Meatless Month, Days 3-5

Day Three: No worries--leftover pizza and leftover seafood salad for breakfast and lunch. The restaurant we went to for the awards served pasta and pizza and bread sticks and salad. I took the sausage off the sausage pizza, ate a spoonful of pasta and some salad, half a bread stick and half a piece of cake. 

Day Four: OOPS! So, I was pretty tired and forgot that my usual "in a hurry" breakfast of a bacon, egg, and cheese McGriddle had bacon on it until the thing was nearly gone (two bites away, bacon already on the way to my tummy).

Lunch was some leftover tuna casserole, eaten on the fly before running to get the kids from school.

Supper was fettuccine alfredo, eaten while on the phone with the warranty company, since our A/C unit decided it needs to be fixed already. 

Today, Day Five, I had coffee and a quarter of a piece of white bread toast with butter, stolen from my 11 year-old. Don't tsk me! It was from his fourth piece! Once I had him off to school, I had scrambled eggs and oatmeal toast with cinnamon apple jelly.

Lunch was leftover fettuccine alfredo.

Supper was a family favorite—maple salmon.

Recipe: Taken from my favorite recipe website, Allrecipes.

Ingredients:

¼ cup maple syrup (I use ½ regular and ½ no sugar to cut back)

2 Tbls soy sauce (I use the no salt added version)

1 clove garlic, minced or jarred minced garlic (1 tsp or to taste)

¼ tsp garlic salt (I use a dash)

1/8 tsp ground black pepper (I skip this or use white pepper)

1 lb salmon

Directions:

1.     Pour the maple syrup into the measuring cup. Add the soy sauce, garlic, garlic salt and pepper. (Allrecipes says to mix all the ingredients in a bowl, but why make extra dirty dishes?)

2.     If you use frozen salmon, thaw it in a plastic bag soaked in lukewarm water. Simply add the sauce to the bag and squish it around to ensure every piece of the salmon is coated. Place the bag in the fridge for at least 30 minutes, although if you prep this early in the day, it will not hurt the salmon to stay in the fridge with the mixture all day. (Allrecipes says to place the salmon in a shallow baking dish and coat it with the sauce, turning once during the 30 minute marinating process. I find the plastic zipper bag works better, allowing all sides of the salmon to become coated without having to remember to flip it.)

3.     Preheat oven to 400ºF (200ºC).

4.     Place the coated salmon into a shallow baking dish. Pour the rest of the mixture over the salmon. Bake uncovered for 20 minutes or until the fish is easily flaked with a fork.

Nutrition information:

Servings: 4

Calories 265

Total Fat: 12.4 g

Cholesterol: 67 mg

Sodium: 633 mg

Total carbs: 14.1 g

Dietary fiber: 0.1 g

Protein: 23.2 g

Again, remember that these numbers come from Allrecipes; I do not have a chem lab in my kitchen, no matter what my mother-in-law says. Changing things, like using no sugar syrup and low sodium soy sauce, will change the nutritional information.

Pics:

Usually, I have a large, glass lasagna pan that I use to cook the entire batch (this is a double recipe, due to popular demand). Unfortunately, said lasagna pan is buried somewhere in a box marked "kitchen" in the bowels of my garage at the moment. 

Ta-Da! Cooked maple salmon with white rice and asparagus. YUM!

A cockroach, by any other name...

...would still be as gross. So, on a couple of other websites that I frequent, there are discussions that I've become involved in where the naming of things is being bandied about.

First, on the Team Flyboy thread on the forums on Gateworld, we're talking about bugs. Mainly, one of the girls found a spider lurking about when she moved her old stove out to clean the area in preparation for a new stove. I mentioned that not only do I hate spiders, but I hate all bugs in general. We've just moved, as I'll be discussing more in future posts, and have found that the bug-man needs to come to my house. I am not talking about the disgusting alien guy from Men In Black, but rather the super-hero who makes all the nasty, crawly critters go away.

