Bird Watching 101

Thisbe watching birds.  A cat's most cherished activity.  Annie enjoys the same pursuit.  The birds seem oblivious to the presence of a cat just a few feet away.

I haven't been posting, alas and alack.  I've been writing.  I did yet another rewrite of Promiscuous Mode, and it is now (whole MS) with an agent, but no great hope.  I've done some more on In Flight and am almost 5000 words into a crime short story.  Sent another story into a contest.  So the writing goes apace.

Also cooking up a storm.  Big Valentine's Day menu which we ate on for days.  Then S.O.'s birthday dinner of stuffed cabbage.  Finished it last night.  Mega-yum.

I've also been working on a writing group's web site, dieting, working out, working on finances, yada yada.  The diet is just a calorie count diet, which means I have to enter every bite into this web site which helps figure out the calories.  It took a long time at first, but I'm kind of into the hang of it now.  Total loss:  3.5 pounds, but hey, that's something added to the 3.5 pounds I lost before the formal diet.

The thing about a simple calorie count is that no food is forbidden.  A lot of diets say that but weight watchers will penalize you a gazillion points for a tablespoon of butter, but you can eat a whole can of beans.  The more something is portrayed as forbidden, i.e., foodstuffs, the hungrier I get for it.

So I take my lumps with 1/4 cup peanuts and the St. Andre cheese and  eat less of something else.  I haven't been hungry, by the way, in spite of the fact that I'm trying to stay around 1200 calories on days when I don't work out.  Turns out I wasn't eating THAT MUCH to begin with. 

I made my mother's recipe of lemon squares to take to a friend's house.  They are so good I will post them here soon.  And I also made crepes with a sweetened cream cheese filling and a strawberry sauce to go on top.  This gave us dessert for  4 nights, 2 crepes each.  A lot of bang for the buck and also cheap.

Tomorrow I'm baking a chocolate/walnut pound cake to take to another event.  I would rather take a salad but it has to be something easily transportable.   Doesn't sound like a diet, does it?  Small portions are the key.

Tonight, we're back to chicken breast, and I'm doing the Boston Globe Saturday/Sunday recipe with  one main dish and then another made from the leftovers.  Not high cal and very tasty looking.  First Spanish, then Mexican. Spanish Style Chicken

Then you make the Mexican Recipe with the leftovers:
Chicken Chilaquiles

 Off to work on my short story.  It's a lot of fun, and I'm visiting Mattapoisett today for research.

Ta Ta

Grapeshot

How many chicken wings is too many? I'll never know.

When I was still in the workforce, occasionally I would have a "hungry day." A hungry day is a day that no matter what or how much you eat you are still hungry, a dieter's nightmare. Yesterday I had one.

Oatmeal for breakfast, no issue there, but as I stood in front of the prepared food counter at Roche Brothers, I thought "eight honey-stung drummies." Usually I get six, and last week seven, trying to determine the amount that might actually be filling.

When we got home it was way past lunch time, always dangerous and I scarfed down the "drummies" with a half-slice of bread, not good. Decided I could have easily eaten nine or ten.

I'm not sure I even have a limit with chicken wings. Well, surely I must have, although it hasn't been found and probably better not be.

Dinner time. S.O.'s birthday dinner. I always make a German-style stuffed cabbage with boiled potatoes and a salad. Picked up some tapioca at the prep-food counter instead of making a cake that two people would devour over the course of the week. Ate the stuffed cabbage, easy on the potatoes, and a nice salad. Waited until later for the tapioca which we ate with a bit of heavy cream.

Sneaked one cookie (homemade oatmeal raisin) and came downstairs to work on Promiscuous Mode and got into the jar of peanuts big time. I mean, there was no reason to get into the peanuts. But I was hungry.

So this morning the scale showed me the extreme error of my ways, from the homemade cookies to the unsalted peanuts and the eight (although small) honey stung drummies. Damn.

Of course there were leftover potatoes which I fried up with slab bacon, onion, tomatoes and eggs for breakfast. Double Damn. By the way, that dish is called "Hoppel-Poppel" and is in my novel, The Shadow Warriors.

I think a long, very long, walk is in order. No matter how cold the wind is blowing. And here's hoping that you don't have a hungry day, or at least not very many. Unless of course, you are skinny and still smoking like a chimney, and then you deserve a whole week of them.

Grapeshot