La Vida Fresca

Tonight was use-up-the-big-bag-of-tortillas night — er wrap night.  We had turkey, the same shredded cheese from last night, lettuce, and tomato wrapped up in a whole wheat tortilla.  Another light, extremely quick and easy meal.

This is actually a photo of Kevin’s.  I over-stuffed mine and it exploded.  But it was still very good.

Totals for mine, which included yogurt cheese  and jalapeños, with the side of apples, carrots, and pickles added in :

calories  385

fat  13 grams

carbohydrate  51 grams

protein  22 grams

I’ll leave you with a photo of this evening’s beverage, carbonated (seltzer) water with lime, in our fanciest glass …

Tonight we had our version of taco pizza. T-t-tasty tasty! It’s also really light, easy and fast.

These involve whole wheat tortillas, beef with taco seasoning, and the usual toppings: lettuce, tomato, shredded cheese, sour cream, and jalapeños. This time though, I decided to use yogurt cheese because that’s what I had on hand and I wanted to see how it would taste on a taco pizza. I was doubtful because I don’t like it plain (it was made with nonfat plain yogurt) but it was actually a good combination with the jalapeños.

Directions go like this: cook ground beef, add taco seasoning. Take tortilla and put on cookie sheet sprayed lightly with cooking spray (or put on aluminum foil on a cookie sheet sprayed with cooking spray to minimize the cleanup). Put some meat on it, sprinkle on some cheese, leave it in a 450 oven for about four minutes. The tortilla gets crispy and hard enough to hold its shape when you pick it up. Then pile on whatever other items you like :-)

Home slice with his slice ….

Here’s the breakdown for one taco pizza with a little under three ounces of beef, 1/3 cup of cheese, lettuce, tomato, jalapeños, yogurt cheese, and one tortilla each:

Calories 380
Fat 16 grams
Carbohydrate 31 grams
Protein 31 grams

I’m tagging along on Kevin’s business trip to Salt Lake City this week.  So, while he goes networking, I get to hang out and enjoy some downtime.

We got here last night (it wasn’t a bit colder here than at home — strange!) and this morning I did some flexibility training in the form of beginner yoga.  I used an audio file I got free from yogadownload.com (thanks to Kath at Kath Eats Real Food for blogging about it).  This is only the second time I’ve done yoga.  I’m not into all the spiritual/energy stuff but I do need to improve my flexibility.  The download I got is pretty easy and basic, however the lady’s voice weirds me out a little.

For the rest of my workout, I did some push-ups then raced up the stairs in the hotel (more like ran, walked to catch breath, ran again) then went for a nice brisk jog down the road in front of the hotel.  It’s hard to tell from the picture, but I ran past some interesting buildings and the scenery was nice.  The air was crisp (albeit unhealthy) and there was still snow on the ground from earlier.  Being from Florida, of course we hoped it would snow while we’re here, but the weather forecast has only promised the likelihood of rain for the next week :-(

The view from the glass door in the room over the street where I ran.

I also planned to use the hotel’s “fitness center,” which looked to be centered around a treadmill in the photo on their website earlier.  In the photo it seemed nice because the treadmill faced  a glass door that went outside.  When I got down there last night, there was a sign saying the fitness center moved to the floor below the lobby.  It ended up being an extremely plain  small room with light-colored walls (with not even a picture hanging on them).  The only two things in the room were a treadmill and an elliptical.  To top it off, when I went to open the door late this morning, it was locked!  I wasn’t missing out on anything though.

Post-workout swag Kevin brought back– a cherry pecan Balance bar:

I really don’t like Balance bars so I didn’t expect to like this one.  It was better than their chocolate or peanut butter types but still not that great.  It was okay — the dominant flavors to me were fig and cherry — but there was still that Balance bar taste to it.  In the product’s defense, I don’t get crazy over bars unless the name starts with something like Ghirardelli or Hershey.

Off to do some writing and take some pictures later!

Just regular ol’ stir-fry that definitely fits in the Spartan category …

And some hot tea …

The price:

1 lb. frozen stir-fry veggies- $2

1 lb. boneless, skinless chicken breast- about $2.60

So it’s about $2.30 per person, not including staples like soy sauce, corn starch and oil.

Of course, if you don’t like Spartan food, you could add some rice …

This meal’s stats for a big serving (1/2 lb. chicken, 1/2 lb. veggies, soy sauce, oil, and cornstarch) are:

498 calories

11 grams of fat

37 carb

64 protein

I made yogurt cheese for the first time this week. If you don’t know, yogurt cheese is the end product when the liquid is drained from yogurt. The method I used involved a cup, coffee filters, and a rubber band.

This is what I ended up with:

It is my understanding that the process creates a product that is lower in lactose than the yogurt you start out with. I’ve read that it tastes just like cream cheese (it does reach that consistency if you drain it long enough) but I wouldn’t say mine tasted exactly like cream cheese. Mine was similar, but it was also somewhat tangy and not rich like cream cheese. But I used nonfat plain yogurt so that might be the difference.

I added chives and salt to mine and it came out pretty good — good enough that I can see some experimenting with this in my future. Some people say that yogurt cheese made with vanilla-flavored yogurt tastes just like cheesecake. I don’t know about that but I’m thinking of mixing in some vanilla next time to see what happens.

A tablespoon of yogurt cheese made with plain nonfat yogurt is 10 calories. This is why it is often used as a spread, in dips, or in place of sour cream.

If you’re interested, here are instructions on how to make yogurt cheese.

Just a good cold weather weekday meal: pork tenderloin (with gravy made from the juices) more carrots, canned seasoned collard greens, and strawberry muffins.

Here are the muffins, which I made with 1 cup white flour and 3/4 cup whole wheat flour. It definitely makes the texture more interesting. The original plan was blueberry muffins but the blueberries went bad before I could use them, so I opted for strawberry since I didn’t want to go to the store and I had a little tub of thawed strawberries already.

In case anyone is interested, I calculated the stats for tonight’s meal (includes one muffin and four ounces of meat). There were about 576 calories 22 grams of fat, 60 grams of carbs, and 26 protein.