Day 1 and Polly in a Shirt

How did Day 1 of the Challenge go for y'all? It went swimmingly for me! I'm going to post some recipes here so get ready. They are modified Paleo and all of them are delish!

For those of you who don't already know, I issued a challenge to my peeps to eat clean for 30 days. We all know that it doesn't matter how hard you work if you're going to fuel your body with junk. I was sabotaging my progress with the food I eat. As a way to keep myself honest, I'll be journaling my meals here.

Since I have to get back to work I'm going to keep this one short and sweet

Breakfast: 2 sausage and egg muffins, 1 banana, Diet Coke (I know, I know) and Water

Lunch: Garlic Chicken, Steamed cabbage, 1/2 of  a Sweet potato and a small side salad of mixed greens with fresh tomato and a Paleo Balsamic Vinegarette, Water

Dinner: Indian Chicken served over Spaghetti Squash with Water to drink

As promised, here are the recipes.

Sausage and Egg Muffins
These aren't really muffins but I made them in muffin tins so I call them muffins. Muffin.

Ingredients:
6 eggs
1 lb. sausage (can be hot, turkey, sage, mild, etc. Whatever floats your boat.)

1. Brown the sausage and crumble it. Drain.

2. In a mixing bowl, combine all eggs, salt, pepper and a little half-and-half or milk. Beat the tar out of them.

3. In a regular muffin tin, portion out the sausage evenly so that you've got 12 muffins 1/2 full of sausage.

4. Spoon scrambled egg mixture over the sausage. I used a measuring cup to do this. I averaged 1/4 cup of the eggs per muffin.

5. Bake on 350 until the eggs are set. Eat.

*Word to the wise. Don't use muffin liners!!! The sausage is greasy enough that they won't stick to the muffin tin. If you're worried about sticking, you can butter the tin first. That would actually probably be delicious.

Garlic Chicken
This is a variation of a slow-cooker recipe I found. It's delicious and very forgiving. My husband loathes onions so I didn't include them but I can imagine that they'd be divine to caramelize with the garlic!

Ingredients:

1 whole chicken, cut up. (I used 4 leg quarters because I like the dark meat. That, and it was cheap.)
40 cloves of garlic (This is approximately 2 heads of garlic)
Salt and Pepper
2 tbsp of butter, divided
olive oil
Onion (optional)
White wine or chicken broth

Directions:

1. Preheat your oven to 350. To peel garlic, place cloves in pot of simmering water for 30 seconds-1 minute. This will make peeling much easier!

2. In a dutch oven or oven safe pot with a lid (could transfer to a casserole dish if needed), pour in a couple teaspoons of olive oil and  1Tbsp of butter. Salt and pepper the chicken. Once the oil is hot, brown chicken on both sides and remove from pan. This may need to be done in batches. Just add more oil/butter as needed. We're not frying it, we're just browning it. It will not be done when you remove it from the pot. That's fine- we're going to be putting it in the oven anyway!

3. Once the chicken is browned, throw the garlic cloves in there. Stir them around and let them get good and golden. (If you're using onion this is the part where you would put the chopped onion into the mix). After 1-2 minutes (stir constantly!),  pour in 1/2 cup of white wine to deglaze the pan. This should get the stuck on chicken parts off of the bottom. Let this bubble for a couple of minutes.

4. Add the chicken back into the pot and spoon some of the garlic up onto the top. Put lid on pot and place it into the oven and let it cook for 45 minutes to an hour. The chicken will be falling off of the bone! Serve with roasted veggies. This is a crowd pleaser!

*For those of you who don't like to use alcohol, feel free to use chicken STOCK. Not broth! Broth is watered down!

**If you are using boneless skinless chicken breasts you may want to add 1/4 cup of stock to the wine right before you add the chicken. When you use bone-in chicken it creates its own broth. We don't want dry chickens!

This dish reheats beautifully. It actually tastes better the second day so feel free to make it a day ahead! Can also be cooked in a crockpot. I would make sure to brown the chicken, though- it adds a layer of delicious flavor.


Indian Chicken

I already posted this recipe Here.

Adam and I eat this all the time. You can add in heavy cream, half-and-half, or sour cream at the end (about 1 cup) to make it a creamier dish but to make it Paleo I didn't add any and it tasted just as good! Served over Spaghetti squash that I cooked in the microwave for 11 minutes. Yumm-O!

