This is our last dinner out before we are home tomorrow. We went to an Italian restaurant with the hopes of having eggplant parmesan, one of our real favorites. Unfortunately the restaurant pared down their menu after re-opening after the pandemic restrictions were somewhat relaxed and eggplant parmesan did not survive the cut.
So we changed gears and had chicken Marsala which has a lot fewer calories than the eggplant parmesan. It made having a piece of bread and a salad with real salad dressing fit into the day’s meals.
Chicken Marsala with angel hair pasta
To be honest, I am really looking forward to planning my menu for next week and sending it out on Sunday. These last two weeks have been a big departure from the way I normally eat now and I am looking forward to eating my own food the way John and I cook it.
We started off tonight’s dinner with some tuna salad appetizers. I had made the tuna salad for lunch and there was a little left over so I toasted up a piece of bread and used a slice of cucumber as the platforms for my hors d’oeuvres.
Tuna salad hors d’oeuvres
Our serving vessels for our main course were plastic containers we bought to store stuff in as our rental kitchen is woefully supplied. Normally I would serve pasta in bowls.
Whole grain penne with onions, garlic, asparagus, mushrooms, celery, and carrot
While the pasta water was coming up to a boil I cut up and sautéed the vegetables. We really like the taste of Barilla’s whole grain penne and John has gotten very good at cooking it to a perfect al dente. He added the cooked pasta to my vegetables and I created a sauce with a little olive oil and pasta water. A delicious dinner!
Tonight’s dinner is in celebration of John’s consulting contract being renewed. He loves his part time job and I am very happy for him. When I suggested steak for dinner I think he was both surprised and pleased because any type of red meat is a very infrequent visitor to our table.
Pan-seared ribeye steak, baked potato, and broccoli
John cooked the steak in a little olive oil and rosemary. If we had been home he would have grilled it outside but it turned out really tasty nonetheless. I microwaved the potato until it was almost done and the seared the cut side in a pan with a little butter. The broccoli was simply cooked in a little water.
Our trip is coming to an end as we head home at the end of the week. I will enjoy being back in my own kitchen making healthy dinners again!
One thing we were planning on doing during our road trip was to have picnics. That way we would have better control of the ingredients that would go in our lunches. In fact we even brought along a folding table and chairs in case we could not find a picnic table. Up until Sunday, though, we had only managed one very cold picnic.
On our way to Boulder, UT we stopped in Capitol Reef National Park and found a picnic table and were prepared with food we wanted to eat. So we had a lovely picnic in a beautiful location.
Naan with hummus, tomatoes, cucumber, and olives (And yes that is a small bag of chips in the upper left)Here’s John enjoying our picnic with a huge chocolate cliff behind him.
Later that day we had an excellent dinner at the Burr Trail Grill in Boulder, UT.
Seared trout with rice and beans and a beet, lettuce, and goat cheese salad
Out in the wilds of Utah it is not always possible to find a restaurant. We did, however, find one in Escalante, UT called Escalante Outfitters. The had crustless vegetable and egg soufflés with a side of grapes. The soufflé was so surprisingly good that I think I will try to make these at home.
Crustless egg and vegetable soufflé with grapes
After driving through a horrific downpour we made it to St. George, UT which is our last stop on our trip. A favorite place of ours is Mad Pita Express where we ordered just what we wanted, hummus and tabbouleh with pita. Their pita is so yummy and they give you so much of it that we had plenty leftover to take to our accommodations. We will be somewhere with a full kitchen so we will be able to shop and cook what we like.
Hummus and tabbouleh with pita
For our first dinner John wanted sushi but I was craving lentils. We compromised and got sushi for an appetizer and made lentil stew with carrots, mushrooms, and chicken sausage.
Lentils with mushrooms, onions, garlic, celery, and chicken sausage over a bed of greens with parsley garnish
We will be here in St. George for a few days before heading home and are looking forward to cooking our own food. Yay!
I have been finding a few better choices for lunches and dinners. Here are some suggestions for you to try the next time you are faced with a restaurant decision.
Corn tortilla grilled shrimp taco
This salad was part of a half turkey sandwich/salad combo
A note about salad dressings: Instead of dumping the whole container of salad dressing on your salad just dip the ends of the tines of your fork in the dressing. Then stab some salad. Try dipping once and eating twice. You will find you eat a lot less dressing this way.
Thai spicy basil eggplant with tofu and white rice
Salad with pears and almonds which I had with…
Half of a personal size pizza (John ate the other half)
I am on a vacation so of course I am going to have a little splurge once in a while. And it is okay. It is physically impossible for me to gain back 60 lbs. during a two week vacation!
Now that we are in the land of more varied restaurant choices, we stopped at Pho 88 for a bowl of pho, a Vietnamese soup. It was good and filling but does not break the calorie bank.
Beef pho with accompaniments
Today we visited Colorado National Monument outside of Grand Junction, CO. It is amazingly beautiful!
