Kitchen Construction: Mediterranean Three-Cheese Lasagna

I've writen a few times about how cooking one large casserole a week has helped me stay on track the past month or so.  I have a pretty busy life between work, working-out, and studying (I'm taking a finance certification test in June) and I don't have time to cook every night.  What I've done instead is invest a few hours every weekend making a casserole that makes 8-12 servings, which usually lasts me through the week, since my fiance usually eats some of it too.

For recipies I've been mostly using the Weight Watchers website, which really has an excellent selection of recipes for pretty much everything you would ever want to make.  One thing to note though: I find that the recipes almost always take significantly longer for me to make than the recipes say.  Granted, I'm no Top Chef contestant (like my neighbor Marcus Samuelson!), but I do think the recipes are a little agressive on the timing.  Okay - on to the recipe!

Recently I made Weight Watcher's Mediterranean Three-Cheese Lasagna.  

To start I had to combine the cheese and spinach into a mixture.  This is the ricotta, spinach, mozzarella, feta, egg, oregano, cinnamon, and nutmeg mixed together.  

As an aside, that bowl is from a super cheap Kitchen-in-a-Box set I got at Target when I moved into my first apartment in 2002, so I have to say it's done pretty well that it's still in usable condition almost 10 years later.

The next step was to spread the tomato sauce, on the bottom of the casserole dish, then put a layer of the ricotta mixture, and then top with lasagna noodles and repeat.  I planned on using Fresh Direct's Extra-Chunky Putanesca sauce, but I quickly realized that this was the wrong type of sauce for this recipe.  The recipe called for thin layers of tomato sauce, but since this sauce was chunky, it was basically impossible to make a thin layer.  I ended up having to use more of it than I had planned and I had to bust out some canned tomatoes too as I ran out of sauce at the end.  

Other than running out of the tomato sauce, this was exceptionally easy to put together as I used no-cook lasagna noodles. It was realy just a matter of throwing ingredients together and assembling the lasagna.

This is what it looked like before I put it in the oven:

Finally, I stuck it in the oven for around an hour (longer than the recipe said) and ta-da:

Looks great, right?  How about paired with a side salad?

Excellent!  It tasted great - the combination of the different cheeses with the cinnamon and nutmeg was very original.  It was a bit watery as I had to use more tomato sauce than was called for, but it didn't hurt the taste too much.  I used full-fat feta cheese (since Fresh Direct didn't have low-fat feta), so that plus the additional tomato sauce and crushed tomatoes pushed up the points value of this to 9 points per serving, which is still very reasonable given this was so filling.

Overall, here are my ratings:

Ease of Preparation: A

Cook Time: B (but since I do this on the weekends, it doesn't matter too much)

Taste: B+

Fiance Rating: B+ (We're so compatable!  Good thing we're getting married)

Finally, you know how whenever you're reading a blog and someone is showing their kitchen, and all the ingredients are all nicely displayed and it looks like they are the most organized cook ever?  Yeah, that's not me:

When I cook it looks like a tornado hit.  Luckily, the food still tastes good.

Weekly Construction Update

Week Ending Monday April 11

I had a really good week last week - at my weigh-in at my meeting I lost 1.2 pounds.  I was hoping to have lost a bit more as my scale at home said I was down 2.4 pounds, but I'm still very happy with 1.2 pounds.  That puts me down 6.2 pounds since I've started going to Weight Watchers meetings, and down 7.8 pounds overall according to my home scale.

Here are the things that helped me this week:

• My big night out last week was Saturday, when my fiance and I celebrated our 5 year anniversary at the New York Botanical Garden and dinner afterwards in an Italian neighborhood in the Bronx.  While I drank and ate a lot that night, there were several things I did well:
• First we walked A LOT.  We walked nearly 20 minutes from the 2-3 stop to the garden, a good bit of time around the garden looking at the orchid show, another 20-30 minutes to the restaurant, and another 20 minutes to the Metro-North train to head home.  
• Second, I counted all my points.  Also, at times when good beers (i.e. microbrews, craft brews) were not available, I switched to light beer.
• Third, when we went out for dinner after visiting the garden, I ordered GRILLED seafood, no frito like last week!

Here's a photo of me from that night:

Yes, if you are wondering, those are THE skinny jeans.  They look pretty awesome, right?

Just as an aside, I became a New York Botanical Garden member that night.  While I do attribute part of my joining to drunken enthusiasm thanks to the excellent cocktails they were serving at Orchid Evenings, I also think that it was a really good deal ($60 after what we had already paid that night) and I think it will be a cool WW-friendly activity as the gardens are so large and there is so much walking involved.  I'm excited to visit again soon.

