Digital Thinkbox

Got my new cook book: Gourmet Nutrition today and I’m impressed. Make sure you check out their PDF sample. I’ve been doing the Texas Thin Crust Pizzas for awhile now and they are awesome. A deal combined with Precision Nutrition prompted me to take the plunge and buy them. Well I got my book this evening and I dived in.

Behold ! Baked Chicken Strips with Portobello Pizzas topped with fresh salsa.

I apologize for the horrible photo. Bad lighting coupled with a terrible camera phone didn’t make for a good food picture.

Baked Chicken Strips

6oz boneless, skinless chicken breast meat cut into 1/2inch strips
Salt
Pepper
Paprika
1 Omega-3 Egg
2 tbsp Water
1/4 cup Whole wheat breadcrumbs
1/4 cup no sugar added coconut

Preheat oven to 350F. Season the chicken with salt, pepper and paprika. You won’t need a lot. Add the egg and water in a mixing bowl and whisk together. Combine the breadcrumbs and coconut in another bowl. Dip the chicken in the egg mixture and then bread. This is pretty basic stuff here.

Put the chicken strips on a non-stick cookie sheet or one that is lightly coated with oil. Bake until golden brown. About 15 minutes. Serves 1-2

Portobello Pizzas

3 Portobello mushrooms (stems and gills removed)
1 cup Salsa (Fresh recipe to follow or use store-bought)
1/4 cup Pine nuts
1/4 cup Parmesan cheese

Preheat oven to 400F. De-stem and de-gill the shrooms. Don’t forget to wash them! Place the mushrooms upside down on a baking tray. Top each with salsa, pine nuts, and then Parmesan cheese. Bake 10-12 minutes. The above measurements are estimates, I just use a few pine nuts, and only made two mushrooms.

Note: Use fresh pine nuts. I had some older ones and the flavor was gone. The mushrooms would have been much more interesting with the pine nuts. As they were they were awesome.

Fresh Tomato Salsa

1 Vine ripe tomato
1/4 cup diced red onion
1/4 cup corn
1/4 cup black beans
1 tsp fresh garlic
1 tbsp lime juice
1 tbsp fresh cilantro (chopped)
Salt
Pepper
Chili powder

Combine in a bowl and mix. Yeah it is that easy. I substituted fresh small red peppers (removing the seeds) for black beans giving it more kick. I also made the onion pieces bigger to make it chunkier. Amount are also really flexible. Make extra and have it with chips.

I was pretty impressed with these three recipes, they went well together. At first I was a little underwhelmed with the chicken, but it is a much more subtle recipe compared to the mushrooms, which if you spice it up railroads all the other flavors on your plate. You think the chicken is the main coarse, but those mushrooms took over and kicked ass! The poor chicken became the side dish.

About 300 calories for the two mushrooms give or take and another 200 – 250 calories for the three chicken strips. So a 500-600 calorie dinner that was filling and high in protein. Nice.

Today we started another round in our fitness challenge. The last fitness challenge was over 16 weeks and I lost about 14lbs and 3% off of my body fat. I still have a ways to go. Here are my current numbers:

161 lbs
23% body fat

I’m still overweight by about 10lbs, but I’d like to be in the 140lb range, but body fat percentage is more important that actual weight. 18%-20% would be ideal, even less if I can work it.

I’m doing the P90X DVD again this cycle, although I’m doing the “lean” version of the workout in an attempt to build more lean muscle and burn off fat. The workouts are pretty good, but intense. I sometimes struggle to do the whole workout.

Besides exercise diet is the other half of the equation. Without a good diet, I’m not going to lose anything. I should probably be eating between 1500 to 1700 calories per day give or take.

Sadly,
My good friend of may years, Wally Bigelow passed away on April 30th after a long battle with cancer.

Wally, you will be missed.

Update: Memorial service is scheduled for 1pm Saturday May 17th in Fernwood, ID.

OK so it has been a LONG time since I blogged. I’m currently getting a new theme installed and upgrading WordPress. An actual blog post to follow soon.

Update 05/02/2008: OK so update is complete…finally. New theme as you can see. I used a canned one someone created, but I kind of like it.