Monthly Archives: October 2017

Skillet Salmon

Quick, easy, healthy, and tasty meal. Eat is as an entrée or on a salad as we did here.

Pearl and Serene, the authors of Trim Healthy Mama, recommend eating fish, especially for stubborn losers. So since Tiffany loves salmon, I decided we’d have some for lunch. Salmon causes Michael’s heart to race, so I need to fix him another kind of fish when we have it for dinner.

So here is my quick way to make a tasty salmon. First, thaw the meat. If it isn’t quite thawed when you are about ready to eat, you can put it in some water to help it thaw quicker.

Skillet Salmon ~ Lifeofjoy.meSkillet Salmon ~ Lifeofjoy.meHeat some butter in a skillet.

Skillet Salmon ~ Lifeofjoy.meAdd salmon. Mine wasn’t completely thawed but no worries, it thawed in the pan. ;)

Skillet Salmon ~ Lifeofjoy.meAdd fiber syrup gold or nature’s hollow honey with maple flavoring. Basically you are looking for a sweet syrup.

Skillet Salmon ~ Lifeofjoy.meThis is what we used.

fiber syrup gold ~ Lifeofjoy.meCome to think of it, it doesn’t really have a maple flavor, just sweet, so use sweetener of choice.

Skillet Salmon ~ Lifeofjoy.meCook until you see it start to turn opaque on the edges and then flip it over and finish cooking.

Skillet Salmon ~ Lifeofjoy.meI cooked it on too high of a heat and was distracted by cutting the lettuce for the salad, so ours was a bit blackened but still yummy. :)

Skillet Salmon ~ Lifeofjoy.meThis only takes about 10 minutes or so.

Skillet Salmon

Ingredients

  • salmon
  • tamari or soy sauce
  • fiber gold syrup or other sweetener of choice
  • salt and pepper
  • tad of butter for frying

Instructions

  1. Heat butter in skillet and add salmon.
  2. Add tamari or soy sauce and sweetener.
  3. Season with salt and pepper.
  4. Cook until edges are opaque and then flip and cook until done.
https://lifeofjoy.me/skillet-salmon/

If you try this one, I hope you enjoy it too.

Until next time, God bless,

Michele ºÜº

 

Celebrating Him

This week is my beloved’s birthday! The big cutie is the birthday boy. :)

I am such a blessed woman. When we got married, he drove me to work and then went on to wherever the job site was with the painting company for whom he worked. He would then be back to pick me up when I got off work and we’d ride the thirty minutes home together.

When I got pregnant we’d decided that I was going to stay home with our children.  And his boss decided that he needed to cease his painting business and accepted a different job. He gave Michael all of the work leads that he had. And thus Michael started his own painting company. It was a bit of a scary time, being pregnant and knowing that I was going to quit my job after the baby was born, and Michael starting his own painting business.

Easter2 ~ Lfieofjoy.me

We decided early in our marriage that we were not going to always be striving for bigger and better things; we would be content in whatever state we found ourselves. We valued our time together and wanted Michael to be completely involved in the lives of our children.

Grandson Love ~ Lifeofjoy.meI’m very blessed to have a man that seeks after and serves God with his whole heart.

He’s lost a bit of weight and is looking really good. Of course that means he is in need of some new clothes. :D

Celebrate Him ~ Lifeofjoy.me To say he is swimming in these clothes is an understatement. Without the belt, the pants would fall right off. :D He has dug deep into his trunk and found a couple of things that fit a lot better than what he has been wearing. ;) I got him a few.

Michael ~ Lifeofjoy.me

I love this man incredibly and am so thankful that we get to do life together. I hope his birthday is wonderful. I’m making a Trim Healthy Mama carrot cake for him. I hope it is good and that he enjoys it.

I hope you’ll celebrate your man on his day. :)

Until next time, God bless,

Michele ºÜº

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A Tough Week

Last week was a busy week. I managed to get some pictures to share with you.

Here are some of the breakfast we served.

Conference ~ Lifeofjoy.meHere’s a little better picture.

Conference ~ Lifeofjoy.meConference ~ Lifeofjoy.me

Conference ~ Lifeofjoy.me Conference ~ lifeofjoy.meI had some wonderful help. Unfortunately I didn’t get a picture of all the wonderful help I had.

