three tablespoons?) of dark chocolate cocoa powder on it and some honey (again, maybe three tablespoons? I’m terrible with viscous liquid measurements). Then came the tricky bit.

You see, the recipes all assume you have a food processor. I don’t. My friend had told me she uses a blender – and while I do own one (a fairly recent acquisition) it wasn’t handy and I was ready to go. So, I dug out my inner pioneer woman and pulled out a potato masher. You heard me. I own a potato masher and I’m not afraid to use it.

I mashed and squished and mashed. Eventually it became clear that the smaller bits of avocado were not going to succumb to my potato masher skills – and nobody wants to find a green glob of avocado in their chocolate mousse. So, I got out a large spoon and started flattening the bits against the side of the bowl. This took a lot of time and dedication and I was wondering if @mamaofletters son might be able to do better given how dedicated he was to his celery/lettuce cake. I persevered until it was smooth.

Yes, I took a small taste at this point – and was amazed. It was chocolate mousse, and very rich. I divvied it into four small bowls and garnished with raspberries.

there’s avocado in this!

I offered my husband one but he demurred (mind you, it’s unclear he paid attention while I made this to realize what I was up to. He asked what I was making pretty far along into the process and I said “chocolate mousse.”) so I put three into the refrigerator and took one out to the deck.

It was gone quick. Very tasty and rich and chocolaty. The small portion was plenty and I suspect I will do this again – though I may get out the blender next time. Of course, the extra work I put into this meant I burned off calories so I enjoyed it even more!

Bon appetit.

Diagram of a bad night’s sleep

I’ve been using a FitBit Ultra recently – and in a future entry I will talk about the great things it does for my motivation to be more healthy, but that is not what this post is about.

One thing the FitBit Ultra does is track how well you’re sleeping. You wear it on a wristband and I assume however much your wrist moves around is related to how well you’re sleeping and if it should call you “awake” or not. It actually seems pretty accurate.

Last night I went to bed at a reasonable hour – around 10pm local time. I had worked hard during the day putting in many hours of yard work (including a grueling session of deadheading the day lilies – which results in something nice but in the hours I’m doing it I mostly hate). I was tired and sore.

I was, apparently, too tired to sleep. I hate that.

When I went to bed I called my cat – Stray Cat (that’s her name, don’t judge) – and she mrowled a lot. I explained to her that I was not about to go back downstairs to give her tuna or anything else and that her only options were come upstairs to sleep or not. She came upstairs. Here is a picture of her when she’s less annoyed:

sitting on mom’s lap on the deck

 

Now might be a time to admit that while I had been on the computer earlier in the evening I had a weird feeling that someone else was in the house. Mind you, I knew this was impossible – I had been walking around the house downstairs to get my 5 miles of walking in (for the FitBit, you see) and I had carefully checked all the locks on the downstairs doors. So I knew no-one was in the house but me and Stray Cat (my husband being away on business travel). I shook off the feeling because it was silly.

I went to bed. I tossed and turned. I tried multiple varieties of sound on the sound machine to help me sleep. Stray Cat did come up and jump onto the bed. She slept. I tried.

Around 2:30am I heard noises – then LOUD CAT MROWLS and more LOUD CAT MROWLS – only one of which sounded like my cat.

Now might be a time to tell you that Stray Cat has a pretty cool cat door – it is tied to her microchip and only opens for her. So another cat being in the house is hard, but not impossible. There are a couple of cats who hang around the house but are too skittish to approach. The will come in the garage (where Stray Cat’s food bowl is kept) and eat her food if we leave the door open. I try hard not to do that but I had been doing a lot of yard work. It was not impossible that someone had been inside the garage/shop when I went to bed and who then came inside (through a non-microchip door) from the garage later. Weird, certainly. Unprecedented, even. But not impossible.

The Suspects

There is a ginger cat and a black cat who hang out. We call the ginger one Rudy – either short for Rutabaga or Rudolph (red-nosed cat) depending on whether you ask me or my husband respectively. The other is Black Cat. We’re not that creative.

In any case – at 2:30am I’m awakened to what sounds like a cat fight. Stray Cat is not known for her bravery in defending her territory. This could be ugly. I rush downstairs sans glasses (not a great plan). I see no cats. I hear no cats. Eventually I spot Stray Cat wild-eyed on the stairs heading back up. I walk around downstairs and in the garage and find no one.

