#36b – One month down!

This is the only replacement goal that I have on my list: to do 30 minutes of yoga or cardio for four days a week for three months.

And I am happy to say that I have completed one full month!  I’m a third of the way there!  I have been working on the Wii Fit Plus for this whole time, but I’d like to start mixing some of my yoga videos back in as well.  It has been kind of embarrassing how tired the activities on the Wii Fit can make me, but I figure that’s why I’m doing this, right?

I try to work for 15-20 minutes in here:

I usually go to the my routine section, where you can create a sequence of exercises, or let the wii create one for you based on how long you have to spend in there on a particular day.  This eliminates all the time you can spend clicking in between exercises, having the trainer tell you to come back tomorrow or how important good posture is, and other time-wasting things after each exercise.  However, you also aren’t scored on how well you did, so you can do the same exercise incorrectly for ever.

Then I usually try the rhythm boxing (on expert – 10 minutes) or head out to the skateboarding, which might be the most fun.

I like doing the free skate, which allows you to skate around for five minutes and try to get as many points as possible.  (The hubs has discovered that the key to getting tons of points is to grind while doing tricks as much as possible.  I haven’t quite nailed the timing of that, so I miss about as often as I can line up properly.)

I’ll also occasionally do the Super Hula Hoop, which is harder than it looks or sounds.

All in all, usually I am tired by the end.  I have noticed a difference in my muscles so far, but no real difference in my weight.  I am still hoping that two more months of this will help me to slim down my hips a bit.  I guess we’ll just have to see how that goes.

#57 – Clothes I would love to have…

… but don’t.  I’m using this as a jumping off point for how I want my wardrobe to feel when I call it complete.  A lot of these are items that are probably too expensive for my budget right now, but some are do-able.  Just not at the numbers that I’d want them.

(The images all link to the products’ listings online.)

Dresses:

Both of the dresses above are from Anthropologie.

Both of these are from J Crew.  I think I could do the navy dress in place of a little black dress:

Shirts:

JCPenney & Ann Taylor

Target & LOFT

Sweaters/Blazers:

Anthropologie & Ann Taylor

Skirts:

JCPenney & Anthropologie

All in all, I think that I am already working along those lines.  I hope I am.

I haven’t included any pants on here, but I need some of those as well.  I was just focusing on these items because I would like details like these on whatever clothes I end up purchasing.

Gadgets!

There are a bunch of things that save us a ton of time an headaches in the kitchen.  Now that I’ve declared my #9 goal completed, I thought I’d share some of those items we’re glad to own.

Kitchen Scale
We use this a lot more than I thought we would than we bought it.  This has made making half recipes so much easier.  We measure the dry pasta, meat, you name it.  I like this one, because it lets you use whatever container you want, and resets to zero so that you don’t have to do any container math.

Microplane Grater/Zester
This is definitely the best way to zest anything.  We also use it to get really finely grated cheese (much easier to clean than the grating side of our box mixer) and have used it with chocolate to get pretty, delicate shavings for cups of hot chocolate.  It’s easy to clean as long as you rinse it right away.

Meat Thermometer
We use this all the time.  Way more than an experienced cook would, I think, but I like to know that I’m not going to poison us.  Call me crazy.  We have a simple digital one from Walmart.  Nothing fancy.

Good Vegetable Peeler
We have a really nice — but still not expensive — veggie peeler that is worlds away from the ones we used at my mother’s house for years.  (She has since replaced her old and dull ones, thanks to extensive griping.)  Being able to breeze through peeling makes us much more likely to eat the fresh veggies we buy.

Cookbook Stand
I love this cookbook stand, because it completely comes apart to store.  You can turn the splatter shield horizontal or vertical to better protect whatever you’re using.  It adjusts to fit magazines to large cookbooks.  The only thing that it doesn’t do that well is hold the splatter shield in front of our big cookbooks with rings.

Fully Stocked Pantry/Freezer
We have a lot of spices, flavored vinegars, soy sauce, and other sauce-making components.  We have identified the items that we want to have in our pantry at all times, and I created a grocery list on the computer that includes those.  We have it on the fridge the whole time, so when we use something up, we can immediately mark that we need more.  (I think that I am actually going to be reworking this list slightly, since they changed our store around.)  This allows us to toss things together if something prevents us from making it to the store.  In fact, we are on our second week of scrounging from the pantry, and we’re doing just fine making that work.

Meal Planning Paper
We also use a pad of paper for meal planning that I picked up about a year ago at the Target Dollar Spot.  As I picked it up, I made fun of it.  But it has been really handy to have a place to plan out of two weeks’ worth of meals, and nice to have a dedicated paper for it, because it never gets lost in the clutter on the fridge when you know what you’re looking for.  We keep the meal plan up next to the grocery list.  While we do make changes as things happen throughout the week, we are usually pretty good at sticking to the plan.

9 – Menu Goal Complete

I have decided to mark #9 on my list — develop a menu of favorite dishes to make on an ongoing basis — complete.  I don’t think that we’ll stop trying new dishes and meals and adding them to the regular rounds, but I have become much more comfortable in the meal-making area, and I think that really gets to the heart of the goal.

One of the best things that the hubs and I do is plan our meals two weeks at a time, and do the majority of the shopping at once.  We make use of the freezer for ingredients and try to keep our pantry stocked with what we think are essentials.  (More on that in a bit.)  It has been getting easier to fill a full two weeks’ worth of meals in without having to do a lot of soul-searching.

I’ll highlight some of the goodness below, but there’s more over on the food blog I share with friends, and there will continue to be more as we continue cooking.

We make several things without following a recipe now:

Black Bean Burritos with Chicken

Enchiladas (the filling, we use a canned sauce)

Lemon Broccoli Pasta

Beef Stew

Chicken Soup

Balsamic Onions

Calzones

Various stir fry sauces

Rice

Some lovely veggie variations, most of which I haven’t posted about on the food blog:

Cumin Roasted carrots

Orange Glazed green beans

Garlicky green beans

And we make some pretty good stuff regularly with a recipe too:

Orange Beef Stir Fry

Fajita Seasoning

Turkey Chili with V8

Turkey and Roasted Red Pepper Meatloaf

Not to mention becoming more comfortable with some fancier options when we have the time to cook and want to step it up a bit:

Poulet Scarparielle

Jamaican Chicken with Ginger Peach Chutney

Roasted Turkey Breast and Sides

Sweet and Sour Chicken/Pork

I believe that one of the secrets to cooking easily is sauce.  You can make it yourself without a recipe, like these:

White wine sauce

Worcestershire Sauce Sauce

or with one:

Apricot glaze

Stir Fry Sauce

Or if you get some bottles of chutney, vinegars, pre-made Asian sauces to have on hand, it makes a simple chicken-and-veggie meal so much nicer.  Hands down, the easiest way to make the same ingredients taste different.

#13 – Last Picture Show

The hubs and I have now watched 30/102 movies in my book.

This goal is going by very slowly, in part due to the fact that I haven’t really liked any of the movies that the book’s authors do.

This was no exception.  It was fine.  Slow.  The individual performances were quite good, but I never got into the movie as a whole.

I guess when it comes to this type of movie, I’m more of an American Graffiti kind of girl.

At any rate, one more off the list!  Only 72 to go.  Ugh.