Happy Memorial Day! Gluten Free, Egg Free and Corn Free Style

What's on your menu? We've got a roasted pork loin, roasted sweet potatoes and sauteed kale on the menu. I started a produce delivery service last week and I am truly loving the push that it's giving me to get out of my comfort cooking zone. Now to find something yummy to make with purple basil! :)

Gotta run Tyrant Number 1 is ready to put on a puppet show and I need to make him a stage to do it from!

April Meal Plans - Week 3 ...the clean eating continues

It has been a crazy week...hmmm those words are nowhere near strong enough to describe the insane chaos that has surrounded this week. Livi still has awful allergies which has thrown her schedule into the black hole of early mornings and she is currently boycotting naps. These are not fun times people, but they will pass. To ride out the storm some extra indepth planning was called for.

So I'm sitting here today to plot out the next week worth of meals and snacks for everyone so that at least one thing will run like clockwork in this house.

April Meal Plans - Week 2

This week is all about trying to use up what I've got and clean out the pantry and freezer.

Monday: Crockpot Port Tenderloin and Cinnamon Apples, served with quinoa
Tuesday: Grilled Chicken and Butternut Risotto with sauteed baby spinach
Wednesday: Crockpot meatballs, mashed potatoes and steamed broccoli
Thursday: Tosca's Tilapia, steamed brown rice and sauteed lima beans.
Friday: Clean Eating Broiled Round Steak, roasted potatoes and squash

In an ongoing effort to trick the testosterone infested members of my household into healthier eating there are a few random veggies that have snuck in here and there throughout these meals. I also want to take this week to start really going through the stuff in our pantry that seems to outlast the month. Some are random ingredients we just never seem to use and I'm not quite sure how they made our shopping list at one point but nevertheless I need the prime real estate they are taking up.

Off to grab some coupons and hit the store! Happy Sunday!

April Week 1 Meal Plans - Allergen friendly, PCOS friendly, Calorie friendly

Whoops I forgot to post last week's recipes. We did eat out one night so here's the rest. More to come later today for this week's meal plans. After last week's craziness it's going to be crockpot central around here!

April Week 1 Meal Plans (many from PCOS Diva's new blog)
One Pot Kale and Quinoa Pilaf
Raspberry Balsamic Chicken
Cincinnati Spaghetti
Baked Potato Casserole (Recipe Below)

Baked Potato Casserole

It's super easy!
Slice 4-5 good size butter gold potatoes thick au-gratin style, drizzle with EVOO, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and bake at 425 for 30 mins.

Top with 1 lb of browned & cooked ground beef, sprinkle with a few pats of butter, top with 1 cup of shredded cheddar cheese, cover with foil and bake for 20 mins.

Take out and serve topped with chopped green onions and sour cream. Delish but it took way to long for this busy momma! I'll be making it in the crock pot next time.

Life Happens

Ever wonder where the time goes? It has been chaos central around here.

We are currently dealing with:

• The ongoing drama of a Tyrant Toddler (I'm waiting for a publisher to offer me a life of easy with a huge advance to chronicle my journey trying to parent this crazy tyrant :))
• The exhaustion that hasn't quite gone away this whole pregnancy
• The morning sickness that made an uninvited return after only a month on vacation
  
• The daily drama of meal planning and keeping our household running...why oh why does that take so much work???
• Scheduling showings and keeping our other house ready for a buyer to swoop in any minute and take it off our hands

Add that to a full time job, a husband that travels and the general day to day stuff that comes out of nowhere and time just flies right by.

I can hardly believe that we're already 6 and a half months along with baby number 2. We can't wait to meet our baby girl and I'm so glad I can take a few solid months off to spend some time with her and Alex. These moments are so precious and they fly by so quickly!

It's a gorgeous day outside and Alex is "helping" aka telling Eric how to clean out the garage. I've had more laughs from him lately. We are really clear on the kind of language he should use and "Oh my God" is not something you hear in our household. Alex, however, doesn't hesitate to correct anyone who crosses his path if he hears those forbidden words. Add that to some gender confusion over boys with long hair, his general "by the book" attitude towards all rules and my kiddo is kind at heart but bossy to the core. It's going to be an interesting few years ahead.

Now off to figure out something yummy to make with Beef Cubed Steaks and then some fun in the sun...Thank you very much Daylight Savings Time!! :)

Someone please invent this

Image via Wikipedia

Traci's Solution to Meal Planning Annoyances:

I'm working on meal planning for this coming week and realized how much easier my life would be right now if someone would invent a hand held barcode scanner with USB cable. Then I could scan everything I have in my pantry, download it into my computer. If this hypothetical device came with a menu planning program it would analyze all my potential ingredients and tell me what I could make with what I had available. How nice would that be!!! Well if there are any inventing geniuses out there who are interested I'd be happy to provide a layman perspective on what it would need! LOL

Gluten Free Goodness

Going gluten free had a lot of positive health benefits for our family, but man does it make shopping, cooking, and snacking a whole lot tougher. A few weeks ago I got an email from a great company called GoPicnic asking if I would be interested in reviewing some of their specialty snack boxes. They have vegetarian, kosher, and best of all GLUTEN FREE (GF) boxes full of great tasting treats. I immediately shot off a response offering to taste test anything they could send that was GF. Eric is also avoiding corn, but even then, 4 out of the 5 boxes they sent me were perfect for a quick after work snack, travel food, or best of all since he flies all the time, food to eat at the airport.