Last Sunday night, our second night in our new home, I sat down in the throne room and prepared to take care of some business with Mother Nature. When I glanced up at the doorway (the throne room is one of those that is occupied by only the throne, the royal parchment and a small closet), I noticed that one of Mother's more disgusting, and larger, specimens had decided to share the throne room with me. I'm not into sharing. Cautiously, I used the parchment and dressed once more, keeping a steady eye on my room-mate. I slowly reached for the door knob and turned it, painstakingly opening the doorway. Yon critter moved. I screamed and made a run for the outer sanctum. My teen-aged boy came darting in, an Alaskan ulu knife in hand, to confront my attacker.

This is what he brought:

This is what he should have brought:

He found a sneaker and after a couple of whacks, dispatched of my foe, whose picture will not be posted for reasons of ickiness. Suffice to say, it was a big black cockroach, the size of a short bus. All right, it was more like a little bigger than my thumb. Either way, it was too big and too gross to be allowed inside my house. 

There's the (rather long-winded--surprise! not) story behind the title of my post. One of the other girls remembered living in Florida, as well, and said she had not been a fan of the Palmetto bugs that lurked lived in the tropical climate. She said that was the name she knew those cockroaches by. Personally, I don't care what you call 'em, long as you call 'em "not in my house". 

On the other website, LiveJournal, a discussion has begun on how things are called based on where you live. More on that tomorrow. I've got to go peek into the throne room before another visit, get some laundry together so I have something decent to wear to the teen's special dinner tonight (in honor of the Naval Sea Cadets, where he has risen through the ranks to become a leader and will be an E3 by the end of the summer), then off to empty another box or two in the epic drama that is moving and unpacking. 

So how do y'all feel about cockroaches? Good, bad, indifferent, terrified, disgusted? 

Meatless Month, Day Two

Day Two of our meatless month project.

Breakfast was unmemorable. I think I nibbled on some imitation crabmeat. Maybe.

Lunch: Seafood salad. Small seashell-shaped noodles cooked and mixed with imitation crabmeat, hard-boiled eggs and mayonnaise.

Supper: Mushroom and pepper pizza with bread sticks.

Tomorrow we are at a banquet for the teen. Don't know what's being served. Hope we can get something that's on our okay list. 

Meatless Month, Day One

Don’t know why, but hubby & I decided to go meatless this month. Actually, that's a lie--one of my buddies on Live Journal is a vegetarian and posts about she and her boyfriend's Sunday dinners. I mentioned this to hubby and he decided that it sounded like an interesting idea to try to go for a month without meat. I went along with it, wondering if we'd feel any healthier or lose any weight (dubious, since we'll likely be eating a lot of pasta and bread). I will blog as often as I can, catching you all up, posting pictures as possible and letting you know how hubby, teen boy, pre-teen boy and I are reacting. Bear in mind, we've just moved and things are in chaos at the moment.

The Rules:

No chicken

No turkey

No beef

No pork (or pork products--so no ham or bacon)

We can eat fish, eggs, beans and cheese, as well as, of course, pasta, nuts, vegetables, and fruits. Chicken and beef broth are okay, just not the solid stuff.

We do not like tofu when it's being passed off as something other than what it is or any other fake meat.


Day 1

Today, I actually ate breakfast. Unusual for me, as if I eat too early, I get sick and by the time I can eat, I usually have clients or staff needing my help. I had scrambled eggs and an English muffin with butter and grape jelly.

Lunch was a bowl of tuna casserole.

Dinner was tuna melts on English muffins with cheese (I had one with white American cheese and one with shredded cheddar blend, hubby had both with white American cheese). Hubby had Lipton chicken soup without meat. Sorry, no pics today--I have to find my camera. LOL! The teen is at his girlfriend’s house. He whimpered his GF’s mom into making him a roast beef dinner. Already. **rolls eyes** The pre-teen wanted to eat hot dogs—not on the “approved” list, but we have two packets in the fridge that will go bad if no one eats them, so we’re letting the kids finish off the “no-no” items.


