As you know I’ve been going very haphazard on that in the past year, but I’m really starting to focus on things properly now. I think I’m in a much better place mentally. I joined Spark People at the recommendation of a fellow Mom, and I’m looking into their tips and things, as well as the bits and pieces I know already.

It’s about making life style changes. Now that hubbie’s feeling better from his surgery we’re going to be working together at this. It’s not as simple for me as just taking something like Phentermine and being done with it.

I want to make sure that I improve everywhere so that’s it’s easier to stick with this and I don’t wind up doing a yo-yo thing like I have before.

It’s so easy in today’s society to get impatient. We’re so conditioned into thinking that there should be “instant fixes” for everything that we don’t want to wait. It’s so tempting to figure that you can pop some weight loss pills instead of actually rectifying problems with your diet and way of life. Why should I make the effort? I can just press this button and all the problems will go away.

The thing is that it’s not that easy and doing things in that fashion is a hollow victory, and really setting yourself up for relapse and failure because you’re not fixing the problem. You’re just masking the problem. Victory’s are best when hard won.

We’re rectifying issues within our household and diet over the past few weeks and continuing on. It is hard going but it’s worthwhile. I’ve cut back on the soda. I know I won’t be able to wean off it entirely, but I just have one can a day as a treat, and already I’m noticing some positive changes with my attitude and diet. I’m cutting back on portion sizes. That’s good too. For example, often I’ll combine leftover meat with egg and potatoes and make a breakfast concoction on the weekends, and would then sit there making sandwiches with the food. So, today I got myself two tortillas and filled them with some concoction and left the rest on the stove for other family members to eat. I’ve been fine with what I ate.

Small portions are the best bet. We have fruit for snack food now: grapes, bananas, melon pieces, rather than chocolate raisins and potato chips.

If I go for walks early in the morning it’s not so hot, and we can run around our yard which is very shady during the day and not get too overheated. Once our tax return comes in I’m going to look into membership to our local YMCA gym which is near my therapist’s office. That would be a good way to exercise and be in air conditioning, and my husband would like that too. He could work out while I take the munchkin swimming or something like that.

I’m no longer slacking on this factor of my well-being, and I feel good about that. Overall I still feel a bit “crappy” because I have the remnants of the stomach flu still affecting me. I had a couple of days of “okay” and I’m back in the bathroom quite a bit, but not as bad as I was this time last week where I could only make it off the couch to run to the bathroom.

Anyway, over the weekend I bought some replacement batteries for the scale that I have, and yesterday I was able to put them in and check how much I weight. 242.8. That’s higher than I was last time I was seriously dieting (I got down to 239 then), but it’s lower than I was when I weighed at the doctor’s office three weeks ago. So that’s good. I’ve lost about 3 pounds since then.

Also I’ve seriously cut back on my soda intake. In the past week I’ve had two Mountain Dews, one was a medium sized bottle and yesterday I had a can. This is a major improvement given I’ve been known to drink four cans in a day, at least. The rest of the time I’m drinking water or water with the low-calorie flavor packets in it so that I have a bit of a change from plain water but am not craving the soda. It’s made me a bit irritable because my caffeine intake is severely depleted, but I do still have the tea that I can drink which gives me a little bit of caffeine.

So, here’s hoping that I can get my weight to my original goal. My idea now is to do this by October, because I’m officiating a friend’s wedding in November and it would be good to be able to get into my old clothes and be a bit sleeker by then. Although by my birthday in July I would like to be down at least 15 pounds, I think that’s doable as my birthday is 16 weeks away.

So here’s the Four Foods on Friday entry for this week. I missed last week and almost missed today because things have been so hectic and plague-ridden over here, but here we go.

#1. What’s your favorite form of potatoes?
That’s a tough one I really like potatoes pretty much anyway they can be made. Especially if they’re scalloped and covered in spices, and everything, or french-fried. How about my favorite way to have them is any way that I don’t actually have to make them, LOL.

#2. Pie crust. Premade or from scratch?
Pre-made. Definitely. I suck at pastry. Unless I cheat and do almost pre-made and get the kind that you get frozen and actually have to roll out, but don’t have to mix.

#3. Vegetables. Fresh, frozen or canned?
I lived with canned veggies for a while, but those are now only kept for hurricane emergencies and things like that. We mostly have frozen and occasionally fresh around here, depending on how quickly they’re going to get cooked. Frozen tends to be best/most often used.

#4. What one dish do you wish you could prepare better?
Hm. I think I’m pretty good at working out how to do anything very well. There’s not been much that I’ve tried to make that hasn’t been edible. I guess pies would be something *L* pastry. I’m a bit daunted by some of the Italian recipes my husband’s relatives gave us…but I can’t really say because I haven’t tried them all yet.