If you are looking to try these meals out I HIGHLY recommend the family pack of gluten free snack packs. Here are a few of my favorites. My son, husband and myself all took samples and tasted items in the boxes. We all loved the cookies, the trail mixes, and the beef jerky. My three year old didn’t care for the sunflower crunch, but I loved it. None of us liked the cheese in the boxes, but we’re all a bit spoiled with nice, fresh deli cheese. Outside of the cheese we devoured the boxes.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. The great people at GoPicnic have teamed up with us to give one lucky reader a sample pack.

Read how to enter below and spread the word about this great gluten free giveaway!

Contest Rules: VISIT www.gopicnic.com, and then come back and tell me how you could use some of their boxes! Camp, back to school, travel, how could these meals make gluten free, or dealing with allergies, more convenient for you.

EXTRA ENTRIES:
To receive these extra opportunities for entries, you must fulfill the first REQUIRED entry. But for extra entries, you can:
* Tell your own story about how going gluten free has turned your life upside down.
* Tweet the contest with the following text “Traveling the Tightrope Gluten Free Giveaway—GoPicnic Makes Gluten Free Life Convenient: http://su.pr/42dSBp”. Leave the Twitterlink in your comment.
* Blog about the contest - add a link to Traveling the Tightrope and the Sponsor GoPicnic
* Add Traveling the Tightrope widget (on the right under the blogroll) to your site OR add Traveling the Tightrope to your blog roll.
*Become a Traveling the Tightrope follower.


One person will be randomly chosen when the contest ends on Friday, 21st at midnight CST. I will contact the winner directly through email or the blog link that you leave when commenting.

The USDA is on my list!

Image by edlabdesigner via Flickr

I woke up in an off mood today. I had to deal with my Grandfather’s wake yesterday afternoon, a late evening phone call from my mother reassuring me everyone was okay in case I caught the news (there was a shooting at the funeral home I had left just a few hours earlier), and then I came out of a dead sleep to my husband yelling at my toddler for daring to be chipper before the sun had fully risen. All told, not a set of circumstances that would help anyone be in a good mood. I got my son out of the room, hoping my husband would catch a bit more sleep and wake up in a better frame of mind. Fast forward a bit and I hear “Ohh Traci this is going to make you mad,” …never a good sign.

Turns out MSN ran this article today, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31719136/from/ET/, and like any husband who knows his wife Eric instantly spotted that it was sure to set me off.

When I first started college I was premed. Shortly into that first semester I realized that my future was looking a little more green then red and I happily began following a course load that should pave my way into environmental lobbying. My family viewed it as eccentric but even at that point I knew there was something wrong with how we grow, process and store our food. With the rise in illnesses, cancer, and problems like diabetes becoming a household word, we are looking to medication to band-aid the problem instead of our lifestyle to solve it.

Although I wanted to pursue a career in lobbying my moral fiber would never let me work on an agenda that could harm. I find it irresponsible and ethically detrimental to society for high ranking US officials to knowingly discuss selectively banning known neurotoxins. As a firm believer in the adage “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” I find it very disheartening that our government would seek to undermine their own label in the interests of big business. Many consumers, including myself, use that label to guide purchases that are better for our family. I for one will be very careful moving forward trusting a label that can so obviously be bought.

Ms. Robinson, I say shame on you!

Works for Me Wednesdays-Meal Planning

What works for me and makes life easier along the way? There are a lot of tools I use to make my life run a little smoother, but very close to the top of the list is the Menu Planning service I use. Now I have enough cookbooks to build Alex a fort, but I run short on the time it takes to pull good reciepes and shopping lists together.

A few years ago I stumbled across FlyLady and her reccomended menu planning service Saving Dinner. I was in alpha organizing mode and Fly Lady is a great site for decluttering and setting some great cleaning routines. I digress :). I loved getting an email each week that had already compiled yummy, healthy meals, and used the service until my 6 month subscription ran out.

Unfortunately it was at this point that my crazy do it yourselfness got the best of me. I didn't renew my subscriptions, since I was so sure I could manage the time to do it on my own. And for the next several months our family was blessed with a stressed out mommy who was trying to throw together a healthy meal. Several months later I found e-mealz.com. By now I had come back around to the idea of paying less than $5 a month to have someone else do all the dirty work (and e-mealz even gave me an estimated price for the weeks groceries). I subscribed and we were back on track...until Eric had to cut gluten from his diet. Luckily about this time I had become obsessed with twitter and a fellow gluten free twitterette :) mentioned that Saving Dinner now has a gluten free option with thier menus.

I subscribed that day and haven't looked back since. It's so nice to print a weeks worth of menus, take a premade grocery list and run to the store on Saturday afternoon. As much as I love cooking, the prep work is not my forte. I would much rather be taking Alex to the park, or working in the garden then combing reciepes for ingredients to build a shopping list. So if any of you find yourself doing the glazed over pantry staredown hoping that inspiration for dinner is going to jump out at you, take a few minutes and check out Saving Dinner.

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