Stuff Your Face Sunday

I apologize for the lack of posts last week.  Was having the worst week of my professional career.  Utterly miserable.  Though I am happy to report that I never found myself blacking out and waking up covered in Cheez-it dust, so I'm proud of myself for that!

Anyhow, time for this week's Stuff Your Face Sunday.  This week's menu was pretty quick to put together, which is always appreciated.  After venturing out to my personal idea of hell, Trader Joe's on a Sunday, it only took me maybe an hour and a half or so to actually cook.  Ingredients were simple, prep was easy, and cook time was only 15-20 minutes per dish.  All around win.

I like bowties on my men...AND my pasta.

I started off with this lemony chicken made with cream of chicken soup.  I realize that cream of chicken soup is straight out of the trailer park but I LOVE IT.  It's salty and creamy and chickeny, what's not to like?  The recipe is so simple and it made the house smell great.  I put it on top of farfalle (my favorite) and though I would've preferred to have had whole wheat pasta, unfortunately TJ's was out of it for some reason.  And they call themselves a health food store....

I'm hopeful it tastes as good as this looks.

Next we had this savory salmon recipe.  I apologize, I have no personal photos of this dish because, frankly, my fish looked like a flat turd.  Charming huh?  I used a white-ish frozen salmon filet and that combined with the marinade made for terrible presentation.  Fair warning: if you're using minced garlic keep an eye on the stove and cook it at a LOW heat.  That stuff burns fast and then you'll have a really dark brown marinade.  I haven't tried it yet but I worry the balsamic may be a touch overpowering considering that it was making me cough when I was inhaling it's fumes during cooking.  I'll report back on this later in the week.  In the meantime, this is what it was supposed to look like.  Thank you allrecipes.com for taking nicer photos than I do!

Yes, I eat my pudding out of a champagne
glass with my initial bedazzled on it.
Don't judge me.

So those are the major meals and now, for the all important snacks.  For my morning snack I'll be repeating last week's slice of whole wheat bread with cream cheese, spinach, and turkey slices.  Delicious, nutritious, easy to put together, travels well.  BUT for my afternoon snack, I got a bit fancier.  OK, not really fancy but a lot more exciting for my tastebuds.  I dusted off an old recipe I used to eat ALL the time during my obsession with weight training and eating protein.  I call it simply Protein Pudding and it's brainless: take cottage cheese and blend til smooth, add a little milk if needed to thin it up BUT bear in mind it gets a bit thicker after you refrigerate.  Then, take whatever flavor instant fat free sugar free jello pudding powder that you prefer and mix in to taste.  When you eat it, you can add fruit like I did or not.  So this fancy looking "dessert" is actually sugar free AND protein packed!  Genius!  I used cheesecake flavor which goes very nicely with strawberries, but I've also done chocolate (sometimes with protein, sometimes not) which is equally delicious.  I think I'll try freezing these this summer and see if it works as a popsicle, mmmm.

So there we have it.  Now I'm downloading new music for my MP3 player (I'm one of 3 people in the world who doesn't own ANY Apple products) and making myself a new running mix for my workout tomorrow.  I'm ashamed to admit I just added a Demi Lovato song into the playlist.  And yes, I am almost 30 years old.

Have a healthy week!