Stray Cat and I go back to bed. She sleeps. I get up twice more to investigate and make sure there is no other cat in the house or garage. Apparently there is not.

It is possible the other cat was never in the house and the mrowling was through a window – they can be quite loud. But usually Stray Cat ignores any cat “through glass.” I have no idea. All I know is that all of this combined meant that I reset my 5:30am alarm to 6:30am (thankful that I could) and regardless it was the worst night of sleep my FitBit has recorded since I got it:

this is what a bad night looks like.

 

Mind you – only the 2:30 – 3:00am part is what I can blame on the cats. The rest is just me having a bad night. All in all, I am truly hoping for better tonight.

Salad Days

After reading on my friend Rich’s site about his experiment with making salads-in-a-mason-jar I decided to give it a go myself. I find that despite my best intentions if I buy lunch during the day at work I don’t always  make healthy choices. I make sandwiches sometimes but honestly it’s a little tedious and I wasn’t always taking the time. I also took frozen meals – those are okay sometimes but I always like salad as long as it’s got good variety. By making a week’s worth myself on Sunday, I’ve got the whole lunch thing dealt with and no stress or excuses about eating healthy.

The first week I had two working lunches, so I only made three salads. The key to this is the order in which the ingredients are placed into the jar. A wide-mouth quart mason jar is what I used based on Rich’s recommendation. Since this is the whole meal, I want it to be satisfying.

The order is this:

dressing on the bottom (I used low-fat dressing and am in love with a toasted sesame ginger version right now) – I just pour it into the bottom of the jar. Not all of it will be coming back out. This is (for the dressings I’m using) 100-150 calories based on probably putting more than 2 tablespoons into the jar.

veggies that can handle being on contact with the dressing for a while come next – I put matchstick carrots on, and the coleslaw mix (just the cabbage, not actual coleslaw). I just got some broccoli slaw to try next time, which I already know I love.

I add chopped red pepper and red onion on top of that, and then chopped cucumber. I also sometimes add sugar snap peas if I have them. And grape tomatoes work really well because you don’t have to slice them. I’m all for less work.

If you want, you can also add cheese. I’ve used crumbled feta but honestly you can also skip it if you have enough variety and a tasty dressing.

Next I add a protein (hey, this is the whole meal!). I’ve gotten the pre-cooked chicken breasts and they work great. I also used chopped ham and enjoyed that. The first time I tried an experiment with lump crab meat I happened to have on hand. More later on that. Total calories for average protein input for me is about 100 calories. That means even if I add a bit of cheese, which I usually forget to do, the whole thing is still under 300 calories and is mostly colorful veggies.

Finally, cram the top with lettuce. You need a lettuce that can stand up to the test for a week – so softer varieties are probably a bad idea. I’ve been sticking with romaine (because iceberg lettuce is just stupid) and it’s worked great!

salads-in-jars

the first three salads-in-mason-jars

Here are the three I made the first week (left to right):

1. light blue cheese dressing and chicken breast

2. light toasted sesame ginger dressing and chicken breast

3. light blue cheese dressing and crab meat

All the rest the veggies were the same though others would probably tailor this more. For the assembly line version, it’s easier not to bother and just let the dressing be the variety.

Day one I took the crab salad to work.

salad and bowl, time for lunch!

I had a large soup bowl in my office, but it wasn’t up to the task.

we’re gonna need a bigger bowl…

Fortunately I also had a supply of plates:

not as pretty as it could have been

It’s great how when you dump the salad out it’s in the right order and the interesting veggies and dressing are all on top! That didn’t happen the first time since I had to move from bowl to plate. Lesson learned. I use the plate now.

So – the crab. It was fine. It was not oh-my-gosh-awesome to be worth the expense and I do worry that it might not hold up as well over time. The chicken was very tasty and has been my favorite protein addition so far.

The salads are large, flavorful, and filling. I am carving out time on Sunday (it takes about 30 minutes total) to make my lunches for the week. I have had one that I ended up waiting 8 days to eat, and it was just as fresh and tasty as the first one. I highly recommend this for busy people who want to eat well. This way, you know exactly what is in your salad. Bon appetit!