Tag: Mall Walking

Casseroles · Daily Thoughts · Uncategorized · Vegetables

Meatless Mondays, Turnip Greens Tuesday, Weeds (oops I mean Salad) Wednesdays, Tomato Thursdays & French Fry Fridays

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We are old. We now walk in the mall with the rest of the Seniors in the mornings. Because it is still too hot to walk outside, we have joined the Mall Walkers Senior Citizen Group of America. Randy said that next time we go we need to go a little later in the morning so we would be there when the stores actually open and reward ourselves with a cinnamon roll for all the steps we were getting.

After getting all settled in now and have all the boxes unpacked, we find ourselves putting on some of the weight that we had lost while we were in Italy. So we have come up with a plan. It started this past Monday with Meatless Monday when we decided that maybe we should keep up the “less meat” way of eating like we did in Italy. So we have declared Monday to be Meatless Mondays. As I thought back about the veggies I tend to cook, it seems that green beans and cabbage are usually a staple at our veggie meals. Looking through a Paula Deen cookbook, I ran across a recipe for squash casserole, which sounded delicious. I had everything for it except sour cram so I substituted Cream of Mushroom Soup. It was even better the next night when we had it for leftovers. Actually, Wednesday nights we head for El Fenix for the 2 cheese enchilada special. So We don’t really have salad Wednesdays, wait a minute. Yes we do. There is a little parsley on the plate of enchiladas so we count that as salad. We had got in the habit of making cut up tomato and mozzarella with olive oil for lunch when we were in Italy (I sill love saying or writing that, it makes us sound so suave and debonair) So we have decided that we need to keep that up instead of always driving to the closest Whataburger. Since my cholesterol had dropped 50 points from the time we left in April to the time we returned in July, I DO NOT want to hear a dr tell me it is back up to where I started. So we truly are trying to eat a little more healthy. In fact, just yesterday, I only ate one basket of chips with salsa at El Fenix. And today, having lunch with my sister-in-law at Houstons, I left half of my key lime pie to bring home to Randy. But…when Janece dropped me off at my car, I picked up the wrong bag and brought the bag that was suppose to go home with her. Being the kind person I am I had brought the other half of my pie home to Randy, but Janece ended up with that bag and I had grabbed her bag that had a whole piece of pie she had ordered to take home to her hubby. No…I didn’t know I did that. So after we share a whole piece of pie tonight we will plan on maybe easing up a little on the olive oil with tomatoes and mozzarella tomorrow for our lunch. What the heck, will cut back on the onion also, so we can have an extra piece of garlic bread to go with the bruschetta. Yes, we are a couple who thrive on eating healthy now and who are the proud owners of smart watches which count our steps as we walk to the donut shop.
Fridays we celebrate with hamburgers and french fries for all the healthy food we have endured during the week.

In case you have a veggie meal and you are in the mood for something different than green beans and carrots, try this squash casserole. It is delicious. The recipe calls for sour cream but if you have cream of mushroom soup,it works great also Either will be great.

1 tablespoon olive oil
6 medium yellow summer squash, thinly slice
1 large Vidalia Onion, thinly sliced
1 tablespoon butter
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1 cup shredded sharp cheddar
1/2 cup sour cream
Salt & Pepper

1 sleve crackers, crushed medium to fine
4 tables butter

Heat oil and butter in little until butter is melted. Add squash and onion, salt and pepper and cook until squash and onion are tender.
Add both the Parmesan and cheddar with the sour cream, and stir until combined.
Pour into a baking dish and bake in preheated 350 oven for about 20 minutes. Remove and add crushed crackers over the top. Dot the 4 tables utter over the top and bake for about 10 minutes or until crumbs begin to turn golden.
(Actually I forgot, I used Progresso Italian Flavored bread crumbs instead of crackers and we loved using that. Tasted great.)

So from our healthy table to yours….you’re welcome. And Yes, the butter is healthy because…well, it just is. Just ask Paula Deen. Besides I have a cake server that has “LOVE & BUTTER” on the front. And if you can’t trust a cake server, what can you trust?

Daily Thoughts

Before & After

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Jodi, our daughter just called and warned us (that was her word, not mine) that her before and after pics would be put on Face Book probably today of her before  and after she began exercising. She said that she hoped it wouldn’t embarrass us to see her on FB dressed in a bathing suit showing off her new body. I told her that the only thing that would embarrass me would be pictures of me in a swimsuit before or even AFTER an exercise program.  When Randy and I saw the pics she sent, it made me begin to think of what my before and after pics would look like right now. Jodi’s looked so good and made me very proud of her for beginning a healthy lifestyle, unlike her mother, who feels like she is having a “healthy” eating day if I have only 1 cupcake and one hamburger in a 24 hour period. When we asked her why her name was not under the picture, she said that she would just say it was Anon, which reminded me of a story that I have to tell about Jodi.

