In The Kitchen

Today after work I came home, plopped on the couch and watched a few hours of Chopped. One thing I've noticed a lot of on that show. BLOOD. People are always chopping into their fingers. They must have some really sharp knives on there.

No danger of doing that at my house, I've been using 50 year old bread knives for the last 20 years to do most of my cutting. Maybe they are really like 70 years old, they were here when we bought our house. Yes, our house was full of crap when we bought it. Fully furnished with indoor/outdoor carpet and all the 1970's fixtures your heart desires.

Anyhow, watching those cooking shows always get me more excited to cook. Most of the stuff they make looks gross to me so doesn't really make me hungry but I like watching their techniques and what not.

I've been doing good lately with pinning a menu on Pinterest, going shopping and buying all the food I need for the week and sticking to it. Then I usually have some left overs so then I don't go out to lunch either. It's a win win.

I am a Lose It girl for tracking my calories but I can't seem to find a recipe builder on their website so I use myfitnesspal to put in all my ingredients  and then it will tell me the calorie break down. Then I write it down and put it in my Lose It. It's a little bit of work but totally worth it to me. I love that I can just scan things in, although I've had to Google how many tablespoons in a cup several times now (it's 16).

Here's what I've made lately.

Italian Chicken

Next time I make this I want to add double the tomatoes and artichoke hearts. So good! 396 calories

Cheese Baked Chicken Penne

This one I used whole wheat penne, 2% milk instead of whole milk and margarine. I'm not a big creamy pasta fan but everyone else liked it. I made it into 12 servings and it was 352 calories. (Left overs for days)

Easy Crock Pot Taco Soup

I pinned this one time off this blog I used to read (Just haven't had time lately to keep up!) The mom has quadruplets. Yes, 4 kids all the same age. And all boys! She deserves a medal!  Anyhow, I have noticed that this gets repinned ALL THE TIME. Like 123 times when I just looked at it. So I was thinking if it gets repinned so much I should at least try it out. It was REALLY good and really low calorie.

The only change I made was to use ground turkey instead of ground beef (I generally do that for all recipes now). 161 calories a serving. Which I think was about a cup. It said it serves 6-8 but those are some pretty big servings. We ate it for dinner and had about 2 cups leftover.

Mexican Lasagna Roll Ups

I love these rolled lasagna recipes because they are more portion controlled. I made about 1/2 of them in whole wheat lasagna noodles and the other 1/2 in regular ones and the calories were the same. 297 calories. These were really rich to me, must have been the cream cheese. I'm thinking I'd just use ricotta or cottage cheese next time.

Buffalo Chicken Cupcakes 

I talked about these the other day. I am not going to make these again unless it's for a party because they are too good. I literally could not stop thinking about them and ended up over eating on them. 103 calories each (made 24)

Spinach and Turkey Enchiladas

I've made these a few times now I think. 249 calories each if you use the La Tortilla Factory 80 calories tortillas.

Skinny Pizza Logs

Super easy and fast to make and SO GOOD. 65 calories each. I think I ate 6. Could potentially be a dangerous food to have if you didn't have a family to make sure you don't eat them all yourself (plus I double it to use up the egg roll wrappers).

I have 5 more lined up. I can't wait to try them all!