Remember a couple of days ago when I suggested that dining on ethnic food might be a good way to eat in a healthy manner? After three days of not very good dinners, John and I have decided that maybe we should rethink our strategy.
Tonight we had Mexican food at a casino restaurant. I ordered shrimp fajitas. It had some sort of weird sauce on it which did not taste the way fajitas are supposed to. It came with a plate of accompaniments which were lettuce, tomatoes, rice, and refried beans. I rescued the shrimp from the fajita plate and put them on the accompaniments plate. I gave John the guacamole and told the server not to include sour cream or cheese on my entree.
The chips and salsa were good as was the guacamole. It figures that the things I want to avoid are the only items worth eating. It might be better for us to follow what we call Utah rules for the rest of our vacation. The Utah Rule states that one should only order meals with the fewest possible steps. In other words a steak is a better bet than shrimp fajitas.
Today is a day of hard choices. Restaurants along the US 50, the loneliest highway in America, are few and far between. We end up grabbing fast food which is never a good choice. Tonight for dinner we are trying to find something that will be tasty as well as not blow the healthy eating budget. We settle on Mr. Gino’s Italian restaurant in Ely, NV.
When we get there only three other tables are occupied. I am glad of that since we can sit far away from other people. I am still not totally comfortable with being indoors with strangers. The menu is full of traditional type Italian-American food. I choose the shrimp arrabbiata which is one of the few things that does not come in a butter, oil, or cream sauce. I get an enormous portion of linguine with five large shrimp in a spicy tomato sauce. Oddly it has melted cheese on top.
Trying to avoid the cheese, I dig around for the shrimp and eat a little of the pasta. I cannot avoid the breadstick though. I give the food and my effort to eat reasonably both about a C-. Eating on this trip is turning out to be more difficult than I imagined it would be.
My shrimp arrabbiata, lower right and John’s lasagna, upper left
We have planned to go out to dinner and have pho, a Vietnamese soup. It is a clear but hearty broth with vegetables, noodles, and the meat or not meat of your choice. The internet says it is open until 9 PM but when we get there they are not serving anything but take-out after 7 PM.
We switch gears and try to find something nearby that will be open because at this point it is going on 8 PM. We decide to eat at a Chinese restaurant and order our pre-diet usual, moo shu pork and Mongolian beef. I wish I could say I made a better choice or even fought for a better choice but I was tired and hungry and it was obviously not my fault!
Left, Mongolian beef and upper right, moo shu pork
If you are like me you are yearning to get out of the house and into the world of traveling again. We are wetting our toes with a road trip. Trying to eat reasonably is difficult. It takes a combination of choosing well and some amount of will power. I have a number of rules that I follow to help me along.
1. Do some sort of exercise every day. This can be as simple as taking a walk. If you are out sightseeing and walking is involved that counts too!
2. Base your meals around vegetables, seafood, and chicken.
3. Don’t eat anything fried. Crispy means fried.
4. If you enjoy alcohol do not drink at lunch. Save your drink for dinner. And no umbrella drinks!
5. If you must eat a dessert save it for a special time when it can be all alone in its glory, not after you have already eaten a big meal.
I am not saying that these strategies will have you losing weight while you are on vacation but it will keep you close to not gaining a bunch of weight that you will agonize over later. John and I once took a car trip from California to Massachusetts and back again over several weeks eating three meals a day mostly in restaurants and at the end of it, following these rules, I lost 6 lbs! I have been on a cruise for two weeks and managed to stay the same. It can be done!
So, how am I doing today? For lunch we went to a Thai restaurant and had a spicy basil dish with vegetables and tofu. There were a couple of surprises such as complimentary spring rolls (fried) and a fried wonton. I am not perfect. I took one bite of each and then offered it to John. He happily ate it. At over 6’4″ he can eat a lot more than I can. I ate all the vegetables and tofu, a little of the rice, and all the lettuce with its unfortunate dressing.
Thai spicy vegetables and tofu with rice, salad, and some fried surprises
Dining out at ethnic restaurants is often a good choice. There are more vegetarian dishes and often the food is not fried or served in gigantic portions. For dinner we tried a Mexican restaurant. We had perused the menu on line, something that I always try to do so I am not swayed by the handsome fried entree with its attractive picture on the first page of the menu. John chose camarones a la diabla, a spicy shrimp dish that came with rice, beans, and tortillas.
Camarones a la diabla
I ordered pescado acapulqueno, a seared white fish topped with shrimp. It was supposed to come with a yogurt sauce but they were all out. There were also black beans (some of which I ate), rice (which I did not eat), a bunch of vegetables (yum), and freshly made guacamole that I gave to John.
Pescado acapulqueno
Needless to say this is a lot more than I am used to eating and I am feeling really full. On the other hand, I feel good about the choices I made and I think that the more good choices I make, the easier the next day’s good choices will be.
Omnivore 