Category: Healthy Living

Like many others, this past week has been extremely busy. However, I still made meals on some of those days and wisely prepped meals; it’s been a week of donabe cooking. Also myTagine-style (it’s like a skillet) Donabe Fukkura-san, which I purchased from Toiro Kitchen, arrived on Monday. It was handmade in Iga, Japan. I love its shape and have made three clay pot meals in my newest donabe. I’ll prepare meals in at least one of my clay pots this weekend. Recently, because of how busy I have been with work, the weekends have become my time to catch up and knock out a lot of meal prep.

Since I’m home for the rest of the day, I plan to take it easy… besides doing some meal prep. In a few hours, I plan to make lasagna and flautas.

Early this morning, I ordered more meal prep glass containers, which arrived a few hours later. Of course, I ordered them from Amazon.

My brother and nephew will be here tomorrow. I hope to have plenty of food prepped by that time, and of course, I’ll be sure to send them home with some home-cooked meals.

Over the weekend, I’ll be sure to find some time to take it easy.

It’s been several months since I made lasagna; however, I made lasagna for my daughter on Saturday.

I love shell lasagna; however, that was not in stock, so the store substituted the shell pasta with the sheet pasta. We went out yesterday to pick up the additional ingredients for my veggie lasagna. When going to a store, I typically take advantage of the curbside pick-up, and yesterday was no exception. How was the lasagna? My daughter called the lasagna “juicy,” one of her favorite terms for food she likes. Since it was only the two of us, there was plenty of lasagna left over. I placed the remaining lasagna in meal-sized portions and had her put them in our chest freezer. This is perfect; when I don’t feel like preparing a meal, we can always get an already-prepared meal from our freezer.

My goodness, where has the time gone? The title of my post sums up the past few months for me and makes me think of the Veggie Tales song. My daughter loved that cartoon when she was a toddler.

I blink, and a few weeks pass. I’m back at work and will move to full-time later this month. Even though I’m part-time, the four working hours have flown by. In addition, I’ve taken on more responsibilities when my boss has been out. I volunteered, immensely enjoying that interaction (leading out meetings) with my teammates.

It’s a rainy Saturday here; I started my day with devotions and walking for one hour and 40 minutes on my Peloton Treadmill.

I walked while watching Damsel on Netflix. Netflix is one of the entertainment options available to stream on Netflix, and since I was invited into the beta months ago, most of my Peloton time has been spent walking while watching something being streamed. I must say, it’s about the only time that I watch any movie.

Towards the end of last week, I discovered Fantasy Hike!

 

From the website…

“Fantasy Hike is a beautiful walking tracker for fantasy nerds and everyone that loves adventure. Start your quest today. All steps you take will let your halfling avatar progress through a beautiful fantasy adventure, from your comfy halfling hole all the way to Mount Fire. Compete with your friends and see their progress in the fantasy world and on the map.

See how far you’ve walked since your journey started. Fantasy Hike lets you appreciate and be proud of your complete walking distance. Walk your dog, take a morning jog, or “run” between meeting rooms. No matter what you are doing Fantasy Hike supports and motivates you to a healthy lifestyle.”

Today was the longest time I have been on the treadmill since last week, so I have not gone too far; however, I plan to make up for that this weekend, and I should be back to my hour per day moving forward.

This past Friday, I told my daughter I would make her homemade pizza this weekend, and I made it yesterday.

While I did want to use our Ooni outdoor pizza oven, I thought it was a bit too chilly for that, so I settled for my baking steel. I used hard winter wheat berries and ground 4.5 cups of freshly milled flour using my Mockmill Professional 200.

Results? My daughter loved the pizza. I made enough dough for two pizzas, and I’ll make the other pizza later this week.

There’s only one slice of pizza left from yesterday. My daughter ate most of it.

In the past few weeks, I’ve made many recipes using freshly milled flour that I’ve ground with my Mockmill Professional 200 Grain Mill. The grain mill has opened up an entirely new door for creativity in the kitchen, and I’m enjoying myself immensely.

Of the numerous grains I’ve purchased in bulk, Eikorn is on that list, and, from my research, it’s the oldest grain known to scientists. It’s also considered man’s first wheat. It’s one of the only grains that has not been hybridized. It’s higher in protein and has less starch than any other wheat. I’d never used Eikorn before acquiring my grain mill, so it’s a new grain for me to experiment with, and I have plenty to use since I purchased 42 pounds. I’ve finally ventured out and started preparing various food items with this grain.

The cheesy mushroom and butternut squash bread I made a few days ago had three different types of grains added to make the flour, one of them being Eikorn.

 

This morning, I decided to make Eikorn Chocolate Chip Cookies. They are sugar-free cookies, and all the ingredients are organic.

Results? I like how the cookies turned out, although I won’t be eating too many of them. I much prefer savory. Most important is that my daughter loves them. I do think I’ll tweak the recipe a bit to make them a bit softer. I’m thinking of letting the cookie dough sit for about an hour before baking the cookies or perhaps adding additional liquid to the cookie dough to make a softer baked cookie. Why: The dough seemed a bit dry. Which can happen with freshly milled flour. However, the cookie is not dry. It’s super moist and gooey inside like my daughter loves chocolate chip cookies.

Further research in the book Einkorn: Recipes for Nature’s Original Wheat by Carla Bartolucci, which arrived a few hours ago from Amazon, confirmed what I suspected based on how the cookie dough felt. Yes, it was dry and freshly milled Eikorn needs to rest before it’s used. In the book, Carla recommends letting the dough rest for at least 15 minutes. I’ll make sure I do that next time.