Recipe Wednesday- Cauliflower Casserole

Today, I'm sharing with you a total carb friendly meal that is also cheesy and delicious.  My intention in making this recipe was to add cubed ham.  However, I didn't remember the ham until I was pulling the casserole out of the oven; not the best time.  This recipe is easy to make and a great quick option for a weeknight dinner. In total, I think this meal also cost us less than $5.00 to make even will all the shredded cheese.  We used frozen cauliflower for this recipe also and used 2 16 oz bags which cost us about $.64 for both; coupons are awesome!

Fancy Meeting You Here

I know I haven't been around in a while.  I haven't had much to post about, and didn't want to bore you all to tears.  My solution was to not post for a while.  Life has been pretty much normal around here, but I can't complain.  I finished training at work last week, and man have things gotten crazy again.  I had a nice break from work insanity there for a couple of weeks and tried to enjoy every minute of it.  I'm out of training now, and thrown back in with wolves.  OK, that might be slightly exaggerated, but I did tell my manager today that I felt like they drove me out to the middle of the ocean on a boat and then dumped me off with no life jacket.  Not exactly the best feeling in the world, but also not the first time I have felt like that in my job.  I know things will get better, I just hate being at the bottom of the totem pole again.  In my job there is only so much they can do to prepare you and the rest of it you have to learn on the job.  

Things around the house have been pretty quiet the last couple of weeks.  We are gearing up for trick or treat night in the new house, which I'm pretty excited about.  We have a lot of kids in the neighborhood, so I think it could be a busy night for us.  Luckily, Andrew was able to get the night off work so he can help wrangle the dogs/hand out candy.  Buddy has his Trick Or Treat shirt as his costume, but so far I have lost the battle on Maya having a Halloween costume.  Maybe next year she can dress up. 

This past weekend, we celebrated my Mom's birthday.  Andrew and I worked on Saturday to build another bench like the one on our front porch.  Both our Mom's loved them so much, they each requested one this year for their birthday.  I told Andrew I feel like we should go into business on this deal, but I don't know what we would do when we ran out of wood from the fence.  I have a couple of other projects in the works for this winter with the remaining wood panels.  Andrew inherited a new miter saw a couple weekends ago, so that made the construction of this bench a lot faster.  He is now dreaming of his workshop he wants in the garage and the projects he will complete.  Major projects on the list are bookcases for the library, and a wrap around storage closet for the basement.  When our basement was finished, there wasn't a lot of room left for storage, but we have plans to fix that.  Luckily, we have several options to work with. 

You may be wondering how the weight loss and diet are going.  Slowly is the best answer I have for you at the moment.  I am finding that my sweet tooth is killing me.  Brownies, cookies, cake, bars, you name it and I want it.  I have talked myself out of going to our local cupcake store more times than I can count.  Enter a slight rant on this topic.  Several times I have thought how ridiculous it was that I had to give up sweets to drop even one pound.  So, I went on the hunt for low carb dessert options; I knew they had to exist.  Of course I found many delicious looking things on Pinterest, but when I looked up the recipes I was annoyed.  When I went to the store, I was even more annoyed.  This past weekend, I had a recipe on our grocery list for low carb pancakes.  We love breakfast food, so I thought why not try and make it healthy.  The recipe called for almond flour.  I wasn't prepared for the $11.00 price tag when we got to the store for such a small bag of flour.  That wasn't my first experience with outrageous prices.  Another recipe this week called for coconut flour, there was no way I was spending $7.00 for a bag of that either.  The sugar substitutes these low carb recipes call for also kill me.  No, I'm not going to spend $15.00 for a bag of sugar when I can buy a regular bag of sugar for $3.00.  I'm also convinced it is going to come out twenty years from now that all these sugar substitutes are known to cause cancer.  I guess for now, I'm stuck with the peanut butter cookies I posted a recipe for a couple of weeks ago.  Don't get me wrong, those things are delicious, but I do like to mix it up now and then.  If anyone has any dessert recipes they would like to share that doesn't involve crazy expensive bags of flour or likely cancer causing sugar, please feel free to pass them along.

Luckily, while I battle my food addictions, I have found a new workout buddy at work, which makes heading down to workout after a long day a lot more enjoyable.  I'm more accountable about working out when there is someone else counting on me.  I have been able to maintain four workouts per week for the past three weeks.  I hope to keep that up, and going into the holidays I am going to need all the time on the elliptical I can get.  

Recipe Wednesday - Cauliflower Soup

With the temperatures dropping, I thought it was only fitting to share this recipe today.  I have made this a couple of times over the last few weeks, and we both find it to be a great dinner option.  The soup is pretty easy to make, which also makes it a good recipe.  Let's face it, when I get home from work the last thing I want to do is spend two hours in the kitchen working on dinner.  If Andrew is home when dinner is being made, he helps do the chopping on this recipe which makes it go a lot quicker.

One warning on this recipe, and the blog this recipe came from warns about this too, cauliflower is a real mess to chop, so make sure you use a large cutting board and a food chopper if you have one. 

