I love muffins, and breakfast for me is frequently a homemade muffin, some fruit, and a cup of coffee. I'm strange in that I can eat the same breakfast over and over and not get sick of it. So, on a weekend, I might make a batch of a dozen muffins and freeze them. Bread products in general freeze well. I can pull them out one at a time, zap them in the microwave for about a minute, and I have an instant hot breakfast. If you prefer to eat different things in the morning like a normal person, the freezing trick is great because your muffins won't go stale. Last weekend I had some raspberries to use up, so I made raspberry muffins using a new recipe. Those weren't as good as I thought they'd be, so I'm leaving them in the freezer for variety's sake. Today I'm trying a cinnamon muffin recipe that I found here.
I made a few changes to the recipe. I doubled it, substituted half of the oil for applesauce, and half of the flour for whole wheat flour. I also added a tsp of vanilla extract and put a cinnamon streusel topping on them.
Can't wait to eat these. Must. Resist. Until. Breakfast.
I have a whole chicken cooking in the crock pot as I type. I combined some minced garlic, salt, pepper, rosemary, sage, and thyme in a bowl and mix it up. I then took the garlic mixture and shoved generous amounts of it under the skin of the entire chicken. I stuffed the body cavity with sliced baby portabella mushrooms and the leftover garlic, and then let it cook in the crock pot on high for the afternoon.
When you cook a whole chicken that way, no extra liquid is needed. The chicken will naturally end up with a good bit of juices in the crock pot as it cooks. You can use those juices to make a gravy by combining one cup of the juices with one cup of water, salt/pepper/spices you like, and some cornstarch. Bring it to a boil and then reduce heat to let it thicken.
I'll serve the chicken and mushrooms over either rice or quinoa and have a salad on the side, and then the leftover meat will go into a pasta bake for tomorrow's dinner.
Taking the meat off the bones is the hardest part of this dish.
This "not eating out" thing hasn't been easy, and it's only the first week. Since the purpose of this blog is to give myself some accountability, the pressure is on to be honest about what we're eating. It's a good thing since it gives me some external motivation to provide better meals for my family, but it is HARD. I find myself planning meals in advance, whereas before the start of this little experiment I would usually start thinking about what I was going to make for dinner on my drive home. I'm thinking that meal planning to some degree is going to be the key to making this experiment successful, but that is one habit that is going to take some time to develop. For now, I'm just proud of myself for having a plan for not only today's main meal, but tomorrow's as well. I've even got breakfast going for most of the week.
We've eaten out twice this week: once on Thursday (which I already blogged about), and once yesterday because I had a workshop to go to all day and then we went to the zoo and had dinner out at Jason's Deli afterwards. Compared to previous weeks, we've cut our eating out in half at least. It's not perfect and it certainly isn't in line with the goal I wrote down in my first post on this blog, but it's improvement.
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