Here I go with my entry for Four Foods on Friday meme.

#1. What type of m&m is your favorite?
I like just the regular M&M’s the dark chocolate ones are nice but I can’t find them any more. I’m not too keen on the peanut or almond flavors though.

#2. Peanut butter. Smooth, chunky, creamy. How do you like it?
Smooth. I don’t eat much of it any more either. I used to have toast with peanut butter and jam or marmalade every morning, but I haven’t eaten it in a while. I particularly don’t like peanut butter mixed with chocolate. Reese’s Cups or things are right out. My husband teases me about this failing on my part, but not too much, because it means he gets to eat all of those types of candy if we’re given them at Yule tide or for Easter or something like that.

#3. Do you usually drink out of glass, acrylic, Tupperware type or paper cups?
For the most part lately I’ve been drinking directly out of cans. I will use glasses if I’m drinking water or something. We also have plastic and styrofoam cups at our house too for when our friends are over gaming, and because my husband maintains that hot drinks keep their heat longer in styrofoam rather than mugs so whenever he has coffee or tea he drinks it out of those and I drink it out of a mug.

#4. Share a chicken recipe.
Hm. Well, I’ve shared a few recipes in the past few weeks that use chicken. Let’s think what else I can…oh, General Tso’s chicken. That’s actually fairly simple, LOL, because I cheat with it a lot so I can make it quickly.

1 cup of rice per person eating.
1 lb pack of chicken breasts.
1 bottle of General Tso’s sauce. (I usually get the Iron Chef kind).
Birds Eye Microwaveable Steam Broccoli.

Chop the chicken breasts into bite sized pieces and fry them up.
Set the rice to cook with one cup of water per cup of rice either in a rice steamer or in a pan on the stove.
Once the chicken is browned add the General Tso’s sauce.
Once the chicken is thoroughly coated, steam the vegetables and then add them to the mix.
Serve.

There are ways to make the General Tso’s sauce for scratch, but any time I’ve tried it’s always come out tasting absolutely horrible, so I go for the cheat way. The sauce is usually about $4 but it’s worth it to not have the hassle of a horrible meal.

Be sure to check out the Fun Crafts and Recipes blog for a the Four Foods on Friday round-up.

So, a week or two I’d mentioned that I was going to write out how I make curry, but that weekend we ate curry out of the house three days in a row so I decided NOT to make curry. Yesterday I finally made the curry and snapped a few pictures of my process.

I posted the actual curry recipe there. In this particular curry my main ingredients are as follows.

1. A pack of chicken, chopped.
2. Potatoes, pre-boiled and diced.
3. Coconut milk.
4. Various spices.

Here are the main spices I used.

I also put in a smidge of minced onion, but that comes later.
The first thing to do is brown the chopped chicken in the pan, while you open the coconut milk, and chop the potatoes. (You can add other veggies to the mix once the chicken is cooked, but in this case all I had was potatoes).
After the chicken is cooked through add the potatoes to the mix and stir it up, then add the coconut milk, then blend again because sometimes the coconut milk will start to separate and be a little chunky.

Next comes the fun part adding the spices:

I don’t measure the spices. I just put a bit in and mix it until it looks good. The key thing with curry is tasting it and making sure it’s not too spicy. The chili and cayenne are what govern the spiciness not the curry powder.

Once it’s at the appropriate taste for you, you can serve it over steamed rice. Voila!

For all those who guessed that I was making some kind of sushi rolls yesterday that is indeed what I was doing. I can make Maki Sushi, which is the sushi which uses the Nori seaweed rolls wrapped around rice, fish and vegetables.

I know how to make california type rolls and also shrimp and crab rolls and it was a combination of those which I made yesterday. I thought I would write out how I do these things so that people who are curious have an idea as to the steps.
I don’t trust myself with a variety raw fish at home. I’ll go out and get that elsewhere. It’s a shame because I LOVE-LOVE eel and salmon rolls, but I’m too paranoid. You can also make sushi rolls with just veggies. There are some really good ones which are combinations of cream cheese, carrots, cucumber, avocado and so on.

Firstly ingredients:
Nori seaweed wraps
Rice Vinegar
Water
Rice (I use jasmine rice, but you can get “sushi” rice from most grocery stores. Any short grain rice works best)
Crab/Imitation crab meat
Tempura shrimp
Cucumber.
Cream Cheese
(You can also use avocado in the shrimp rolls but I couldn’t find any good avocado at the store).