There were a few other things that contributed to my success last week:

• I continued my habit of cooking one large casserole a week.  Last week I cooked Weight Watchers' Baked Pasta with Butternut Squash and Ricotta.  It took me about 10 hours to make this (okay, exaggerating, but it took a while) but it was exceptionally tasty.  So much so that my fiance loved it, despite it containing wheat pasta, which he calls "dirt pasta".  Even though it took me forever to make this, it was totally worth it and I plan on making it again soon.  I will write a post on this dish soon.
• I worked out 5 days last week an earned 25 activity points, which really helped with my nights out last week.

I tend to lose weight in an every-other-week pattern, so I don't expect next week to be as good in terms of weight loss.  However, I'm going to keep at it as I'm close to breaking into a different decade on the scale!

Fitness Awesomeness

Last week my motivation started to wane a bit, likely due to only losing 1.4 pounds over the past 3 weeks.  Though the lack of large losses are understandable given my eating (see the "frito" incident from last week), I was feeling a bit down in the dumps.  So I did as Ms. Bitchcakes preaches - I focused on celebrating my recent successes in fitness.  And I've actually made a lot of progress lately

• I can now do a real chaturanga in my yoga class - this means I lowered myself to the ground in a push-up position.  I've been working on this for some time and I usually have to put my knees down as my upper-arm strength is not good enough to do this properly.  Right now I can only do a real chaturanga 3 or 4 times a class before I get too tired and have to put my knees down, but this is still a HUGE improvement as I've been working on this for over 2 years.  Here's what it looks like:

I look just like this when I do this.  Except for the perfect form and the pink-ness and the blond-ness and the perky butt-ness.*

• Today, in yoga, I managed to do a real bind.  What I did was that while I was in a lunge with my left leg forward, I weaved my left arm arm under my left leg and grabbed my right hand which was wrapped behind my back.  Basically, I was a pretzel!  Okay, well maybe not a pretzel exactly, but pretty darn pretzel-like for me.  This yogic achievement was an even bigger deal than being able to do chaturanga because this is something I NEVER thought I could do.  My shoulders are pretty tight (especially my right one) and as I previously mentioned, there is a bit of junk in my trunk, so I never thought I'd be able to get my arms around my behind to do a bind (whew that rhymed (so did that!)).  This was really exciting.
• Other cool yoga achievements lately include doing a full wheel while standing on my tip-toes (a pose I previously found completely ridiculous and unachievable), and having it feel downright easy to flip the dog (my favorite yoga pose name).

Tomorrow's my weigh-in and I've had a pretty good week so I'm cautiously optimistic.  I think part of what helped me have a good week was focusing on the progress I have made when I was feeling bummed earlier in the week.  That's why I started this blog - to motivate myself by celebrating my successes, and I feel like that worked this week.

*Photo from Yoga Journal

Weekly Construction Update

Week Ending Monday April 4*

I had a bit of a rough weekend Weight Watchers-wise.  I went out for drinks with friends on Friday night and we went to an Italian restaurant for dinner after, which was probably not the best idea since at that point I had consumed 4 beers.  At the restaurant, I thought I was ordering really well by ordering a margherita pizza and a mixed seafood appetizer.  Stupidly, however, I didn't realize the "frito" in the in name of the mixed seafood appetizer meant "fried", which resulted in my fiance mercilessly mocking me for the rest of the weekend (thanks, honey!).  I tried to not eat too much of the appetizer, but I was starving, so I did have some.  That, plus the beers, plus the pizza, put me over my points for the week by 9 points.  Given that I went over in my points, I was very happy at my meeting when I lost 0.6 pounds, leading my total weight loss to 5 pounds.  

The big thing that helped me even though I had a close encounter with fried calamari was that I worked out 5 days last week earning 26 APs.  I ran in Central Park twice, ran around my neighborhood once, and did Vinyasa yoga twice.  Also, I continued my recent habit of cooking a large dish on the weekend  - I made Weight Watchers' Layered Mexican Chicken casserole, which was really tasty (even my fiance loved it!), and fed me for the week.

The one thing I wish I had done differently is I wish I had had dinner before I went out Friday night, since I could have had a slice of the Layered Mexican Chicken and some salad and it would have only cost me 7 points instead of the 19 points I ended up using.

