Day of Accomplishments

After yesterdays relaxation day today it was back to work at finishing up the packing and cleaning of the apartment.

Before I get into today I should recap last nights dinner. It was basically what I had intended. A mash-up of chicken, carrots, zucchini, red peppers and rice noodles.

I mixed in a little Pad Thai sauce and to keep up with the Asian theme I cooked it in sesame oil instead of EVOO.

Here’s a few pics of last nights dinner:

Pretty tasty dinner for just throwing together whatever was in the fridge.

We are now officially out of veggies. Don’t think I’m going to pick up any more (ACK – that just can’t be right for a food blogger) right now since we are only eating at home for two more days.

This morning I got up and had a piece of toast with a little becel, my final homemade granola bar and some oj for breakfast.

(I’m really hoping my new apartment has better light for food pictures).

After Matt left for work I started to do some cleaning around the place. In the morning I was able to clean all the windows (inside and out), clean the outside and seals of the fridge and start cleaning the downstairs bathroom.

Since Matt was only gone for the morning then working from home in the afternoon I was pretty excited since I knew we’d be able to accomplish a lot.

Lunch was a grilled cheese sandwich with mozza and 2 slices of turkey bacon.

Served with a cold glass of pink lemonade.

And a gala apple with some almond butter.

I was right, we were able to get tons accomplished this afternoon including: finishing cleaning the downstairs bathroom, cleaning (most) of the cupboards, packing the rest of the random kitchen items and starting to decided what food items we were going to bring with us.

By 4:30 we were wiped and ready to relax. While Matt did a little work I decided to book our hotels for the trip. This is finally accomplished and just another thing that is making this move seem more and more real.

Dinner tonight was Jamie Oliver’s Classic Tomato Spaghetti. Since we had all the ingredients on hand (except for the red chilli – which we just left out) we figured it would be an easy meal that we didn’t have to purchase any further ingredients. We also had pre-cooked shrimp in the freezer so we used that instead of frozen shrimp.

Here are the pics:

Served with a piece of Ancient Grains bread.

It’s been an very exhausting day so I’m looking forward to curling up with In Defence of Food for the rest of the night.

I’ll be back tomorrow and I’ll post some pics of how the packing and move is going.

~ Katie :)

Pasta Revolution

Happy day before the long weekend! How many others are as excited as I am? I’m so excited for the weekend. It’s a long weekend and the weather in Halifax is calling for 20 degrees and sunny. Who could as for a better weekend.

This morning started with another green smoothie. In this morning’s blender: 2 handfuls of organic spinach, banana, 1 tbsp of flaxmeal, 1.25 cups of UVAB, ice and this…

1/2 the pack of Vega Whole Food Smoothie Infusion. I love the extra greens in my smoothie.

I think I’ll be starting my day with a smoothie for the rest of the school year. I’ve had so much more energy the past couple days.

So how many people out there watched Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution? Matt and watched it every week and really started to love it.

I loved the idea that Jamie had to changed the school system and the food that our kids eat. We also loved the idea of eating real food and we’ve been trying to work on that. That includes pasta sauce from scratch not from a bottle.

Tonight we finally decided to try our first Jamie Oliver recipe. Matt decided to cook me Jamie’s Classic Tomato Spaghetti.

He followed the recipe exactly but here’s a quick breakdown of our dinner.

Jamie Oliver’s Classic Tomato Spaghetti

Ingredients:

• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 red chile
• A small bunch of basil
• Box of Spaghetti
• 1 large can of diced tomato
• Olive Oil
• Parmesan Cheese
• Bag of frozen shrimp (this one we added on our own)

Matt first sliced the garlic and chile and took the basil leaves off the stem and cut up the stems.

He boiled pasta and and in a pan heat up 2 tbsp of olive and cook up the garlic, chile and stems of the basil. When the garlic starts to brown add the tomatoes and the basil.

In a separate bowl cook the shrimp.

Once the pasta is cooked, drain and mix into the tomato sauce.

Then add the shrimp.

Serve on a plate topped with some parmesan.

Served with a piece of Oatmeal brown bread that we picked up at Pete’s this afternoon.

Dinner was simple, healthy and delicious. NOM!

This recipe made 6-7 servings so lots of leftovers.

And after dinner treat included 2 or 3 of these that we also got a Pete’s.

