Cooking or whatever you might call it these days

We've changed our eating habits around our little house. So although we do a fair share of prep for meals over the weekend, we're usually prepping veggie based salads or sides and thawing out some frozen fish or chicken or whatever.

This summer I took up a few new health-related habits that included focusing a little more on a better everyday diet. NOT diet, as in eat nothing and lose weight, but diet as in our general eating habits.

Reasons for this:

1. I was eating WAY too many carbs and I align with the food people who say lots of white flour-based carbs are not good for you. So I wanted to change that.
2. Our garden was bountiful and I wanted more variety in what we did with that bounty.
3. I want to move toward eating a more natural diet - mostly plants with some meat, with a little bit of other stuff thrown in there so why not start now?

A typical meal for us looks somewhat like this. Some meat and some veggies. The husband will sometimes augment a meal with some extra food (read carbs) but generally we're satisfied with meals like this.

We needed to get rid of a few chicken thighs that were lost in the freezer. I found a skinless Asian-style baked chicken recipe and we mixed up a salad of edamame and red onion as the side.

The salad was much better day 2 and was loosely based on this recipe.

I find that as long as I eat enough protein, this type of meal is satisfying. I'll share more about our meals as we continue to make changes. And don't worry. Although eating less carbs is an ideal, I still like baking way too much to stop that! :)

Decision making

Making decisions and compromising are sometimes the hardest things to do in a marriage. The husband and I face our fair share of situations needing some sort of agreement. We tend to approach these differently depending on the type of situation.

For house items, we've devised an approach that I think works pretty well.

Step 1: We compile a list of to-do's - in this particular instance it is a list of improvements we would like to see by mid-November.

On the list: 
Paint office
Paint foyer
Paint dining room
Paint trim in all of the rooms in the house that need it
Paint ugly yellow-tinged doors
Repair dog-damaged bathroom doors
Repair dog-damaged laundry room door and trim
Finish project 1
Finish project 2
Paint back suite
Finish decorating several rooms
Paint front door
Planting around mailbox

Step 2: We go to our respective corners and prioritize the list based on our own preferences.

Step 3: We total our separate priorities.

Step 4: We prioritize based on the lowest total number.

This is the actual sheet where we worked out priorities for accomplishing these tasks.

Our process definitely works well for us! 

And if you can't read the husbands chicken scratch - our prioritized list is below.

Date night

It's restaurant weeks here in Houston. I did spell weeks correctly - I guess there was some name issue so although restaurant weeks is all of August, it is not named restaurant month. Strange.

We like to support good causes (Houston Food Bank), so we got all gussied up.

And went to dinner at Haven, a restaurant that supports locally as much as possible.  We were impressed by the number of dishes using ingredients from around Texas.

Picture from here

Picture from here

The husband tried the fried chicken livers appetizer - yummy.

Picture from here

Picture from here

And then the dish was featured on one of my favorite food blogs.

We might try to make these at home some day.

Back to reality

I'm back in the big state of Texas. I'm glad to be home with the husband and dogs and glad to be back to a somewhat normal schedule. Working while in NC kept me quite busy and trying to catch up with as many people as possible seemed to fill up most of the extra time. But it was great to see friends and family and to make some headway in my own professional goals.

I don't have much to share today so I thought I would leave you with these words. I love reading inspirational and funny quotes - these are some of my favorites from pinterest. Enjoy!

(All images via pinterest)