Recipe Tuesday :: Banana Chocolate Chip Cupcakes with Nutella Frosting

When I said those words one coworker was like, "Omuhgosh Yes!"  It was one of three options I gave another coworker for cupcake choices for her birthday.  I love making cupcakes and bringing them into work.  I get to moderate the amount of desserts I eat and then I enjoy getting critiques.  Too dry?  Didn't like the frosting?  For the critiques on these I got 10 out of 10!  They were so delicious!

Thanks to Pinterest I have a large retinue of cupcake recipes.  I'm trying to make as many as I can and I really think these will get a repeat which is always a good sign of an excellent recipe.  The wonderful Sally's Baking Addiction is the author of these amazing Banana Chocolate Chip cupcakes and her original frosting was a swirled chocolate-peanut butter masterpiece that I didn't have the time to make.  So I went to another of her winners...Nutella frosting.  I have to tell you that this frosting was so delicious that the leftovers were handed back and forth between Mom and I and delivered directly from the piping bag into our mouths.  And then said piping tip was cleaned out as well as the bowl...and anything else this frosting was on.  So yummy!

These required three very ripe bananas and make a good option when you just don't want to do banana bread.  You could even top these with streusel and call them "muffins" if you'd like!

Making your own cupcakes isn't as difficult as it sounds and I'm always a little surprised at how quickly they go together.  Also I swear they taste better the next day!  For these I got to use one of my new gadgets, Batter Spoons.  They propose that they'll deliver the right amount of batter to fill the cups 2/3 full, giving you perfect cupcakes.  What do you think?

And if you hate frosting cupcakes you seriously need to invest in a 1M piping tip and some piping bags.  After making the frosting it takes about 2 minutes to frost all those cupcakes!  Boom!  And they look so pretty and professional too!

Don't worry there's another coworker birthday (actually one of our students) coming up soon!  And he used to be a baker, so I'm pulling out all the stops to make truly impressive cupcakes...

Recipe Tuesday :: Turkey Hummus Wraps

So I got some good response from the healthy recipe last week so here's another!  This is my favorite easy lunch for taking to work.  It's balanced and tasty and looks so healthy, which honestly makes everyone jealous of your lunch.  I'm serious.  Almost every time I eat this at work someone will comment on how good it looks.  So here...tell me what you think...

Delicious, no?!  Don't you want to make that for your lunch?!  All right, all right, I'll tell you how.  But first it would probably be a good idea to buy yourself a food scale.  I actually bought mine for yarn (I know I'm crazy) but it's really good for dividing your skeins of yarn in half.  I mean if you have a 100 gram skein of yarn you want to make into two socks, then you need two 50 gram balls, so weighing them is key.  But I digress.  My food scale is an invaluable tool in helping me properly manage portion sizes.  It's hard to eyeball 2 ounces of turkey.  But weighing it out you know you're getting exactly the amount you should eat.  They aren't too expensive either.  Here is the one I use, but there are others that are less expensive like this sleek one and this other one sure is pretty.  Get one.  It will change your life.  But now, bring on the food.

Carrie's Turkey Hummus Wrap

1 Carb Balance Fajita size tortilla
1 Tablespoon hummus
2 oz (about 5 slices) thin slice turkey lunchmeat
1 oz (or 1 slice) 2% milk provolone
1 leaf of lettuce
1/2 oz pretzels
2 oz grapes

(334 calories, 37 grams carbohydrates, 23 grams protein, 10.4 grams fat, balanced 44-28-28)

Take a tortilla and spread the hummus on it.  Lay out your turkey evenly on the tortilla.  I like to spread my cheese evenly over the tortilla as well, so I tear it up along with the lettuce.  Then just start rolling from one end and enjoy with pretzels and grapes on the side!

My Favorite Weight Management Tools

Look at this an extra blog post!  I got some great encouragement from family and friends this Christmas season about my blog and how much they enjoy it, so I am going to make and effort to blog a little more often.  It seemed it was getting a bit redundant with only Tuesday food posts and I found this new site that helps me make picture collages, which is one of my favorite things on other blogs, so here is a collage of my favorite tools to help me manage my weight!

1. Fitbit One  2. Lose It! App  3. FormulaZone website  4. Elliptical  5. Stability ball  6. Pilates DVDs

I LOVE my Fitbit One!  I'm a competitive person and with a daily goal of 10,000 steps I have a daily challenge.  When the weather is good I try to get out and walk around the hospital I work at to increase my step count on it.  I love seeing a high number at the end of the day and get a thrill when I do get it above 10,000 steps!  It is an effort, but a good one!

