COOKIES!

Everyone loves cookies.  I seriously doubt theres a single person alive who hasn't found one cookie they at least like, and what better time is there to make cookies than the holiday season.

This morning I kicked off the cookie baking in the Osetek Household with a new favorite from Good Housekeeping Cookies book and then moved to a variation on an old tried and true.  Ofcourse I had some fun with the "kids" on the way so, pardon the pics...(I was waiting for the cookies to come out of the oven and had a little too much fun!...oh and yes I washed my hands!)

First Recipie (the winner this morning by far!)

Chocolate Wows
Bake Time: 13 minutes, recipe makes 48 cookies (or if you like a little bigger cookie, it makes 24...yes, I like big cookies, you know you do to!)

Ingredients:

Waiting for recipe #1 to finish

1/3 cup flour
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
6 squares (6oz) semisweet chocolate
1/2 cup butter (1 stick)
2 large eggs
3/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2 cups chopped pecans
1 6oz package of semisweet chocolate chips

Directions:  Some of the directions in the book were very specific for mixing eggs and using wire spatulas...thats great, but I'm a little to free spirited for that this morning and just did the following:

1. Preheat oven to 325' F and place some wax paper on a couple cookie baking sheets
2. Mix all dry ingredients.
3. Melt butter and chocolate squares in microwave at 30 second intervals, when mixable, take wooden spoon (or any spoon) and stir until smooth.  Put aside and let cool a bit
4. Put wet ingredients into dry ingredients and stir.
5. Add chocolate mixture and stir.
The batter will be like cake batter, don't panic (I did).

Chopped Chocolate

6. Add the pecans and chocolate chips.  Here's where the batter will look a bit better.  Still a little more wet than a regular cookie recipe, but don't worry it will turn out ok.
7. Spoon cookies (you determine the size) onto wax paper/cookie sheets
8. Bake for 13 minutes, the tops will be shiny and cracked

When they come out of the oven, they are super soft, thats where having a couple cookie sheets will come in handy so you can put one in and let the other cool.

These are the best!  They literally taste like chocolate pecan pie in a cookie!

Recipie #2
**White Chocolate Chip Cookies
(Honestly I ran out of chocolate chips...and I'm still in my PJ's and am to lazy to go to the store and get some at the moment, so this is the wonderful result!)

Ingredients:
1 1/4 cup flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup butter (1stick)
1/2 cup brown sugar (recipe calls for light brown, I only had dark in the house, still turned out good)
3/4 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs

Waiting for recipe #2 to finish

1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 package White Chocolate Chips (insert regular chocolate chips if that's what your going for)
2 cups pecans...(I used walnuts because I always use walnuts in chocolate chip cookies and because I had used all the pecans in the previous recipe)

Directions: Remember what I wrote up in recipe #1 with the directions saying specific things and me not following every detail?...that holds true with this recipe as well...dont be a hater, they will turn out)

1. Preheat oven to 375'F
2. Combine dry ingredients
3. Melt butter in microwave until stick is about half gone, then take out and mix until smooth (this makes it go by faster instead of letting the butter sit out for hours getting to room temperature)
4. Put wet ingredients into dry ingredients and mix
5. Add walnuts (or any nuts, or no nuts) and white chocolate chips and mix
6. Drop the cookie dough onto the baking sheets over wax paper and bake 10-12 minutes.  This recipe made a couple more cookies than the previous one, I think I got about 30 cookies total.

The Finished Product

YUM!

Papa Murphy's Pizza Awesomeness

This past weekend we opted to try a new pizza place.  We drove to Hickory North Carolina to visit Papa Murphy's Take 'N' Bake Pizza.

What does that mean?  "Take N Bake?  Well, it means what it sounds like.

We arrived pretty late (about 8:40pm) and after much discussion about their awesome menu, decided on two medium pizza's.  The first a "Herb Chicken Mediterranean dLite" pizza and the second a "Chicago Style Stuffed Pizza".

