I am a sexy BEAST. I need recipe/meal ideas! A.D.D. Deux & BREAD Bread bread!

You know those clothes you feel all sexy in?   This is not it.
I have no warm clothes, so I am wearing my hubby's big black sweater thing.  I went to our room to get something, and he got 'that look' and said, "You look incredibly sexy in my sweater."  I checked, and yes, he was serious.  This is me in my hubby's big, shapeless sweater. Did anyone ever see that movie with Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn "Housesitter"... where he complains that she keeps dressing in her sexy clothes... like a big baggy sweatshirt?  That is my husband.  With less hair.  That's a funny movie, btw.  I need to rent it again.

Not only am I not wearing any makeup, but I haven't even combed my hair.  See the look of disbelief on my face?  Silly man.  I love him and his love goggles.  Not everyone would be willing to post thier photo online in this kind of state, let me tell you.  This is what I look like in the mornings, although sometimes my hair is sticking up in the back.  And my roots don't show up much because I'm REALLY going gray quickly.  Probably all these teenagers around here.



Anyway, school is out because of the snow, so I don't have to leave and teach art today.  This means I can experiment with some more recipes!  Can you spot the difference between these two photos?

Healthy ingredients for my "Eat Clean" bread baking day!

This was actually the first photo.  See?  My husband's most assuredly NOT clean BACON in the background.  He wants me to say that at least he was eating it on my clean bread with healthy eggs and mozzerella cheese, so it wasn't totally unhealthy.  He's lost 13 pounds doing this whole eat clean thing, so he's allowed a treat... since he wasn't really TRYING to lose weight in the first place.

Advice, Please?

I have a kitchen full of most of the ingredients for a lot of things, but have yet to find a full meal.  I DO have three different kinds of bread dough mixed and ready to rise, though, so we'll have plenty of bread for my bread freaks this week. 

What would you make?
Meats:
Prepped chicken breast, flank steak & lean ground beef
Beans:
Prepped chickpeas, navy beans and kidney beans
Veggies:
Frozen broccoli... oooh!  Just had an idea!
Frozen, peas, mixed veggies, spinach and corn (Oooh!  Had another idea!)
Grains:
Whole wheat flours
Whole wheat pasta:  Egg noodles,, penne pasta, couscous
Whole Grain rice
and, of course...
Dried Beans galore
A variety of spices
We're really low on fresh produce, so all I have is green leaf lettuce, green onions and a couple of apples.

P.S. Do you ever have those brief moments in life where you think, "Wow! I did it! That was so awesome of me!" You know, kind of like a mental pat on the back.
Until you realize that you were slightly mistaken...
So, this morning I was giving myself a big pat on the back as I found the cookbook right where I put it last night... in my school bag. Even though it was an unusual place, I still went right to it. Right. To. It!
Until I got back to the kitchen and realized that I had left to go get my flavored sweetener from my purse. I wasn't even intending to look for my cookbook at all. Oh, pride. You silly thing. 

This book is awesome.  I love it more today than I did yesterday.  I'm feeling silly with how much I love this book.  Over 300 pages of YUMMY easy bread... yeah, baby:)  Come to think of it, the fact that I was somewhat covered in flour and smelled like home made bread MAY have had something to do with my husband finding me sexy... he really loves his bread...

Clean Out, Plan & Prep Day A.D.D. Style

This is me.  On the way to a date night with my hubby, which is why I look nice, as opposed to right now when I'm in boxer shorts and a big old long sleeved shirt because SOMEONE keeps forgetting to do laundry.  And my hair is combed and not sticking up like it is right now because I keep forgetting that I'm looking for a comb when I come out of the bathroom.

Well, today turned into a clean out and prep day.  Byn style.  Which means it probably took a lot longer than it should, and that varying amounts of things got done as I got distracted throughout the day.

So, I sat down to check my email and got hungry instead.  So I decided to plan out a meal I could blog, then I would cook it, then eat it whilst I blogged.  Then I realized that I didn't know what we had on hand already, so I got up and went into the kitchen.  Then I decided that iced tea sounded good for some reason and went back to bed with my ice tea, and saw my email up that I was in the middle of ("Hey Honey, what do you want to eat this week, 'm trying to plan out meals  and thought I'd check our freezers first...")

So yeah, off to the kitchen again, amazingly enough, this time I remembered what I was gong there for.  A quick peek told me that our freezers were stuffed full of a lot of food that I hadn't even taken stock of in months.

So I started cleaning out the freezer and realized it might be nice to have a list of everything, so I got my son to finish cleaning out the freezers whilst I went looking for something to make a list with.  Its amazing that in a homeschooling house that I can never find a writing utensil.  I found the books I was looking for before Art class on Thursday and started organizing my art suitcase... oh wait, freezers.

We're being organized this time.  Prepared meats on the top, uncooked shelf 2, veggies on the bottom.  Fruits, broths and prepped veggies & beans are in our other freezer.

So, back to the kitchen and my list.  We found a bunch of ground beef, a bunch of chicken breasts and a bunch of flank steak that a local farmer gave us... so I went ahead and started cooking it.  I figured we always use meats chopped, sliced or otherwise small pieces to make it stretch further, since we're on a tight budget.  I threw the ground beef in the stock pot, the chicken breasts in a skillet and started slicing the flank steak.

Then I realized that this might make a good, inspiring post for my blog.  Maybe you need to clean out your freezer?  I definitely need to stay on top of my freezer meals.  I was almost ill over the amount of things that had to be tossed because they were unrecognizable/not labeled/covered in freezer burn.  I always have the best of intentions, but then we get in a hurry and get busy and just toss something on the stove.  So, for the rest of the month, these are my new goals to help use up our freezer food:

• Cook a bag of frozen veggies to have as a side dish for two meals a day (Or add to soup/entree)
• Make meal plans for using the ALL of the chicken & beef in the freezer before the end of the month. *Yes, my peeps, that means that there aren't going to be any variations on that theme other than my one pork and one fish based dish for the next two weeks!
• LABEL FOODS when we freeze them.  EVERY TIME.  I don't care if I have to duct tape a sharpie to the underside of a cabinet where the kids won't find it, I will get better about this.
• Make some meal plans using chili & prepped kidney beans, Navy beans and chickpeas

There, aren't you proud of me?  All that work accomplished with very little distrac... oh crap.  I actually came out the first time to start the laundry that my husband asked me to PLEASE do today...  Bye!

Okay, so over the last HOUR I sat down here at least 6 times to finish this post with photos and realized that I didn't have my camera.  So I would get up looking for it, remember I had laundry to start/trash to toss, kids to boss around or some other thing... then I would sit down again to realize I never had found my camera.  Then I remembered that the first time I got up, it was to make use of the green beans from the freezer that had been left opened in hopes that they could be salvaged.

Sorry for the lack of photos... but here is something I'm hoping to make use of this month.  I've read about them, but have never tried them.  They appeared in my local grocery store, so I bought some to try... any tips or experience with them (other than Chia Pet stories?)

Remember, this all started because I got hungry.  The PLAN for today was to make muffins. And bread. Sigh.