McDonald's - Breakfast of Champions

Votes on the poll this week are few and far between. Which leads me to believe either no one watches food shows, no one is reading my blog, or my choice for a poll topic is not interesting enough. If it's the first, why the heck not? Food shows are boss. It's incredibly relaxing to watch someone cook on TV (I think so anyway) and it's a good way to find inspiration for your own meals (Note to self: Make those Pizza pretzels you saw on Rachael Ray AGES ago). If it's the second, well, can't blame anyone there, I guess. This blog is moreso for me to alleviate boredom and pay homage to my true love: food (sorry Randy). But if people ar in fact reading this, then I'm stoked because it's nice to know the hard work I put into each post is being appreciated. And well, if it's the third, sorry my topic sucked. More of you  need to get blogs so I can get some feedback and ideas!

Moving on!

Thursday I had it in mind to be experimental with groceries left on hand. Turns out I had some sour cream that was about to go bad the next day. Since I hate to waste food, I scanned the recesses of my mind to think of what I could make with it. I remembered a recipe for Hungarian Pork Chops that was in one of my Weight Watchers cookbooks and turns out, I had everything I needed. The recipe is called 'Hungarian Style Pork Chops with Sour Crean Sauce' and serves four. You'll need:

4 boneless pork chops
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
3/4 cup reduced sodium chicken broth
1 (10 oz) bag spinach
2 tablespoons paprika
2 tablespoons fat-free sour cream

First, place the pork chops between sheets of wax paper. Pound to 1/4 inch thickness:

This picture actually does little to show my fury of fist pounding the chops. The landlords probably thought I was nailing something to the wall...

Sprinkle the chops with the garlic powder, salt, and pepper:

Spray a large nonstick skillet with nonstick spray and set over medium-high heat. Add the pork chops and cook until browned and cooked through, about 2 minutes on each side (I actually found it to be more like 4 mins on each side).

Transfer to a platter and keep warm. Add the broth to the skillet, scraping up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Add the spinach; reduce the heat  and simmer, covered, 1-2 minutes. Remove the skillet from the heat; stir in the paprika and sour cream.

Spoon the spinach and sauce over and around the chops. Each serving (1 pork chop and 1 cup sauce with spinach) has 224 calories and 9 grams of fat. For side dishes, I made mashed potatoes and used the leftover sour cream in them instead of butter or milk. I also did up a small pot of brown rice.

This is a quick and easy meal that doesn't use too many ingredients. It's not a huge favorite of mine but I like it enough for those times when you don't want to spend too long preparing a meal but want to eat something fairly healthy.

Yesterday, I decided to be experimental and try my hand at making a chicken bacon ranch pizza. I made a whole wheat crust using the a recipe from grouprecipes.com. I won't bother posting the recipe as you can find it youself by clicking on the link here:  http://www.grouprecipes.com/15952/whole-wheat-pizza-dough.html

These next few pictures document the process of me making the dough:









Yeast chillin' out and activating

This is my big dough ball prior to rising

I will say this about the above crust recipe: Unless you like realllllly thick pizza, take about 1/3 of the dough away from the ball (once it has completed all the rising time) and toss it (unless you are making more than one pizza)/ Makes for a thinner, less doughy pizza.

Next, I started preparing the bacon to fry. Check out this picture: Randy was supposed to get a picture of me taking out the bacon but instead got a candid action shot: look where my eyes are looking.

Bad kitty. Although I can't blame him for going for the bacon - he has good taste. Lucky for me, Sebastian did not succeed at getting any bacon and I threw it a frying pan to fry in all its bacony goodness.

Look at that. Is there anything more beautiful?

While the bacon was frying, I thinly sliced two chicken breasts, seasoned them with a little oregano, and fried them in a seperate frying pan with some olive oil.

I flattened out the crust on a greaed pizza pan and, with the ball of dough I removed, it was the perfect thickness:

I used a bottle of Ranch dressing as a substitute for pizza sauce. It's tempting to pile on a lot of this stuff but if you are using a fat-free or low fat version, don't go overboard. Once the pizza cooks, these watered down versions tend to run a little over the dough. Next time I make this, I will either use less ranch dressing or use a full-fat dressing.

Next, I added the crumbled and sliced bacon (blot the grease off really well so your pizza isn't too greasy), some spinach with the stems removed, and the sliced chicken. I covered it with a mixture of cheddar and pecorino-romano cheese.

I then cooked it in the oven at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes. And:

Pizza heaven. This was delicious! I had two giant pieces and could probably have devoured the entire thing. Randy really enjoyed it as well. Om nom nom.

This morning I woke up and after drinking a few beer last night was really in the mood for some McDonald's breakfast. Since I was going to be doing P90X later that morning, I knew I didn't want anything too greasy. The last time I tried doing P90X after having an Egg McMuffin, I nearly died. So Randy offered to trek out (thanks babe!) for some McD's for me. I got a medium coffee (so much better than Tim Horton's coffee) and a fruit and yogurt parfait. They've made the fruit and yogurt parfaits a lot smaller which is probably a good thing because healthy or not, I'm sure the old ones were caloriefests. It came with a little packet of granola (only 25 calories in a pack) and was a great "I don't want to make anything but I don't want any crap either" breakfast.

It also tasted a lot better than Tim Horton's parfaits. The berries actually seemed fresh, not frozen. Yum!

Today the chef is getting a welcome break from cooking - Randy has a chicken in the oven and is making some gravy to have a hot chicken sandwich. Tomorrow I'm thinking of making homemade turkey burgers and fries. We shall see!

Shoutouts from the past two days go to: Ketchup chips, watermelon jolly ranchers, and homemade peanut butter balls.

Here's Sebastian saying "Get that damn camera out of my face":