*Tuesday is my weigh-in day, so that is why this recaps the week ending Monday.

Recent Moments of Awesomeness

Over the last few months as I've refocused on weight loss and fitness, I've reached a few milestones, some of which were pretty surprising.

• I ran my first race since 2008 and set a new record for 5 miles.  For some background, I used be a very avid runner, and in 2008 I was training for the New York City marathon when I was sidelined by an IT band injury (here's IT Band Syndrome on Wikipedia).  It was really hard for me to move on from being a runner, but over the past 2.5 years I've gotten really into yoga.  However, I was heading down to Virginia Beach to watch my fiance run a marathon, and so I decided to try to run the 8k race.  I only trained a bit as I was afraid of messing up my IT band and I was hoping to just survive the race.  Amazingly, I managed to not only finish the race, but it was my fastest 5 mile race ever.  Here's me after the race, proudly displaying my medal which doubles as a bottle opener (the race was sponsored by Yuengling).  This race was clearly designed for me:

• Also during that weekend, I wore, for the first time, real skinny jeans.  I bought a pair of skinny jeans last spring from American Eagle that I read were good for those of us who have slightly larger-than-average derrières (I'm pretty sure these are them).  When I got them they were a tad small, but I figured if I lost a few pounds I could wear them.  Unfortunately, between work and studying I never did manage to get into them.  However, as I've been losing over the past few months, I tried them on and they fit.  It was awesome to wear a pair of jeans that I didn't have to tightroll to get into boots!
• This weekend I ran in Central Park for the first time since 2008.  Since the race in Virginia Beach went so well, I've been running 3 miles a few times a week.  I've been nervous to go run in Central Park because hill running can inflame a tight IT band and Central Park (especially the Harlem end, near where I live) is super hilly.  But on Saturday, I suited up, ran to the park, and made it through a 4 mile run with no pain.  I felt so good that I did it again today.  It was really refreshing to be back in the park, as I really haven't spent much time there since I got injured.  I didn't realize how much I missed running in the park.
• I've been trying to cook in bulk once a week so that I have a bunch of meals on hand whose points I am 100% sure about.  For a while I was trying to cook multiple times a week, but I've found that I would spend hours cooking and then eat all of the food within a day or two, or worse I wouldn't get around to doing all the cooking I planned and I would end up having to throw out the ingredients (my fiance LOVES it when I do this).  I've found that casseroles are a really good way to go for cooking in bulk, as most recipes can easily make 8-12 servings, which will keep me going for most of the week.  I've found a number of good casserole-type recipes on the Weight Watchers website.  I'll write about a recent casserole attemptin another post.
• And finally, I've been tracking super religiously.  Unfortunately, I've also been going over my points pretty often, but I'm still happy that I've been writing EVERYTHING down.  I'm hoping next week I will be able to stay under my points as I don't have any big social engagements planned, which is what typically pushes me over my points.

That's it for now, but I'm hoping to have some more awesome moments in the coming weeks.

Inaugural Blog Post!

Hello Interweb!

It's been a long while.  I'm a former blogger who burned out several years ago (2 posts a day and a full time job will do that to you) and stopped blogging.  I have since turned my attention to work, school, and life.  However, I have tended to focus more on work or school than on myself, and I would like that to change.

Though there are many things about myself I would like to work on, this blog will be focused on my attempts to lose some of that junk currently residing in my trunk and on fitness in general.  I have to thank Ms. Bitchcakes for inspiring me to return to the interweb.  I can see that chronicalling her successes on her blog has been a major motivator for her, and I am hoping it will be the same for me.  Though my dog does pant happily when I tell her I've lost weight, I'm hoping writing it down and sending it out into the internerd will help me celebrate my successes even more, thus inspiring me to keep going.

To lose weight and get fit I am a Weight Watchers meeting member, I do yoga, and I run.  I have been an on-and-off Weight Watchers member since I was 19 (wow), but for the most part I always did it online.  I started going to meetings about 5 weeks ago and I have lost 4.4 pounds.  In the past I was always too embarrassed or busy to go to meetings, and on the rare occassion I tried meetings, I was the youngest person in the room by 20 years.  Now I'm not embarrassed, I'm making the time, and the meeting I'm going to has a great cross-section of New Yorkers, several of whom are like myself - youngish kidless career-types who like beer (well, maybe not exactly like that, but close enough).

I plan to write about once a week (no blogger burnout this time!), but as I'm a very busy career lady, I might miss a week now-and-then.

Thanks for reading.

-Ellen