Conference ~ Lifeofjoy.meAnd here are a few pictures I gleaned from other people. ;)

Here’s Gwin and I.

Conference ~ Lifeofjoy.meI had my tennis shoes on and when I walked, the wind blew open my jacket . . . oh well!

Here’s one of my love helping me in the kitchen.Conference Kitchen ~ lifeofjoy.me Conference ~ Lifeofjoy.me

I am excited to say that I managed to LOSE weight during conference week!!! Whoo hoo!!! :p That is a huge accomplishment! I ate a salad every day, although some days it was very small. I also ate rather light in the evenings.

I managed to get my grocery list made after finishing the clean-up after service. Then went to lunch with a great group of people at Chuy’s. I didn’t leave the restaurant to start my grocery shopping until about 3:30! Oh my! But I have a jewel for a husband who offered to pick up some things for me. So I gave him the Walmart portion of the list and I took the Sprouts and Aldi portions. I still ended up having to drop by Walmart because I forgot to put a couple of things on his list but was able to run in the door of the garden center, grab the couple of items I needed and run back out.

By the time I got home, got the groceries put away, and made a quick dinner, I was exhausted. We were supposed to go to a star viewing after dark but neither Michael nor I were up to it. I wish I’d have said a proper good-bye at lunch.

Unfortunately Tiffany was still coughing badly on Saturday, so I asked her if she wanted some cough syrup. Michael ran to the local Family Dollar and got both some daytime and some nighttime formulas. Sunday morning she got up and took a shower and fainted! And she had hives break out all over her body! It was a fight all week long. Thankfully, they were nearly gone yesterday and we were both able to get some rest.

Of course, I’m running errands by myself once again but I’ve learned something about myself, I can do it. ;) Yes, I prefer the company, but I can manage it alone. :)

It was so nice to have some cooler weather this week! I made soup twice! We had a chicken tomato bisque and a chicken chili. Both were deemed keepers and are from the Trim Healthy Mama cookbooks.

Well, I better run. I still have a menu and grocery list to make.

Until next time, God bless,

 Michele ºÜº

Striping

This week’s diva challenge is a monotangle, so I won’t be combining it with any other focus tangles or challenges. I’ve not really used Striping before. But when I saw it as a monotangle, it reminded me of some tiles I’d seen on facebook using a line technique for getting your mojo back when you’ve gotten in a drawing slump. Here’s a link to the video of what I’m talking about.

I guess I should have taken a scan of the lines I drew for the “string” but alas, I didn’t. I did like Ellen said in the video and just drew some random lines. Then I started adding some wider lines than what she demonstrated in the video since I was going to blacken some in for my stripes.

I decided not to give all of them the sparkle but to keep some of the stripes solid. I also decided not to fill the entire square. I liked how some of the shapes were well defined and not muddied by more striping close to them.

Here it is before I added any graphite.

DC#336 ~ Lifeofjoy.meHere it is after shading.

DC#336 Shaded ~ Lifeofjoy.meHmmm, it might look better smaller. ;)

DC#336 Shaded ~ Lifeofjoy.meYeah, I think I like it better that way.

Thanks for stopping by and a huge thank you if you leave a comment! :) It means a lot.

Until next time, God bless,

Michele ºÜº

Seasoned Eggs ~ Lifeofjoy.me

Seasoned Eggs

Such a different and tasty way to have eggs. The flavor combinations are endless.

I recently followed Trim Healthy Mama’s Stubborn Losers Menu. When I decide to follow a menu, I go all in! I eat everything the way it is listed, which means taking a chance on different foods.

One of those foods was how to fix eggs. I like an egg with a runny yolk but all the white cooked. I am not a fan of egg whites but the stubborn losers’ menus were designed to help me get the scales moving. In order to do so, the menus do not abuse calories, which I have done more than I can admit.

So I tried their recipe for Big Fried Egg Trick from page 243 of the trim healthy mama Cookbook. The thing I want to share with you today is what I learned about how to season eggs from that recipe.

So, once you get the eggs in the pan, it is really just a matter of sprinkling on whatever seasonings you like.

Seasoned Eggs ~ Lifeofjoy.meI used oregano, onion powder, salt, pepper and nutritional yeast. (I store my nutritional yeast in that shaker that I got from Dollar Tree.)