Overall, another great day of eating.

Question: Is everyone enjoying my recipes recently? My dinners have been so yummy lately that I really wanted to share them with all of you. If I’m boring everyone please let me know or if you’d like to see something different on the blog please tell me.

I have lots of big plans for the weekend so hopefully I’ll have some other interesting and exciting posts for you coming up.

~ Katie :)

Teaching Operation Beautiful

I wanted to vary a little from my usual posts to tell you all about what I’ve been teaching my students over the past few weeks.

As my readers, you know that I am a teacher. I teach at a private school at the Jr. High level (grades 7-9 for any Americans out there). My class is very small and only consists of 10 girls. This makes for an interesting and different dynamic. Most of the time I really love it. They all get along very well and we are able to have some very good discussions. About 6 weeks ago I was sitting at my desk eating lunch and I looked around and for the first time noticed what they were eating: potato chips, chocolate bars, buttery popcorn and other forms of junk food. I watched them for a few days not saying anything. I realized this was not only normal behaviour for them but for some of them this is ALL they were eating for lunch. I decided to have a talk with them and found out that some of them hardly ever ate ‘real’ food. I decided that even though they were teenagers and that they should have already learned this before I was going to put my other curriculum on hold and take a few weeks to talk about healthy eating.

We started with discussing the four food groups and discussing how many servings of each they should have. After that I got them to make menus for one day of healthy food that they like/enjoy or at least willing to eat. I then got them each to research a food group and look at healthy choices and unhealthy choices within that group and some of the key nutrients in that food group. We also had quite a few discussions on why healthy eating is important – I have started to showing them Jaime Oliver’s Food Revolution. So far they have seen two episodes and are really loving it.

After we finished discussing healthy eating we moved on to eating disorders, body image and self-esteem. I knew from the beginning I wanted to some how incorporate Caitlin’s fantastic website: Operation Beautiful.

I considered to ask them to somehow participate in it but then I decided I didn’t want to force them to do it. It wouldn’t be the same so instead after we had a discussion about self-esteem in teenagers and how it is important to no only feel good about oneself but to make sure to pass it on I introduced them to Operation Beautiful and gave them an entire period (40 mins) to look through the website and read as much as they can on it.

Afterwards, we had a discussion and I asked them to go home think about what they read/saw on the website and write a reflection on it. I really want to share with you a few of their responses (please remember that these are 13-15 year olds and some of them are English as a Second Language students so their English/Grammar is not the same as others their age):

“As I entered my house today, after my 30 minute jog, I found myself “fat talking”. My original plan was to immediately go take a shower, but I realized this was the perfect time to reflect on ‘operation beautiful’. As was mentioned in the website, fat talking is something almost everyone is guilty of, and it has nothing to do with the way you look. I found this website absolutely amazing! Just at first sight, the colors and the design are so cheerful, which right off the bat sends off a positive vibe. As I surfed through the tabs, I was so inspired and everything that was written was so true! Reading Caitlin’s advice and encouragement about loving yourself is so motivating. I think tons of people have negative body images, and are struggling. Operation beautiful applies to so many people, and it can really help.”

“I really liked the website and it was so wonderful to see it. It really helped me see that I am beautiful. I am going to try not to say the word ugly anymore. I am proud of myself, I have black and brown curly hair and dark brown eyes…The website taught me to not care about whether I’m fat or thin but I am beautiful the way I am.”

“Operation Beautiful is a site that inspires girls about their inner and outer beauty. Operation Beautiful is an organization to help girls or women feel confident and on insecure about who they are, what they wear or how much they weigh…When I read some of the posts from the website, I felt inspired by these people who post some amazing notes just to make other girls around the world feel beautiful and confident in who they are…I am thanking this site for all the help. I realize you don’t need to be skinny, put on a lot of make-up or wear fancy clothes to be beautiful. It’s us girls who make up our own beauty.”

I am still waiting for a few more responses from some students so I might share some more this week but I after reading their responses I really wanted to share some now with all of you.

I would really love to spend more time with them talking about all of these important issues that teenagers face but I’m still a teacher and I need to go back to the regular curriculum and move on but I’m hoping that I was able to least get them to think about some of these important issues.

Thanks for reading and sticking with this long post. I will be back tomorrow with my regularly scheduled healthy living post.

~ Katie :)