Cooking With Hound Dogs

I'm not a huge fan of all things Rachael Ray, but I do think it's cute that there is a recipe in each Everyday With Rachael Ray magazine that is specifically for people to share with their dogs. I realize that this sort of cutesyness is the exact thing the Rachael Ray haters usually hate, but it really amuses me. And actually, I can't complain much about Rachael Ray. Her 30 minute meals may take more like 45 minutes to an hour to make if you're me, but they always come out good when I make them...which is saying a lot considering I seriously once googled "How to hard boil an egg." While I do think that the media has reached its saturation point as far as she is concerned, my only real complaint is that some of her recipes are way out of my price range. If there was a 30 Minute Meals For Under $2 Per Serving, I'd be all over that!
At any rate, in my quest to cook more for myself and rely less on frozen food and canned soup, I went to the grocery store today and bought ingredients so that I can cook several meals over the next few weeks. And tonight, I made the frittata featured on this month's cooking for your pet page. And then I shared it with my hound. Really. I didn't give him a full portion since I'm not that crazy. I love my dog to death, but he has his own food, I'm not giving him half of mine. I'll be eating the other portion for breakfast tomorrow morning. But I did give him several bites of my dinner, and he was very excited to share. Apparently my hound likes zucchini! I liked it a lot, too, so tonight's cooking adventure was a success.

I'm feeling quite virtuous today. Besides successfully cooking dinner, I made myself come out of hibernation to do my laundry (which involves trekking to the apartment complex laundry room) and grocery shop. I was particularly pleased with my grocery shopping since I saved $40 with my store card and coupons. Go me!
And even though it was freezing, I took the dog for a 2 mile walk around the lake this afternoon and was shocked to discover that the lake is frozen! When I moved here back in August and it was 90+ degrees for days on end and miserably humid, I scoffed at the signs around the lake that said "NO SWIMMING, NO ICE SKATING." I figured it would never, ever get cold enough to freeze the entire lake to the point that people would even consider skating on it. But oh, I was wrong. The entire surface of the lake is frozen except for a little bit in the middle where all of the geese are paddling around (I guess this is south for the winter for Canadian geese). It's not like this is a small pond, either. We're not talking golf course water hazard here. The path around the lake is a mile long. So I'm pretty amazed the whole thing froze, although I guess since it has been below freezing for five days in a row I shouldn't be surprised. It's still not so solidly frozen that anyone with half a brain would actually attempt to skate on it, but it was frozen enough that I couldn't resist sitting on a rock at the edge and testing exactly how frozen it was. Highly scientific finding: The lake is frozen enough that I had to slam my foot really, really hard against the ice to get it to crack.

Besides being amazed at large expanses of ice and cooking charming dinners for two for me and the dog, I've been spending a lot of time the past couple of days playing around on sparkpeople.com. Have you used this? It's pretty neat, actually. It's a free website that allows you to set health goals and then track your progress by logging what you eat and how much you work out. You enter your weight and how much weight you want to lose, and then it customizes a food and exercise plan for you. You can then opt to use the eating and exercise plans, or you can just do your own thing and use the site to log your progress. I'm not trying to lose weight, I just want to maintain, so I entered my weight and said I wanted to lose zero pounds, and now I know approximately how much I need to be eating and working out to stay at the size I am now. My favorite feature is that you can set it up to track whatever goals you want in addition to nutrition and exercise. In my case, I have it set up to keep track of how many nights a week I get a full eight hours of sleep, how many days I eat at least three servings of fruits and vegetables, and how many days a month I make a home-cooked meal.
I've been doing it for less than a week, but it has already been really eye-opening. According to their calculations, I need to be eating between about 1500 and 1900 calories a day and burning 200 calories through exercise to maintain my current weight, which seems about right. As I've been tracking my eating, though, I'm realizing that I'm rarely making my calorie count for the day. On an average day, I apparently consume 1200 to 1400 calories. True, I have yet to track a day where I've eaten a big meal out, but since those days only happen about once a week on average, I think 1200 to 1400 calories probably is my actual norm. And that's eating what I want when I want and eating until I'm full. In a way, this is a little bit of a good thing since I guess it's better to be naturally under range rather than over range. The problem, though, is that an unhealthy portion of those calories are coming from fat. I'm eating nowhere near the amount of protein or carbs I need to be eating (only about 1/2 the carbs and 2/3rds of the protein), but my fat calories are consistently coming in at the high end or slightly over my recommended range. And I read my fitness magazines enough to realize that a healthy diet needs enough fat in it, but I'm clearly out of balance here. Suddenly, I have a pretty clear explanation for why I still have a bit of belly flab even though my weight is actually on the low-ish range of healthy for my height.
I'm glad I figured this out. I can definitely stand to get more protein in my diet. I've suspected for a long time that I'm not eating enough protein, so I'm going to consciously start working on eating more meat and nuts and stuff like that. I'm not sure what to do about the fat, though. Frankly, I like not having to think too much about what I eat, other than thinking about how it tastes. It's easy to make a mental note to myself to eat more peanut butter; it's harder to attempt to give up certain foods in order to cut back on fat grams. With that said, it now seems pretty clear that I might actually see better results in my ab area if I tweak my eating habits a bit rather than just doing more cardio. So it might be worth experimenting. Assuming I still have time to even remotely think about what I'm eating once school starts again, of course.

Tomorrow is my master class. I'm so nervous! But excited! Good night.