Seasoned Eggs ~ Lifeofjoy.meSeasoned Eggs ~ Lifeofjoy.meFlipping the large egg is the hardest part but I usually just flip it in pieces.

I cooked it a bit long because I was taking pictures. :p But it was still yummy!

Seasoned Eggs ~ Lifeofjoy.meSeasoned Eggs ~ Lifeofjoy.meSeasoned Eggs ~ Lifeofjoy.meIt’s really better when the yolks are a bit runnier. :)

Seasoned Eggs

Ingredients

  • Eggs
  • Oregano
  • Onion Powder
  • Salt
  • Pepper
  • Nutritional Yeast

Instructions

  1. Spray a skillet with oil.
  2. Add eggs.
  3. Season the way you like
  4. Cook, as desired
https://lifeofjoy.me/seasoned-eggs/

The flavors are only limited by your imagination.

Until next time, God bless,

Michele ºÜº

Don’t Take Offense

Before Pic ~ Lifeofjoy.me
Me in the black shirt and blue shorts-2011

Okay, I know that there are women out there that are a little overweight or fat in their own mind and their husbands are all like, I love you the way you are . . . you’re beautiful, and they don’t believe them. For those women I have to say, believe your husband!!! There are a multitude of blog posts on the internet telling you that I am right when I say that.

I need to let you know that I am truly so overweight that it is not pretty. Don’t get me wrong, I can still cover up and make myself presentable and pretty for my man (and I should do that) but I should never delude myself into thinking that he thinks all this blubber is beautiful or enticing. I have to lose weight!!! And praise God I am losing weight. But it is not my husband’s fault that he is a visual creature; that is how God made men. It is also not his fault that I allowed myself to gain so much weight.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been on diets for our entire marriage. He has paid a lot of money for me to try to lose weight. Sometimes it worked but most of the time it didn’t. Praise God, this time seems to be different (but check back in a year and we’ll see if it really is different or not ;) ) The whole family has changed their dietary lifestyle several times because I’m the cook in the house and not going to make several different meals, parts of meals yes, entire meals no.

Michael would never say anything derogatory about me or my weight on purpose. If anything is said, it is something that slipped out and I took it differently than he intended. But to say that if he loved me he’d never let something like that slip is accusatory and disrespectful to him. My sweet husband has kept his mouth shut on the subject of my weight but I know how he feels. We’ve been married for 30 years, so you can trust me when I say I know how he feels about it. However, that does not keep us from loving on each other. We still flirt and touch each other; we have a healthy marriage.

I have to stand up for any of those husbands out there that would never intentionally hurt their wives but might have let something pass through their lips that clued the wife in to what he thought or felt about her weight. Don’t let yourself be torn down by it. Know that he did not mean to hurt you and that the devil wants you to be offended so he can tear you two apart. Don’t let him do that. Just get determined to find something that will work for you.

I recommend Trim Healthy Mama because it is such a balanced approach to food. I get to eat sprouted white whole wheat bread and bacon, although not at the same time. ;) I get to eat yummy peanut butter muffins with a chocolate syrup drizzled on them, albeit sugar-free but definitely not sweetener free. :) But I’m also encouraged to eat big healthy salads full of veggies, which can be eaten with lovely healthy fats and meats or low in fat with fruit and lean meats. It is such a well balance approach to eating and I’m blessed to have found it.

I hope, that if you are one of those women, who have found out that your husband is turned off by your weight, that you will not hold it against him but prayerfully consider how you can show him how much you love and respect him by getting yourself healthy. Yes, do it for yourself but doing it for him isn’t necessarily a bad thing either. It probably shouldn’t be the only reason though. ;)

Until next time, God bless,

Michele ºÜº

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Conference

Busy week with the conference this week. And of course, I took NO, as in ZERO, pictures. I made Egg “Muffins” this year. Although I have made them for the young adult conference before, I have never been able to make them for the October conference before.

I made about four dozen of them each day. Well, actually I mixed it all up in the afternoon and the next morning the early crew baked them. People really seemed to love them. I did not add any cheese to them and I did not really miss it. I’ve been trying to cut back on the dairy a bit, so as to possibly get the scales moving in the right direction again.