So, good fellows, that's what I done ate! I'll be having Indian Chicken leftovers for lunch and I am contemplating some lemon pepper chicken for dinner. Or a spicy grilled flank steak. We shall see!

Also, Polly demolished an egg carton yesterday. She also nibbled on a tomato for some antioxidants.

Then, Adam put a shirt on her because he thought it was funny. Polly isn't amused. She's been walking around like a prisoner in shackles.

I'm so going to find this shirt in a million pieces when I get home!

Go eat something green and fibrous!

Over and out,
Sunny

Cause and Effect

Since I had an off day yesterday and have nothing to add other than my arms still hurt like you know what and I bought a kitchen full of fruits, vegetable and meat yesterday, I figured I'd share some of my favorite recent Polly pics. These could probably be split up into several different posts but I'm lazy so I uploaded them all at once.

"Helping" me stretch for Crossfit.

I actually took this picuture while sweeping and mopping the floors! It's no great mystery as to why I can't keep a clean house.

Cause...

and effect!

Before...

During...

Aftermath.

Who knows what she's doing here.
She is forbidden to go into the shower ever since the dreaded razor incident.

Someone broke into the house and shredded my legal pad!
Polly was waiting at the door to tell me all about it!

Hunting for lizards on the deck.

This morning. She was sticking her legs in my side pushing me off of the bed.
This is what I wake to most mornings.

Polly and her dad.

I miss these days!

I don't know how I deal with the endless path of destruction but I can't imagine life without her!

TTFN,

Polly's Human

Sucking Wind

I'm alive! I have been short on blog material for a while and couldn't put my finger on why I didn't have the inspiration to write. This morning, it dawned on me. I haven't been embarrassing myself in public enough. We all know how I like to make myself look like a fool when the world is watching. Well, my friends, I'm back in action! First, some background.

Last weekend my handsome husband and I attended the wedding of some close friends of ours. It was a lovely affair. What WAS NOT lovely was my inability to fit into ANY of my dresses! Not a single one. I would love to tell you that it's because my boobs have grown so much that I just needed new tops but that would be a bold faced lie. I've gotten chubby. There. I said it. My pants are tight, I can't walk up the stairs without getting winded and my legs jiggle a little too much. It was during the dress trying on process that I decided to do something about it. Enter: Crossfit DGA.

I have seen several friends of mine transform from "meh" to MEOW by going to Crossfit. Now, I've been a member of gyms before, but I know myself a little too well. I need someone yelling at me to exercise or else I'll hop on an eliptical for 30 minutes and be done. I needed to see results SOON so I knew that I needed to take radical measures. Being a total chicken, I absolutely had to have a friend accompany me on my first trip, so I tricked Rachel into going. She's so enthusiastic and bubbly about everything so of course she was game. I can always count on her! We decided on the smaller 7:30 pm class to get us started off.

On the drive to our first class, I honestly wanted to throw up. I had visions of people running in the mud and bleeding and sweating and crying in my head. I thought that the instructor was going to be Satan incarnate with whips and a megaphone screaming in my ear. I contemplated turning around several times but I couldn't let perky Rachel down so I stuck with the game plan.

When we walked in, the facility was quite unassuming. Some bars for pull-ups lined the walls, boxes stacked in a corner, "kettle bells" and weights dispersed throughout. It looked innocuos enough.

One must not judge the book by the cover.

The warm up kicked my arse. We ran 400 meters, came back and lunged forwards and then backwards, we skipped, hopped, "Frankensteined", and did all other kinds of gloriously painful stretches. By then Rachel and I were pouring sweat. Eric, the instructor, then pulled us aside to work on form and introduce us to Crossfit. And boy, what an introduction it was. We squatted and squatted and squatted.

Then we did some more squats and something hilarious happened. He asked us to run to the edge of the fence across the street and back.

*I will note here that I felt like an asshat wearing my City Bar t-shirt because there was a KID training with us. I was annoyed with his endless energy and flexibility. I know it wasn't his fault that I was so out of shape but MAN! He was unstoppable! I wish someone would bottle his energy so I can shoot up with it before I go back!

