My Awesome Weekend

It snowed Friday afternoon and into the night, giving us about an inch of snow. When I picked Cam up from school on Friday, there was already a good dusting of snow. And for whatever reason, he decided he need to clear the "roads." So he ran into the house, found his toy snowplow, and started clearing roads on the sidewalk. The funniest part: he was saying he was clearing the roads to Camelot (no, I am NOT making this up), so he was Camelot's snow plow. So we played in the falling snow for about half an hour, because the wind wasn't blowing, so it felt positively balmy out, despite the snow.



Saturday, we spent more time outside, clearing more roads. Though it was a tad bit more difficult, since the wet, fluffy snow that had fallen had frozen into the kind of snow that doesn't want to be messed with. The kind that crunches with every step you take. And laughs when your snow plow tries to break through. Luckily, we had something of a staging area where his trucks could work without the snow being in the way. (Can you see the payloader in the bit of dirt? He was loading the dirt into a dump truck, taking it over to a bit of snow, and dumping it. It was "sand" to help clear the road.)



I'm still making headway in eating better. Last night, I had homemade sloppy joes. Before, if I wanted sloppy joes, I would buy burger, Manwich, and hamburger buns. But in my healthy eating, hamburger buns are obviously off the table. And with the second ingredient in Manwich being HFCS, and the third being just corn syrup, well, I don't really want to eat that either. So my sloppy joes took a bit longer and a little bit more effort to prepare. No problem. (BTW, have I mentioned just how thankful I am that I enjoyed cooking/knew how to cook before I started on this food adventure?) I wish I had had a red bell pepper, to replace half of the green bell pepper that I put in the sauce. That's my only complaint. Too much green bell pepper taste. Not bad, I say. Oh, and that I had put the onions in to cook sooner, because they're still crunchy, and I'm still not a fan of crunchy onions.

Sloppy Joes

8oz tomato sauce
1 C ketchup (I used HFCS-free stuff. One of these days I'll learn to make my own!)
1/4 small onion, diced
1/2 small green pepper, diced (or 1/4 green and 1/4 red)
2 cloves garlic, diced
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp celery seed
1/2 tsp chili powder
1 tsp mustard (oops, I forgot this in mine. Oh, well!)
1 pound ground beef

Brown the ground beef.
Add onion, pepper(s), and garlic and cook until soft (or to desired crunch level).
Add remaining ingredients, mix.
Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer 10-20 minutes.


I also made my own buns. The recipe can be found here. They make an excellent GF/low carb alternative to hamburger buns and with the strong flavour of the meat sauce, you really can't tell that they aren't your typical buns.