Happy Anniversary, Maya!

I'm a day late on this, but as of yesterday, Maya has been with us for one year.  We celebrated by clipping her nails and brushing her teeth.  I'm sure she enjoyed her celebration, not!  She has been through a lot with us in the last year.  She has been house trained, we are working on leash training and walking on a leash without pulling, and she has lived with us in two different houses.  She has escaped our yard several times, but always returned home.  We have had to fetch her out of the woods next to our house and taught her how to play nice with other dogs, which we are still working on.  More often than not, she likes to bark at dogs twice her size and when they come running after her she runs between my legs for protection.  She is a huge snuggle bug and LOVE to hide under the covers at night.  She has been a great addition to the family and a wonderful companion for Buddy.   

Here is Maya's fist year with us in photos.

Recipe Wednesday- Low Carb Stuffed Chicken

Sorry for the total lack in posting lately, but there hasn't been anything too exciting going on with us.  In good news, both dogs had a visit to the vet this past weekend; Buddy was there for support.  Maya was at the vet to get her shots updated, which she was not thrilled about.  The vet thought Maya looked great and is in great health.  Saturday was the moment of truth for Buddy; we wanted to find out if he had lost weight or not.  We decided before going to the vet if he had gained weight, we were going to have them run his blood work again and check his thyroid.  We were beyond thrilled when he stepped on the scale and had lost 2 pounds!!  He is now within three pounds of what he weighed when we got him.  He does seem to have a little more energy the last week or so and doesn't act like an almost 10 year old beagle.  Maya does a good job of keeping him young, and we hope to have him as part of our family for many years to come.

In other news, I started training at work for my new role this week.  I am still in the same department and actually have the same manager, but I am changing which product I handle.   Rather than doing our Short Term Disability claims, I will now be handling our Long Term Disability claims.  There are about two and a half weeks worth of training to complete and then an eighteen month learning curve.  The learning curve for Short Term Disability is about 6-7 months for comparison.  There are a lot more pieces to the puzzle in Long Term Disability including; Social Security Disability, workers' compensation, life insurance, etc.  We have the claims for a longer time period, but that also means we have more time to make decisions.  I hope this means it wont be so burn and churn like it is on Short Term Disability.  So far, I'm enjoying training.  I love having something new to think about each day!

Other than a trip to the vet and training at work, things have been pretty normal around here.  I have been keeping up with my workouts with at least three per week.  I had a bit of a set back week a couple of weeks ago when there were a lot of sweets in our house from our housewarming party.  Now that those are out of the house, I have been trying to stay on track.  We continue to experiment with new low carb dinner options, and have found several new ones that we like.  Last night, we had a pretty delicious meal; prosciutto wrapped stuffed chicken breasts.

I will point out that I altered this a little bit from the recipe.  Neither of us are a fan of goat cheese, but Andrew loves Feta, so I swapped the two out.  I also didn't have any sun dried tomatoes, but I did have sun dried tomato pesto, so I used that to stuff the chicken as well as in the sauce.  The sauce makes this dish amazing, and we will definitely be having this again!  While you are on checking out this recipe, the blog it came from has several other amazing low carb dinner options to check out.  

Fall Fashion Frustration

Do you ever look at your wardrobe and think to yourself, I'm sick of this whole thing. I think that every season, and every season I add a few things to my wardrobe to try and improve my selection. The last couple seasons, and especially when we moved, I tried to get rid of things I know I haven't worn in a season. I think if anyone looked at my wardrobe, they would probably think all I ever wear are sweatpants and tank tops.  Those seem to be the predominant features in my closet.

I see these women on pinterest or at work who seem to be effortlessly styled, and I wonder what kinds of things they have in their closets. I think perhaps the main issue is that I just don't seem to know how to put outfits together. My go to style in the winter is dress pants and a sweater. In the summer I either wear a maxi dress or capris and a t shirt depending on if we are talking about work or weekend wear. During the spring and fall, for work I'm again in dress pants a t shirt or some kind of shell and either a light sweater or a jacket.  I find this to be all very predictable.

Sometimes, I wish I could break out of the boring and go for something with some pizzaz. I have been on the hunt for the perfect pair of riding style boots for several years now.  Here is the problem; I have huge calves, at least in boot land. Even the ones for large calves don't always fit. I find it rather frustrating considering my shoe size itself is actually very normal. If anyone has any recommendations, please pass them along. Two other things I have been after are leopard print flats, and a leopard print scarf. Oh, there is my other fashion thing; I'm in love with scarves. The shoes have to be flats because I have pretty much decided that my feet like to protest anything that might be a heel. I don't enjoy walking around in pain all day. The other part of that is that I own very few pairs of pants that wouldn't be insanely short if I didn't wear flats with them. Now, I have come across several pairs I like, but never seem ready to bite the bullet and buy a pair. The same issue also goes for the scarf; I never just buy instead I'm content to continue carrying on about wanting one.

So, there you have my fall fashion struggle. Any tips, thoughts, ideas, photos, etc are welcome!