**In my previous experience with squats, you put your hips back like you are going to sit in a chair. This is NOT what we were doing. I think my butt almost touched the floor. It probably didn't really but that's what it felt like. You do 30 of those bad boys and go for a jog and get back to me on the outcome.

"Oh, sure. No problem!" I stupidly thought.

I can't explain the science of what happened to my body, but there was some miscommunication between my brain and my legs/knees/ankles and somehow my arms got dragged into the big mess. When I tried to take my first step, it felt like my joints had been replaced with rubber bands and my bones were noodles. Not the uncooked kind, but the soggy ones that sat in water for too long and got swollen and gross. We looked like the Golden Girls shuffling across the road. Our arms were going twice as fast as our feet and every time I did anything that remotely resembled running my ankles did this wonky thing where they turned in and my knees went sideways.We were a wreck. We laughed so hard at ourselves that I thought I was going to pee on myself. I had to do the whole "stop and cross your legs" thing. Don't judge, you know you do it, too.

When we got back inside we repeated the process. It was brutal.

Once we were granted permission to leave, we trudged back to our cars. I think that I actually had to lift my leg to put it in the car. It was like I had no control of my limbs! When I got home, I almost tumbled down the hill to my front door because I couldn't stop myself once I got some momentum up. It was so pathetic. Polly was watching me through the window with her head cocked to the side. I'm sure she was wondering why I was walking like I had just had a stroke.

Even after all of the pain and agony, Rachel and I both enthusiastically agreed that this was something worth doing again and that we would join. It's always good to have an accountability partner! Stay tuned for more stories from the dungeon.

 (Day 2: The Aftermath and Subsequent Workout is coming next and it's a good one!)

Holla,
SM

Polly: Chapter 2

(My Polly posts are more for family than anyone, so skip over them if dogs aren't your thing! I'll get back to my self-depricating ways soon.)

Once we got Polly home we quickly realized that this dog needs demands some serious attention. Since I wasn't yet married, Polly lived with Papa and Granny, too. Oh, the two of them were staunchly opposed to me having a dog and wanted me to leave her at Adam's house. As Polly grew physically, she also grew on everyone's hearts. Now, Papa misses her when she's not around and Granny will hesitantly admit that she misses her, but it's a "good miss." Ha. Granny's always got jokes.

Aside from being cute, Polly has also proven to be a fragile dog. When she was six months old, she broke her leg. Actually, it was her hip. She had a FHO (femoral head ostectomy) to remove the "ball" from the "socket" and has been healing from that surgery ever since. The night after her surgery was the second worst night of sleep I've ever had.  She slept in the bed with me and would wake up yelping in pain from the surgery. It was so sad I would just hold her while she whimpered herself back to sleep. Since she can't really bear full weight on her right leg, the muslces in that leg are less toned and smaller than her left leg. She walks with a limp sometimes but let me assure you that she is lighting fast.

Today, the only way you would be able to tell that she has a problem with her leg is to a) look closely or b) feel it. I wouldn't recommend b. She kind of bites at you. And snarls. But it's a love snarl. She just doesn't want anyone messing with it!

Just when we thought we were out of the woods, Polly sustained a back injury just after the New Year. We didn't know what it was immediately, we just knew that she was barking and in a lot of pain. Like, she barked NON-STOP for four hours. $200 and a visit to the middle of NOWHERE, we had no diagnosis from an emergency vet and a pocket full of pain killers and tranquilizers. That night was the THE worst night of sleep I've ever had! It took a lot of meds to put her to sleep! I'm talking tongue hanging out, insane amounts of drool and lots of nasty farts. I was scared that we had over medicated her so I woke up every few minutes to make sure that she was still breathing.

The next morning, we took her to her regular vet. Within five minutes the Doctor came to the conclusion that she had a broken vertebrae right between her hips. This part of the spinal column happens to control bladder and intestinal control. Read: she might be peeing and crapping everywhere FOREVER. Luckily for Polly, one shot of steroids set her right again and she hasn't whimpered since!

I literally went from thinking my dog was going to need wheels to barely being able to control her as she pulled me toward the door of the vets office. Now, when we ride through town she whines when we get near the doggy hospital. It's like she knows!

I am happy to report that since that awful day Polly has had zero problems with her back and she is running at full speed. And chasing vermin.

Ciao