We ordered and watched them make each pizza.  While we waited I explored their counter cooler and looked at their dessert pizza that they had out (a "Smore's" pizza...YUM!).

Raw Mediterranean Pizza

After a short five minute wait both our pizzas were ready.  Yes, BOTH pizzas.  But how can that be?  Well, the kicker to this place is that they send the pizza home with you WITHOUT cooking it.  Yes, that's correct, you will be driving home with uncooked dough and un-melted cheese, only to arrive home and have to cook it yourself.

So, back to our experience.  After about five minutes, both our pizza's were ready.  The cashier came around the counter and handed us our cling wrapped pizzas and asked if we had ever been to "Papa Murphy's" before.  "No" we replied.  She then gave us great instructions on food safety and cooking.  And to our great surprise she said "I saw you eyeing that dessert pizza, we have to close soon, would you like to take it home?".

Cooked Mediterranean dLite Pizza

They gave us a FREE dessert pizza. (Insert a vision of me doing a happy dance like Carlton from "Fresh Prince of Bell air" right there!)

We headed home to get the oven going.

When we got home it was about 9:45 and we were hungry.  The oven got pre-heated and the first pizza went in.  We cooked the "Mediterranean dLite" pizza first.  It was a thin crust chicken, and vegetable pizza with garlic cheese and roasted bell peppers.

It was done after about 20 minutes.

Cooked Chicago style stuffed pizza

After this pizza we decided to go ahead and cook the second.  The "Chicago Style Stuffed Pizza" which was a deep dish stuffed pizza with lots of meats.

It was pretty good.  But the Mediterranean was the winner of the pizza's for the entrees.

Then we set to cooking the dessert pizza.  This pizza was a "Smore's" pizza that consisted of pizza crust, marshmallows, chocolate chips, and brown sugar.

Cooked Chicago Stuffed

Again AMAZING!  But although this was one of my favorite desert pizzas I have ever eaten, by this time we were so full, we could only eat about a half a piece each.

All went back into the fridge to face the re-heating for lunch test over the next few days.

And I'm happy to say that yes, the pizzas (all three) were good re-heated...which proved true ALL weekend (i.e. pizza for breakfast and lunch and snacks).

cooked dessert pizza

If you get a chance, try these guys out (yes, I may be biased because I received a free dessert pizza...I love free food, especially dessert)!  It's definitely fun and new.

Side note: All the pizza's come with instructions on cooking and food safety.  Make sure to follow the directions, no need to get sick from eating raw dough or other uncooked foods on the pizza's.

yum re-heated dessert pizza

The Candy Experiment

Finally got in a run this afternoon.  I am trying to decide what to do next with my training. The last few years I have been training for one race after another.  Finally I was able to reach a long time goal of mine this past year by qualifying for the Boston Marathon.  I promised my body I would take some time off post race and I did (about 6 weeks gasp!).  I had a BIG test coming up and needed to spend the past couple weeks studying not running.

So the past few weeks have been rest weeks for me while I studied for the certification exam (I still don't know how I did as the results take 6-8 weeks to be sent back out). This seems like no big deal,just a couple weeks off.  But for me, its pretty big.  I had been training for the past year five to six days a week.  And for the past couple years I've not really taken more than three weeks or so off from running.  So it was a big deal (yes, I know I already said that).

In that time I went from eating healthy to eating "un-healthily" to back to eating mostly healthy.  I discovered that when I am exercising and training I find it easier to follow a healthy eating plan and easier to practice (my personal favorite) "Intuitive Eating".

What is "Intuitive Eating"?

I remember while in school studying for my RD credential we had to take a course by the name of "Nutrition Counseling" in which we were taught some of the basics of counseling and how to ask questions in dietary interviews.

In that course we learned about "Intuitive Eating" in which people are taught how to listen to their bodies signals for what to eat and to listen to their senses for hunger and satiety, as well as taste acuity(sp?).  We were taught ways to use "Intuitive Eating" to maintain a healthy relationship with food.