Some years back, when she lived with us as a single mom, she joined us in the mornings for our devotion time, where Randy or I would read one of the devotions out of Our Daily Bread. Jodi began to notice that several of the readings were written by “Anon” and one day she commented that, “my goodness, I wonder who Anon is, he sure wrote a lot of devotions”. We began to laugh, not knowing whether to tell her exactly who “Anon” was or just agree with her. We couldn’t stand it, we finally told her who “Anon” was and so began the joke that when we didn’t know where a saying or a reading came from, we would just say, “I guess Anon wrote it”. It is just one of the many stories that we could tell of those days when we were blessed to have her living with us.

Back to the Before & After story. I ask Jodi if she thought I should post my B & A pics on FB and she began to laugh. She said that I could post pics of me before moving back to Texas from California, where I had lost about 30 lbs. We then began to laugh, thinking of what my “after moving back to Texas a year ago” would look like. The before pics would show me with a lettuce wrap in one hand and a piece of fruit in the other. Because Pasadena didn’t have a fast food joint on every corner, it made loosing weight pretty easy, plus we lived upstairs so climbing up and down burned more calories than I am use to burning. The after picture would show me in a sweat shirt with a Whataburger in one hand and a taco in the other, all the while trying to balance cupcakes on my knees. If you don’t live in Texas, STAY AWAY!!!! moving here makes you fat. It is either too hot in summer to walk or too cold in winter to walk. We just sit inside and eat the fast food that we picked up on the corner.

We won’t be posting any B&A pictures anytime soon. Maybe if we go back to visit friends in California we will take our pictures out there and they would show some improvement in our body weight, than if there were taking now, after being gone from there a year. But if we every need to embarrass our kids, we know just the way to do it now.

Daily Thoughts

Mall Walking

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I discovered this week that mall walking is not for me. On Jan 5th we woke up and looked at each other and knew that today was the day, Monday, the first day of our New Years resolution that we had agreed upon 4 days ago. We did our usual chores of laundry and cleaning and knew it could not be put off any longer.  So we got out our tennis shoes, our white tennis socks and made sure that we looked pretty fashionable, just in case we did run into someone we knew. Because it was so cold outside, I ask Randy to please park close so I wouldn’t have to wear a coat and then have to carry it around while we walked. Because we didn’t quite make it before the mall opened to do our walk, (actually we didn’t get there until 3 in the afternoon. It took me that long to talk myself into this new resolution that I knew I wouldn’t keep in the first place. Whose idea was it that we were going to do this 4 times a week? It certainly wasn’t mine. The only thing I do 4 times a week is bake.

We step inside the mall and begin our trek from one end to the other. About half-way down the mall, I reached up to be sure my earring had not fallen off, as I was pretty proud of how fast we were going, when I discovered that HE had let me walk out of the house and into the mall with out earrings. I don’t go to the bathroom without earrings. Southern ladies just don’t do that. I told him that this was going to be a short walk, because what if someone noticed that I was in the mall without my earrings! I just couldn’t take that chance.  We began to look around and noticed that the only ones that were “mall walking” had to be over 70. And they certainly didn’t care if they had earrings on; Tweety Bird t-shirts with matching elastic band pants was apparently the “in” thing to wear mall walking. Each time we passed Dillards or Macy’s I thought of something else that I wanted to show him. Looking back over that day, I think we probably spent more time window shopping than walking, but as I told Randy, “we should really wait until middle of Feb or first of March to start this because you know people are looking at us and thinking that we are some of the old people that make a resolution that the first of the year, we are going to get on an exercise program and their second thought would be “bet they dont’ last 1 week”. So if you start later, at least they might be thinking, “good for them, they are still keeping up their resolution to exercise”. It really does make sense to me. By the time we got in the car I told him that I thought I would just wait until it warmed up a bit and walk outside. I just didn’t feel like we fit in with all the oldies at the mall that always stopped at the food court for their McDonalds 87 cent coffee and $1 apple pies when they were through. Plus, since I had gone to our neighborhood mall without earrings, I just couldn’t stand the thought of going back in there for awhile.