The first pasta salad I ever made was a disaster. I took the recipe from a friend after eating his dish at a potluck. I don’t remember what it included, I think chicken and perhaps pepperoni. I had friends and sister around as my guinea pig food tasters. It was disgusting. Nobody finished their dish. Of course, that was 6 or 7 years ago, and I’ve become a much more sophisticated cook (also better at obeying directions!) Though I don’t make pasta salads weekly, I really appreciate them for their endless healthy possibilities. Pasta salads also have such a nice social quality to them. I almost always make a pasta salad for parties as a vegetarian option or side dish. The picture here is of a pasta salad that I made for my birthday party last year. Nobody turns their nose up at pasta salad!

After visiting my mom this weekend, she sent us home with squash, cucumbers, and tomatoes. I instantly knew that I’d be making a pasta salad. I picked up some pre-cooked/pre-diced Tyson bagged chicken (a coupon buy), a block of mozzarella, and some rotini noodles. I always like rotini, farfalle (bowtie) or cellentani (curly cue) for pasta salads, because I think their shapes are cute and appropriate for the dish (i.e. holds the sauce/dressing best). For this particular pasta salad, I tried to slice up everything (except for the pasta) so it was dime-sized. I put all the ingredients in a big bowl, then I mixed them up with a big spoon. I sliced the cheese and veggies while the pasta was boiling, so the total meal prep time was around 30 minutes.

So you can recreate the recipe if you choose, here are the proportions: 1 bag of the pre-cooked/pre-diced Tyson bagged chicken, ½ block of mozzarella, ½ box of rotini noodles, 3 medium-sized yellow squashes, 2 cucumbers, 2 tomatoes, a splash of olive oil.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was always skinny. I was the skinny girl in a skinny family of stick people. Skinny dad. Skinny mom. Skinny sister. So when, in summer of 2006 (the summer before my senior year of college), my body went haywire and I gained 30 pounds in a three month period, I knew something was wrong. At that time, I worked at UNCA’s gym, and I looked like a giant blue blob in my standard-issue uniform. The thing is, since I was so skinny before (probably weighing an average 110-120 pounds since highschool), most people didn’t see me the way I saw me. Most didn’t even realize I’d gained so much weight.

After going to several doctors, I was diagnosed with a life-long medical condition that had triggered the weight gain. Over the next year (and a move to Flagstaff, AZ), I moved from doctor to doctor, realizing that this particular medical condition was correlated with a lot of other bad stuff other than the weight gain. High Cholesterol (Yes, I had high cholesterol at 21). Pre-Diabetes. A B-12 deficiency.

In Flagstaff, I thought I paid attention to my diet. I walked 30 minutes a day (going to and from campus), plus my regular exercising. I’d drink a Slim-Fast for breakfast. We bought our organic food from New Frontiers. But I wasn’t really thinking about quality or quantity. We still walked over to Chili’s two or three times a week for football, beer, and a feast. I got a M.A degree. I didn’t care much about the rest. I gained about ten more pounds in my time in Flagstaff.

Read the rest of this entry »

This morning, as I enjoyed a bowl of cereal and an egg white scramble (tossed in cheese and a couple bacon bits) with a glass of V8 Fusion, I got to thinking about what exactly my V8 juice is. Passion Fruit Tangerine tastes sort of fruity, with a strange carrot smell and aftertaste. For the most part, I feel healthy drinking it, compared to say… a beer with my breakfast, which would be decisively unhealthy. According to the front of the bottle, the juice contains a full serving of vegetables in addition to its full serving of fruit, AND it is approved by the American Heart Association, as it meets food criteria for saturated fat and cholesterol for healthy people over the age of 2… and I am definitely over the age of 2!

But when you look at the actual nutritional value, this is where I get a little confused. At 110 calories, it has pretty standard juice calorie intake. 0 fat, 70 mg of Sodium (3% daily value), 600 mg Potassium (17% daily value), 27 g total carbohydrate (including the 24 g of sugars) (9%), 0 Protein. None of this sounds particularly healthy in anyway. Onto the vitamin breakdown, Vitamin A 15%, Vitamin C 100%, Calcium 2%, Iron 0%, Vitamin E 10%.

With the exception of Vitamin C, V8 juice doesn’t seem to be giving me any amount of substantial nutritional value, so who cares if each serving contains a full serving of fruit and vegetables? A multivitamin would give me more nutrition than V8 seems to provide! Is there some sort of unquantifiable vegetable goodness which is soaking into my brain as I type this?

Don’t even get me started on peanut butter. Choosy moms choose Jif, but why? So I can get 4% of my daily Iron, 15% of my daily Vitamin E, 2% of my daily Riboflavin, and 20% Niacin? What does any of this even mean? Who cares about my Riboflavin levels? Why has the peanut butter and jelly sandwich been such a staple of the American lunch if there is absolutely nothing worth saving in here?

This has seriously just become a jumble full of questions. Maybe I’m just being paranoid, but I feel like the labels lie. Thoughts from you fine food-eating folk?

I first posted about Trail Mix several weeks ago. We just finished that batch.

This is Trail Mix Take Two. We eliminated the sunflower seeds because they’re too small. We decided we needed another fruit/something sweet, so we added the yogurt covered raisins, which are cute and look like little eggs.

Trailmix ala RayRay:
almonds, cashews, goldfish, peanut butter m&ms, yogurt covered raisins and pineapple

Any suggestions as to how we can make it even better?

I wanted to have an epic meal for my last night of summer. We normally buy ground turkey for our “staple meals,” and I wanted to grab a pound so that way Derrick can cook sloppy joes tomorrow night when I’m in class. I noticed that they also sell turkey legs for something like $1.98 per pound, and we bought a package three turkey legs for $3.13.

We really winged the meal for the most part (no turkey puns intended!), rubbing salt, pepper, garlic salt, paprika and vegetable oil on the legs, then cooking it at 400 for an hour and a half. It turned out delicious, though I think Derrick thought the skin was a little spicy. Side dishes included saffron rice and country style baked beans. DELICIOUS!

This meal for the two of us cost about 8 bucks, and we have leftovers to “recycle” as sides for our next few meals. My point is simple, as I was saying in my last entry, that I am increasingly amazed by how easy it is to cook cheaply at home. Derrick and I like to eat out, so it’s worth the extra looking around and experimenting to figure out some fun meals for home. This one will definitely be one we cook again.

Oh, and don’t worry, I’ll get out of this writing about food rut soon enough. School starts tomorrow, & you’ll be able to look forward to monster student stories. I’ll be teaching two sections of Eng. 1101 and taking my first MFA poetry workshop tomorrow evening.