RECIPE SOURCE: CENTENNIAL MAGAZINE INSTANT POT RECIIPES
Note: I do not receive any compensation for links provided in these reviews. They are simply here as a way to cite the original sources and to provide the reader with necessary resources to make the dish.

A few days ago, one of my besties shared a picture with me from Walt Disney World. She and her family were eating at Sanaa at Disney's Animal Kingdom's Lodge at Kidani Village. Her family enjoyed the Naan Bread Service Platter and she indulged in the Buttered Chicken and Rice entree.

For some reason, that made my mouth water. I did eat at Sanaa once a long time ago when my tastes were a little more--limited. I loved the bread, but the chicken dish felt underwhelming to me. 

I have expanded my horizons since that meal and after seeing Amy's picture, I decided I wanted to give it a shot. And then, like a gift, I found this Buttered Chicken with Rice in the 2020 Instant Pot Recipes from Centennial Magazines. It was a sign!

And, if you have an Indian dish, you need to have Naan bread! I did a quick Google search and found this easy recipe from Gimme Some Oven (love that name, btw!) 

Full disclosure: I did forget to add the yogurt in the first batch of dough. I whipped up another pretty quickly. 

I admit I giggled like a schoolgirl when I was cooking the bread dough, amazed that I was making something that actually looked like what I've eaten at a restaurant. 

But, let's talk about the Buttered Chicken and Rice recipe!

WHAT I LIKED ABOUT THIS RECIPE

Other than than melting the butter and putting in the spices, no pre-cooking needed to happen. I love being able to pretty much dump all the ingredients into the pot without any major pre-work. I thought with a rich dish like this, there would be some major steps involved. Not so!

You will need to mix up some heavy cream and flour to thicken the chicken and broth at the end. It worked like a charm. 

I also got a pleasant surprise when I put the recipe into my Lose It app to get the calories. With the butter and the cream, I expected the dish to be a big hit on my daily calories. Without the rice, one serving was under 400 calories!

​Is it a big bowl? No. But the richness of this meal and the bread means you don't need a lot to be satisfied. Even my husband wound up only eating half of the dish I gave him.

I picked up a copy of Hungry Girl magazine the other day because it boasted "65+ Healthy Recipes" and the cover said "World's Easiest Weeknight Dinners." 

Yeah, they had me hook, line, and sinker.

​Turns out, there's a lot of recipes I want to give a shot. But, for my first meal of the 7 Days/7 Recipes Challenge, I chose her Sloppy Jane Casserole. 

What the heck is a Sloppy Jane??

Why Sloppy Jane? If you're more familiar with Sloppy Joes, you're not alone. I had to do some digging to find out the difference between the two. After browsing Google for a little while, the consensus seems to be that Sloppy Jane's are leaner versions of the classic Sloppy Joe. This recipe uses lean ground beef (I used 90% lean beef). Other versions of the dish use ground turkey. It's really just a matter of preference.

This is a homemade sloppy joe recipe (no Manwich here) topped with shredded hash browns. Yep, it's really that basic.
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I love recipes with a few, simple ingredients and this one fit the bill nicely. All you need is a pound of ground beef/turkey, crushed tomatoes, onion, Worcestershire sauce, some brown sugar, thawed shredded hash browns, garlic powder, salt, paprika, and some chili powder. I won't post the full recipe, because, you know copyrights and stuff. I respect that! Hungry Girl does have another version of the Sloppy Jane mix on her website. Check it out here. 

It only takes a few minutes to whip up the Sloppy Jane mix on the stove top. Then, since I didn't have an 8X8 casserole dish, I used that round pan you see above. Add the thawed potatoes on top and cook in a 375 degree oven until bubbly on the sides. You should put the broiler on for the last few minutes to let the potatoes brown.

I also loved that this recipe took just a little over 30 minutes from start to finish!

The Sloppy Jane flavor was tasty! I might add a little more spice next time, but my husband and I both enjoyed it very much. He even asked for seconds!

Another plus: one serving of this casserole is only 250 calories! The casserole serves 4 people and what you see in the photo above is one quarter of the entire pan, which is one serving!

​I'm not sure if the rack in my oven was too low or I didn't let the casserole cook long enough. The potatoes were bland and were pretty dry without having that classic browned flavor. It took away from the overall enjoyment of the dish for me. 

Next time, I think I'd make the mix on it's own and serve it either on bun the old-fashioned way or perhaps stuffed in a baked sweet potato or russet. Hmm...

It's also not a very attractive dish when served on a plate, but most casseroles aren't. So, I won't hold it against the recipe :)

​With the modifications I mentioned, I'd add this to our rotation. It might not be a weekly dish, but once a month or so for a quick on-the-table meal, why not?

Are you bored with the same, boring dinner rotation?

For a while now, I found myself making the same 5 or 6 meals for my family. Tacos, Baked Chicken, Burgers, Pasta, Breakfast for Dinner, etc. When I didn't feel like making those things, we'd go out.

Well, COVID-19 changed a lot of that, but I didn't switch up my menus very much. I had one picky eater home due to quarantine and our 18-year-old was clearly getting fed up with my go-to dinners. We were ordering take out a lot and that certainly wasn't helping my health/weight loss journey.