The Lose It! App has been the best food diary I have found.  In the past (like 2005) I used to write down everything I ate in a book, write down the calories and add it up.  So much work!  Now with my app I just scan the barcode or find the appropriate food in the directory and add it to the meal I'm eating!  It has carb, protein and fat information and will show me the percentage I'm eating along with the calories!  I can see if I'm really eating close to my balanced diet (from my last post) or where I've gotten out of control.  I can add my exercise to it and it will adjust my calorie total taking into account what I burned.  It also has a restaurant foods directory so that you can choose better what to eat when you're eating out.  It is A-M-A-Z-I-N-G!

I've already sung the praises of the FormulaZone website a little in my last post, but really it changed my life.  There is a small fee to access it, but it is worth it.  I can search recipes made by other people and I can make my own balanced recipes.  I take my favorite dinners and with their "Help me balance it" tool find a food that will help me increase protein or decrease fat, whatever it may need.  It really has made eating balanced meals easier.

Oh my elliptical, how I both love and hate thee at the same time.  Because of all my baby woes the doctor told me I needed to lower my BMI and my elliptical gets most of the credit.  I was terrible at paying gym fees and then never going, but with my elliptical at home I don't have the excuse of "I don't have the time to go to the gym" or "It's too hot/cold to go outside to exercise."  It has weight loss workouts that automatically adjust the resistance and they take only 30 minutes to run through.  I have been neglectful of it for a while but we've been getting better acquainted again.

And lastly my stability ball and Pilates DVDs are great alternates for exercise when I'm not feeling up to the elliptical.  These are newer tools for me and I'm trying to do an every other day sort of thing with the elliptical.  I really want to tone my arms so I recently bought a couple of small hand weights to use with the arms sections of the Pilates DVDs.  I'm hoping for some serious results!

What are your favorite weight management tools?

Recipe Tuesday :: New Year's Tuna Sandwich

Welcome to the New Year!  As with everyone we are back to eating healthy and trying to lose weight in this house.  There are many diets out there and it can be hard to stick to them for the long run but I'd like to share what has worked for us.  Mom and I have eaten the balanced diet for a few years now and it is really something you can use to change your habits and not just "diet" for a while.  It encourages more protein to keep you from being hungry, eating smaller meals more often, lowering your fat and carbohydrate intake and not throwing your hands up and quitting when you've cheated a bit.  The basics are that you should balance your carb-protein-fat intake to 40%-30%-30%.  This has also been called the Zone Diet and we use the FormulaZone website a lot to help us make meals that are balanced that we want to eat.  We have a whole binder full of breakfasts, lunches, dinners and snacks that we can pick through and put together quickly and easily.  If we do have a long hard day and can't find the time or energy to cook dinner we do pick up something for dinner, but with this diet you just eat your next meal as a balanced one and you are back on track.  Granted you can't do that every day but as with everything moderation is key.  Mom and I got serious about balancing our meals again after a Christmas season filled with goodies, as you've all seen on these Recipe Tuesday blogs, and we already feel more energetic, less emotionally tied to food and just more positive about life.  So I'm going to be sharing some of our favorite balanced recipes here on the blog throughout the year along with the other less balanced ones!  I hope you enjoy them and that they inspire you and help you on whatever diet plan you choose!

We got into quite a rut before Christmas, eating the same things over and over, which is the first sign that the death of your diet is coming.  We splurged all Christmas long and the scale showed the errors of our bad ways.  So at the beginning of the year we came up with some new ones and this has been one of my favorites.

I've never been a huge fan of tuna, mostly because of the pungent smell, but also the flavor that seemed to linger....all day.  We started off by choosing a higher quality albacore tuna and then I mixed in some of what I like to call "Janelle's Amazing Guacamole."  Really it's just an avocado mashed up with garlic powder and pepper to taste.  It really thinned out the smell and taste of the tuna and made it taste divine.  Seriously I was singing the praises of this sandwich for the rest of the day!

Balanced Tuna Sandwich

1 slice Dark Sweet Columbia River Bread
1/2 package (2.5 oz) Premium Albacore Tuna
1/2 to 3/4 Tablespoon light mayonnaise
1 Tablespoon avocado (mixed with some garlic powder and pepper)
Alfalfa sprouts

Mix up the tuna with the mayonnaise and avocado.  Mound onto 1/2 a slice of bread.  Top with sprouts and other 1/2 slice of bread for an amazing sandwich.  You can add 1/2 a pack of sliced apples or about 1/2 of a medium apple.  This lunch works great for two people!