Okay, New Years' Resolutions 2011---Starting up the Food Blog again! Wheee!

Resolved to lose some weight and get back to better habits, starting with more fresh food and less mixed drinks.  Today's grocery run included refilling the low fat meats:  turkey bacon, chicken sausage, frozen fish with sauce (should really start making own sauces, but baby steps), chicken tenders and lean chuck stew meat.

And now the main course (ha!)--the veggie and fruit part of the pyramid, including: clementines, grapefruit, bananas and kiwi for breakfast (still have some blueberries in the fridge); onions, 'shrooms, two bags o' salad (I know, but I hate tearing up greens for salad and whole heads of things take up too much room in the fridge!), bag o' broccoli, cauliflower and carrots (for steaming or stir-frying--I'm feeling very virtuous right now and bought a lot of fresh things, but there are very nice frozen stir-fry veggie mixes, that are great for when you don't have a lot of time), fresh snow peas, baby bok choy, colorful peppers, and...drumroll, some pre-chunked rutabaga.  I was thinking about making a rutabaga mash for Christmas b/c I loved the one my grandma used to make, but I still had sweet-potato leftovers from our After-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving and thought they'd be too similar.  

So...tonight I am making a beef stir-fry--have been marinating the stew chunks for the last hour in an "Iron Chef" brand honey-garlic teriyaki marinade/sauce.  A bit of an impulse-buy, but do you know how hard it is not to find a pre-made marinade/sauce whose first or second ingredient is NOT high-fructose corn-syrup??  It's difficult.  My advice--skip the marinade/bbq section and head straight for the ethnic food section--the Asian sauces there tend to have more natural ingredients.  Tonight I'm also making up another meal, using some of the garlic chicken sausage, the rest (about 2/3rds) of a bottle of vodka marinara sauce I had in the fridge and the rest of a bag of fresh spinach leaves that is on it's way out anyway.  We can have that tomorrow with home-made whole-wheat/mushroom linguine we bought at a food fair here this Spring (Barilla also makes a whole grain pasta which has more protein, fiber and Omega-3 than regular pasta--look for it at your grocery store).  Tonight with the stir fry I'm boiling up some buckwheat soba noodles (quite often though, I'll just let stir-fries function on their own with no noodles or rice--and frankly, for this de-tox period maybe I should skip the soba and have those with another Asian dish down the line).