My girls are away at school now and it's just me and my husband. He'll eat whatever I cook and not complain at all. Still, I got to the point where I hated cooking because the meals were just meh. 

sI'm not a bad cook. I just don't have a lot of confidence in breaking out of my comfort zone. But, now that I don't necessarily have to make meals I know my kids will love and I some more time on my hands, I decided to start trying a few new recipes a week. Sort of to get my feet wet, I guess. 

As I was doing my meal planning for the week (which is a BIG help for me to stick to my healthy habits!), I decided to take a big leap and try 7 NEW RECIPES OVER THE NEXT SEVEN DAYS.

I decided they had to be easy and when I scanned through two new recipe magazines I snagged at Walmart a few days ago, I easily found 7 meals to try.

As I make these meals, I'll share my thoughts on the recipes, along with links (if I can find them online) or I'll point you in the direction as to where to find them. I'll be honest about how they turned out, what the challenges were, what I might change and if I'll add them to the rotation. 

I'll warn you. My meals probably won't look Instagram pretty. For me, it's more about taste than appearance. But, I'll work on that, too, because food should look kinda nice.

So, you ready to find a new recipe or two to try? Let's go!

My weight loss journey has changed how I see things. 
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For years, I managed to flip and flop between ignoring how bloated, sickly, and tired I appeared. Why? Well, I felt it all the time. If I took a hard look at myself in the mirror, I would just more depressed. I'd spiral into despair and back into a vicious circle that would cause me to simply shut down and assume I couldn't do anything to fix it.

Eventually, I realized the only way to change how I felt and how I looked was to--you know--actually change what I was doing with my life. You can expect things to be different if you keep doing the same things over and over again. So, I sucked it up, accepted where I was (and that I hated it) and took my first steps to changing my life.

It's been 3 years since I took those first, hesitant steps. As the old advertising adage goes, "You've come a long way, baby."

Except, when I look at myself, I don't see that.

Oh, I can't deny there's been progress. My body is changing. 

But, I still have the body of someone who is considered to be very unhealthy. I'm still morbidly obese. I'm still over 300 pounds. 

Even at my lowest weight during this journey (about 280), I was still morbidly obese.

And I look it.

And that pisses me off.

When I weighed almost 400 pounds, my body reflected my lifestyle. I fed it crap, and lots of it. I sat on my big butt as much as I could. I ached. Breathing was a challenge. It made sense to me that I looked the way I felt.

Now? Now it just feels damn cruel sometimes.

I have changed my life. I have done things I never dreamed possible a few short years ago.

Some of them are little things, like bending over to tie my shoe or climbing a flight a stairs without needing to take a rest break. 

Others milestones are more significant. What started as walking to the corner and back eventually built up to 5K and 10K events. Those races and years of training eventually brought me to the finish line of the Disney Princess Half Marathon this past February. (Note: For the record, that happened just one short week before our world turned upside down. I do sometimes wonder if these two events are somehow related. ;) ) 

My eating habits have evolved into that of a healthy person. I control my portions. I eat vegetables willingly and (most of the time) happily. I like yogurt now! I've become a damn good cook and I even freaking weigh my ice cream portions!

I don't look like a person who does that. 

And, I'll say it again. It pisses me off.

I FEEL like a new person. I actually like the person I am. I hate the disconnect between what I feel and what I see. 

I'm grateful for this body. It has endured so much abuse over the years. 

Sometimes I wonder if maybe that's why it's taking (what I feel is) forever to change. My body has been down this road before — so many times, really. Perhaps it's still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

"Oh, she's just going to go back to her old life."

You'd think after three years, it would see I'm serious about my life this time. Even after gaining about 25 pounds from the 2019 holidays to through the early days of this horrible pandemic. (I'll write about that in another post, as I'm still unpacking a lot of that.)

I suppose after the years of abuse, my body has trust issues. 

And, when I think about my situation like that, I can't blame it really.

I inflicted a lot of damage to myself over the years. Three years isn't enough to reverse all of that.

So, now I'm working through the disconnect of what I see and what I feel. 

I think my body and I need to learn to trust one another through this healing process. We are in it together, after all. 

Oh, Twitter...how you do love a good viral smackdown. In a case of a holiday ad gone horribly wrong, Peloton is facing serious backlash over its 2019 commercial. Critics claim its sexist and promotes body shaming. After a casual conversation about the social media storm with a friend during a weekly music trivia night at a local restaurant/pub, I decided to pitch a story on my take on the whole debacle. 

My voice is no better or worse than the thousands of others out there. But, I think I have a unique perspective as an overweight woman who is coming into her own in the fitness world. Apparently, my editors agreed and gave me the green light! Check it out below and let me know your thoughts about the commercial and the resulting controversy. And many thanks to my editors at Simplemost for letting me wade into the wild waters of viral commentary!  For the record, the original headline for the article the editors agreed on was "I'm an overweight feminist and I think the Peloton holiday commercial is empowering." Ok...wow! Not my choice at all, but it was out there for a while until they changed it to something a little less...in your face, I guess :) 

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