This week’s menu is pretty basic and leans heavily on plant-based dishes. I am hoping to get back to my goal weight in the next week so making easy dishes that taste great and have a lower calorie count will help me in my quest to lose vacation weight.
Happy May! And for me, happy to be home!! What a pleasure to be cooking in my own kitchen where I have everything I need close at hand.
John said he felt like pasta so while he heated up the water, I got the mushrooms cut up and in a sauté pan followed by some onion and garlic. When the pasta was getting close to done I added the stems of the broccolini. When John drained the pasta I put in the broccolini florets and then he dumped in the orecchiette. I made a sauce with some reserved pasta water and a little olive oil.
Usually I do not put cheese on my pasta and just keep it vegan but tonight I wanted parmesan strips on top. I feel like since yesterday was a travel day that it still counted as vacation and I could splurge a bit. But on Sunday it is back on the straight and narrow as I need to lose a few pounds gained over the last two weeks. I know it is never a good idea to let my weight go up even a few pounds without doing something about it. I am, after all, a serial dieter and I have been down this road too many times.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Later that day we had an excellent dinner at the Burr Trail Grill in Boulder, UT.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Formations near the Grand View Viewpoint
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.
Shrimp fajitas and chicken enchiladas
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
Omnivore 