Our teacher (probably one of the best I've ever had) had us do the following exercise in class.  She passed out 2 M&M's per person. We had to put one M&M in our mouth and eat it as we usually did (I ate mine without a thought). YUM! I love M&M's was all I could think about.  Well, that and I couldn't remember if I had actually eaten anything at all as it had gone by so fast.

Then later in the class, with our eyes closed, she had us put the other M&M in our mouths and suck on it. Savor it. Think about it.  Think about our idea of the candy, and what we liked about it.  Was it really what we thought it was?  Did it satisfy a craving?  Was the chocolate in the candy even good?

Many people including myself were surprised at what they learned.  I actually found that I don't really like M&M's.  I like the idea of them, the thought of putting them in my mouth and satisfying not a nutritional need but an emotional one.  I learned that M&M's represent more than just food to me, but memories from my childhood.  It was a neat lesson (or experiment as I like to call these things...its more adventurous).

This is a great experiment to try at home or even with a group of people you run or workout with. You may be surprised at what you learn.  

Allot of potential gain from a food exercise right? Try it if you dare...it only takes two M&M's.

What the Fridge?

Our Refrigerator

The fridge is a central part of the kitchen.  Without it many things would have to be bought daily and leftovers would be sparse.  This dirty little pic is an "open window" if you will to our refrigerator.

Gasp!  is that recess and chocolate gelato?  Aren't you a dietitian?  Wait, is that cheese cake and baileys?

Thinking any of these things?

Our refrigerator is always a mystery.  I think we even have some dressings in there that are out of date.  If you look real hard you can see a Tupperware container filled with a mystery meat.  In reality that's the last of the turkey that didn't get put into a frozen entree post thanksgiving.  Yes, I know it now needs to be thrown away.

At the moment, our fresh vegetable bins at the bottom of the fridge are empty.  Yes, I know, a dietitian without any fruit or vegetables in the fridge, appalling.  To our defense, there's some frozen blue berries and strawberries in the freezer.

Messy Fridge

Here we have an up-close and personal view.  From top to bottom: diet Dr pepper, vanilla creamer, milk, whipped cream...old turkey, mayo, cool-whip, butter, home made butter...don't really know what's in the drawer...
then we have eggs and pickles.

If you look to the left of the picture into the freezer side you will see: frozen pizza, vegetables, frozen french fries, Popsicle maker, and desserts.


Obviously, we need a re-vamp of our dietary habits in the Osetek household but that is a post coming soon.

I will leave you with some pictures of our dog and cat.  We got a new camera and hopefully I will be providing new and better pictures of food and other fun stuff

please, please, please

Life is funny sometimes.


In life we ask for things.  We pray and plead for things.  We fight, act and react, we say we need things and do things to earn what we think we want.

Have you ever needed something so bad that you pleaded on your knees?  I'm talking on your knees, tears streaming kind of pleading?  Have you ever found yourself at the brink of some life event or change thinking "please, please let this be the time", or "let the job go through", or "let him win", or "let us get pregnant", or "make the meds work", or "let her cancer be gone"?  Or, have you pleaded for things like weight loss, money or luck?

The funny thing about life is that while sometimes when we plead, it is our own way of disguising our hard work,  other times, it is our own way of grasping at invisible straws.

We plead as we do things to get us to our goals. "Just let me get through this run" or "Just let me avoid this (insert greasy high fat food)".   It gets us through whatever moment we are in.  Eventually we reach one of our goals (that is if what we are trying to achieve is within our control).

For things that are totally out of our control however, those pleading moments are met with a final and abrupt brick wall, when what we've worked and hoped for, asked and begged for, doesn't come to pass.

It is that moment when you realize that what you wanted or needed so badly hasn't happened.  That moment when your stomach drops and your throat closes and your heart beats so hard you know someone ten feet away can hear it.

And you have to decide what to do next.  Do you give up?  Try again?  Will you be defeated by your own disappointment? Will fear of failing a second time or even a third keep you from getting back at it?

It is in that difficult moment, when you make that decision, you begin to define yourself.  That is when life's adventure begins...