The plan for tomorrow is to have pizza for dinner. Breakfast and lunch will be played by ear. I may ignore hubby's complaints about the smell and hard boil some eggs for a nice egg salad sandwich. :)

Word Wednesday--Ixes

Almost like the Do-re-me song, when you know the basics, you can create fabulous music with your words. 

[vid of Do re me song from the Sound of Music]

We discussed a bit about words last week--how they have a history and a basic element, sort of like in chemistry. When you add more elements to the basic one, new compounds are created. Root words have "-ixes" added to them to change their meanings--affixes, which can be divided into prefixes and suffixes. At least that's what I learned in school. Apparently, there are a whole slew more of them nowadays (no, I did not go to school in a one-room schoolhouse, although my dad did).

Prefix: An affix added to the beginning of a word to change its meaning. Ex: wanted becomes unwanted with the prefix un-.

Suffix: An affix added to the end of a word. Ex: -ly added to quick to make the adverb quickly.

Affix: An element of a word that is combined with other elements to change the meaning of the word. An affix can be either a prefix or a suffix in the English language.

Now, according to Wikipedia (I know, great reference source, Lynne), there are quite a few others that I use, but didn't think of as affixes.

There are: 

Infix: Cuts into the middle of a word. Massa-freakin'-chusetts.

Duplifix: Rhymes with the root or stem. Like the "itsy bitsy spider".

Interfix; Links two root words. Wikipedia gave the example of "speed-o-meter". I'm too tired to think of one of my own right now. 

Circumfix: Two parts of the affix sandwich the root. Dis-figure-ment.

Simulfix: The root word changes when it becomes plural. Sing to sang.

Suprafix: Where the stress is placed on different syllables of the word, thus changing the meaning. Again, lazy/tired. Gonna use Wikipedia's example of pro-duce (vegetables) vs pro-duce (to make).

Please note that these are all examples from English. There may be others. If you know of them, please let me know. I always like to learn. Most of the time. 

Word Wednesday: Intro

I have always loved words—the way a simple synonym can subtly change a meaning, the way they flow together to create new worlds. And yes, I was one of those weird kids in school that loved diagramming sentences. 

Word Wednesday is all about words--their uses, their misuses, their oddities and their simplicities. This week, since we’re just starting out, let’s define some of the words we’ll be using pretty regularly. Bear in mind that I’m not here to argue semantics (ooh! I’ll add that to my definitions) and any nitpicking will be subsequently ignored as I am a busy person looking for less stress, not more. My former middle school Earth Science teacher introduced me to the concept of K.I.S.S., an idea I have become more and more in love with each and every year since.

Semantics: The interpretation of the meaning of a word.

Etymology: The derivation of a word. A word’s “lineage”.

Root:  The base word from which other words can be formed. Ex: the root of “singing” is “sing”.

Next week, we'll talk about -ixes. You'll have to read to find out what I mean. :)

Kavan Smith was thinking of me!

I thought this deserved special note for a Fanny Friday post. I am a huge fan of Kavan Smith and have been since I first saw his portrayal of Major Evan Lorne in Stargate Atlantis. Unfortunately, I have never been able to afford to go see him at any of the cons he's attended. From all I've heard, he's not only a very down-to-earth man, but also a bit of a naughty boy. Sounds like we'd get along great!

An online friend of mine has met him many times and has become comfortable chatting with him. Recently, she went to see him in Vancouver. She talked to him about me--about how much of a fan I am and my inability to come see him--and this was the result:

I never asked her to get me anything and was completely bowled over to receive this in the mail from her. The fangirl in me squeed like a teenager when I opened the package. :) Mind, hubby's got his nose a bit out of joint over it, but he'll be fine. LOL