Strawberry Cheesecake...sort of

So the hubby and daughter are out for the night on their "date" and after a good dinner of black beans and rice (see the post before this) mommy wants dessert! No problem, right? WRONG! For Lent I decided to give up junk food. Candy bars, ice cream, etc. I have always been a comfort junk food junkie eater but since I need to lose almost 100 pounds I knew that since I was feeling addicted if you will to junk food and relying less on God I knew it was something God was calling me to do. In doing that I knew that if I was going to be cooking or baking to be very careful of the amount of sugar and fat that I used. So I knew if I was going to have something I had to be good! I'm not going to break my promise to myself, let alone God and I knew that God gave me the gift of figuring out what goes with what when it came to food so I decided to trust that. The result? A healthy HEAVENLY dessert that I am so happy about!!!

6 large strawberries hulled
1 ounce cream cheese (I buy the once ounce single serving packets in bulk so I didn't have to worry about measuring)
1 tsp sugar

Whip the cream cheese and sugar together with a fork until light (just a couple of minutes since it's such a small amount but you will see it get a bit fluffier). With your fork gently cram (don't ask me how you gently cram, just do it!) the cream cheese mixture into each strawberry. You should have just enough for all 6. If you don't want to try and stuff them you can slice your berries in half and spread the mixture on it.

Result? Yummines!
Calories: 135
Fat: 7g
Cholesterol: 20mg
Sodium: 117mg
Total Carbs: 16-17g (varies on the actual size of the berries)
Fiber: 3g
Sugars: 12.4
Protein: 2g

EASY Black Beans and Rice

I LOVE black beans and rice. To make them however, well, it can be a pain. After seeing Cooks Country do a version today (it looked wonderful but again, to time consuming for me) so I had an idea to transform it, change it around, make it my own...and what do ya know! It worked! (Can you hear the angels singing?)

So what do you need?
1/2 Bell Pepper
4 cloves of garlic
1/4 onion
(mince the above in a food processor until 1/4" or smaller but not paste like)
1 19-ish ounce can of black beans (drain but reserve the liquid, you will need it! You should have about 1 cup of the reserved liquid. If you don't then you will need to add enough water to get to that and if you have more use it and decrease your water if need be.)
2 cups rice (Thai Jasmine is my favorite but any long grain rice will work fine)
2 cup water
2 tbsp olive oil
1 strip pre-cooked bacon finely chopped
2 tsp hickory bacon salt (if you do not have bacon salt, first of all SHAME SHAME SHAME! Go to http://www.jdfoods.net/ and buy some!! If you can't do it then use 2 strips of pre-cooked bacon instead of one and add in 1 tsp salt. But seriously, go get yourself some Bacon Salt...that stuff is AWESOME in a jar!)

OK, you can do this in a pan or in your rice cooker. I have a good rice maker so I chose to do that. Once your veggies are minced heat your pan on medium (or turn on your rice cooker) and cook them for a few minutes in the olive oil until they are starting to soften. Add in your bacon and bacon salt and cook for a few more minutes until they look like this:

Yea, my rice pan is sadly beaten up...still cooks good though!

OK, now I want you to put in the beans, the reserved bean liquid and rice. Stir it up and let the rice soak up the bean liquid for a minute. This will add more flavor to the rice. After a minute go ahead and add in the water and cook away! If you have a rice cooker just tell it to cook, on the stove I would bring everything up to a simmer, cover and then cook on low. Either way, to prevent everything from burning stir it two or three times during the cooking process, likely 20 to 30 minutes. Once it's done remove the lid and give it one final stir. Let it rest for a couple of minutes before stirring.

The finished product!

Good stuff!

Dinner, NOW with bacon!

So it's not any secret that I like carbs and bacon. The two go well together. The other night I was hungry, the family was hungry and I was tired. I boiled some bow tie pasta, tossed it with about 1/2 pound of cooked and chopped bacon and about a pound of cooked and chopped chicken breast...oh yea. It was good. Hubby thought it needed pasta sauce...yea, it would be good with that but it was fine just plain too. (And yea, I know, the picture isn't great...it's a cell phone camera for pete's sake!)

Stromboli...sort of

OK, so maybe it's not Stromboli but what else would you call it?? And yea, it's cheating...so what. It's still yummy so bite me. Wait, no, bite the food, not me.

OK, so step one, go buy your favorite take and bake pizza (Papa Murphy's is mine!) I recommend going light on the sauce but if you don't, so what. No biggie. See, pizza. This one was a chicken, with a bit of bacon and some other stuff...I forgot and the kids were whining. (Oh, tip, get a pizza that comes on a baking tray, so much easier!!)

So that was easy right? OK, stay with me now! You'll want to lightly "scrape", move or somehow relocate the toppings from the sides towards the center all the way down. So what you'll want is two semi-bare sides and the toppings going from top to bottom in the center. Kind of like this:

It doesn't have to be perfect just so that the majority of stuff is in the center. 

After that take a pizza cutter or other sharp cutting device and make around 10-12 slits on each side towards the center. Basically act like you would be cutting completely through but don't! You'll want to leave the middle uncut where all the toppings are. 

Once you have made all the cuts you will make a small fold at the top to help hold in everything...OK, I think it's more to make things look pretty. Either way, just fold the dough down a bit...sort of like this...

If nothing else it will make pizza, er, Stromboli, er, sandwich...it will make the FOOD easier to move when it's all done baking. Then begin cris-crossing them almost like you're braiding them. 

Finish "braiding" it all the way down and pop it in the oven. I baked mine at 375 for about 25 or 30 minutes. Once it looked like this, I took it out, let it rest for a few minutes and ate it up. 

So, give it a try, it's good stuff. And I promise I won't tell anyone your secret. It's safe with me...for now anyway. 

Jo's Homemade Mac & Cheese

*NOT heart healthy BUT OH SO GOOD!* 

8 ounces pasta, 

1 cube butter, 

1 cup milk, 

3 eggs, 

2-3 cups shredded cheese (mexi-blend is my favorite), 

3 slices bread dried/toasted and pulverized into crumbs, 

1Tbsp salt. 

Boil pasta with salt in water for one minute less than package directions. Drain well and mix in 1/2 of the butter. Mix in all of the cheese. Stir the eggs into the milk and then add that into the pasta. Pour everything into a deep dish pie pan greased with 1 Tbsp of the butter. Mix the bread crumbs with the last of the butter and lay evenly over the mac and cheese. Bake at 450 degrees for 15 minutes until golden brown on top and bubbly. Let rest for 10 minutes before dishing up. (Please note, I am not responsible for your drool damaging your keyboard).