How to go about it:

The friend who first showed me how to make sushi recommended a rice cooker and I wholeheartedly agree. It’s so easy to make sure that you get enough rice, and that it cooks to the consistency you need without having to hover over the pot all the time. That way you can prep the rest of your ingredients and be ready to go once the rice is cooked.
Rice cookers come with these nifty measuring cups which are perfect for sorting out how much rice you need. I used two cups of rice and two cups of water and a cup of rice vinegar, and that was enough rice to make five sushi rolls.

While the rice was cooking I peeled some of the rind of half a cucumber and chopped it into thin strips, then chopped the crab meat into halves. I also put four of the shrimp tempura pieces in the oven to warm up, that took about 12 minutes at 350. I also made some thin slices of cream cheese as well, and then washed my knives off.

I had a very good tip that it’s best to keep your knife warm and slightly wet when trying to slice through sushi rolls because it helps to stop the seaweed wraps sticking to the knife and makes it a lot easier to cut.

Once the shrimp was cooked I let it cool for a little while as the rice was almost ready. Here you see the wrap laid out on a sushi mat. Those are supposed to help make it easier for you to roll and shape the sushi but I’ve yet to be able to work that out. I find it easier just to roll the sushi itself. If anyone has any tips on rolling with the mat I’d be happy to hear them.

It’s important to remember to put the sushi wrap shiny side down.

Once the rice was cooked, fluffy and sticking together I laid it out on the sushi wrap. You lay the rice out to the edge of the wrap on three sides, but leave some empty wrap at the bottom so that the wrap will stick together. Then about a third of the way down you lay the ingredients. In the picture below I have crab, cucumber and cream cheese to make the california like rolls. With the shrimp rolls I just used shrimp and cream cheese for one, and shrimp, crab and cream cheese for the other as I had crab meat left over.

Once everything is laid out you roll the wrap up together, until it’s stuck like the one below. This is the shrimp and cream cheese roll. Then after running my knife under the hot tap for a little while I sliced the sushi into pieces, each somewhere between a half inch and three-quarters of inch in width.

Here’s the first california roll and the shrimp and cream cheese roll. I wound up making two more california rolls and the shrimp and crab roll. They’re very yummy even if I do say so myself.

What’s anyone else’s favorite kinds of sushi?

I love to eat the shrimp rolls especially fresh off the press because the shrimp is still slightly warm and it just melts in your mouth. I like eel rolls, and eel and cream cheese is just divine, but I haven’t tried to make those myself yet.

It’s good to serve sushi with pickled ginger and wasabi, but I need to learn how to make wasabi paste properly. Usually I cheat and get it from the grocery store, but it’s not very spicy. It’s good to serve sushi with soy sauce and mix in a little wasabi to taste and then dip the rolls in there.

Here are my ingredients:

What could they make? Can you guess?

You may have noticed I haven’t talked about my diet or exercise plans in a while; because for a bit there they really went to pot. Lately I’m in the mood to start going with things again. I’ve been doing minor things like taking the munchkin out for the romps in the morning or using him as my weight lifting exercise, but I’m an impatient person. I want results; but I keep forgetting to get the batteries to fix my scale so I can’t really tell the difference or if anything’s happening at all.

When I talked to the doctor about my weight one of the things which came up was weight loss pills; but we both decided that I just need determination and to stick to things, and I know I have the ability to do that I just keep putting it off which is so very counter-productive. It’s always excuses. “I feel bad” “I’m too busy” ” I have to do this instead” or just plain “I don’t want to.”

This stops here! Over the past couple of days Mum helped me figure out my points allowance for Weightwatchers and gave me some spare point configuration cheat sheets that she had. I’ve put things off again but starting today I’m going to be counting my points. I’m allowed 40 per day from the looks of things, and 35 extra for the week, so that will give me the opportunity to “cheat” a little on gaming days and have a little bit of junk food so that I don’t feel deprived.

I can do this!

Well, as of this morning’s weigh-in I’m 239.6. I’ve actually gained .4 of a pound.
I’m not going to let this deter me though. I’m coming up for that lovely female time of the month and normally gain around 1lb during that time, so I look on this as a good sign that I’m probably starting to lose, but there’s water retention and all the rest of it. I didn’t exercise two days out of this last week because I was in a major funk, we have some things going on that I’ll get into later, to put it briefly we’ve found out we have to be out of our apartment by this time next month. Such FUN.

Anyway I’m off now to run some errands, and see if we’d be eligible for a mortgage or foreclosure or a “we’re happy that your husband’s a cop have a great housing deal” situation.