I made a little over a dozen with just sausage (bacon bits on two days). Then I made a little over a dozen with meat and sauteed veggies (onions, red bell pepper, green bell pepper, and mushrooms). And finally, I made a little over a dozen with just the veggies. The were taken nearly as quickly as they were put out, so I guess that means they were pretty good. ;)

One day this week Gwin and I went to the spinal hospital nearby for bacon cheeseburgers (minus the bun) and salad. Then another day I was blessed to go with a large group of people to Cracker Barrel. I like to get their country house salad. Usually I get it without croutons and onions and add a side of broccoli but this week I got the sweet potato with it. It may have ended up being a slight crossover on the Trim Healthy Mama eating plan but I only put a small drizzle of oil on the salad and no butter on the sweet potato.

My friend Gwin was also in this group. She’s actually the one that took this picture and was a dear and sent it to me so I could share with you. :)

Lunch ~ Lifeofjoy.me(That’s me! Different hair style.)

It is nice to go with a group of people but then I usually get lost between the conversations. I’m nosey and have a hard time not attempting to listen to several conversations at once. There were some people there I’d have like to have gotten to know a bit better but it’s okay, I was able to chat with a lovely lady and her young daughter, as well as Gwin and a couple more ladies.

Speaking of hairstyle, Tiffany hasn’t felt good this week, so she has not gone to the conference, well except for one service on Wednesday. But since she hasn’t been feeling good, I’ve had to do my own hair. Bad thing is that I hadn’t even attempted to do anything with it . . . she’s been the one figuring it all out the last several weeks and now I had to figure it out . . . it’s been passable. ;)

Then one day Michael got rained out of work, so he came to church and thus to lunch with us. We went back to the spinal hospital because it is very reasonably priced when Gwin pays. We figured out that she must get a discount because ours was a bit more. BUT the chicken special is really good!

Come to think of it, Gwin and I have had lunch together every day of the conference! :) On the other day we went to lunch, Michael got rained out again, so he was with me and invited another gentleman at the conference to join us, as well as Gwin. We went to Jason’s Deli. I like that restaurant because they have a good salad bar and have olive oil right there for dressing.

You might wonder why Gwin and I ate lunch with each other so much this week. You see, she helped me in the kitchen. She filled in where my family left me stranded was unable to do what they normally do. ;) I’ve said before that Michael is my right arm and Tiffany is my left arm. Well, this week, when I had neither of them, I had Gwin. :) I joked with her and said she was a great prosthetic arm. Thankfully, Michael was there a couple of days and able to lift the heavy stuff and help wash up dishes. :)

Today is the last day. Actually it is only a half day. Who knows, I may grab a few pictures to share next week. But if you’ve been around here for any length of time, you probably doubt that I’ll actually get that done. ;) We are going to be quite busy because we’ll actually put everything away as we close down the room after breakfast today.

It’s been a good week. I’ve gotten to know some new people and Gwin and I have been able to spend a lot of time together, which we haven’t done in a while. We’ve had some great services, worship, and speakers.Conference ~ Lifeofjoy.me

On the way home yesterday, I stopped and said hi to my kitchen mentor, as this is the week of their “conference” too. It was nice to catch up with her and find out how things are going. She’s taught me so much!!!

Well, I better run. I’m supposed to even pick up groceries on my way home later. I hope I’ll get my act together enough to do so.

Well, Until next time, God bless,

Michele ºÜº

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Another Reading List

Porcupine Reading ~ Lifeofjoy.meI’m a sucker for books and reading lists. I also am a fan of family read alouds.

Well, I recently came across a website that offers a few lists of suggested books. They have a list of picture books broken down by months. Some of my favorites are on the list and I only looked at a couple of months.

There are also a few short lists of fantasy books, classic books, and some poetry or books in verse. There’s also a list of books for struggling readers. :)

Now, I do have to warn you that these lists are all free BUT you have to sign up for their email list to get access to these booklists. I felt it was worth doing so; you can unsubscribe any time.

There are some podcasts with accompanying blog posts that tell what you can expect in the podcast. I have not listened to any of those yet but I’m interested in a few. The first I’m interested in is an interview with Jonathan Rodgers, the author of one of my favorite children’s series: The Wilderking Series.

This website also has a premium membership option. I don’t really see a need for it but who knows, you may find that you could benefit from it.

I hope you enjoy the Read-Aloud Revival website and find it beneficial to you.

Until next time, God bless,

Michele ºÜº