Bacon Pancake Dippers

I love that Tony likes to make me breakfast over the weekend.  He’s an awesome cook once I let him into the kitchen!  But he’s not shy about using butter, oil, cheese, etc.  I used to try to hover around him so I could see exactly what was going into my breakfast, but about a month ago I finally decided not to care.  He knows I am trying to lose weight, and while he may add a touch more butter or oil than I would doesn’t matter.  It’s a loving gesture, and I appreciate it.  So thank you Tony for my amazeball breakfasts you make!

Saturday’s was no exception.  He said he thought about it while he was waking up – savory french toast with hot sauce syrup!!  What?!  There was actually a teaspoon of Parmesan cheese in the egg mixture.  The syrup was a mix of sugar free pancake syrup and hot sauce – holy shizz, was it good.  Just on the brink of being too spicy, but the sweetness from the syrup was the perfect balance of heat.

Another thing happened on Saturday.  I had my Cleaning Pants on.  Cleaning Pants are when you actually are in the mood to clean.  Hannah and I always talked about it – and while she was a neat freak, it would always work out that the days that I had my Cleaning Pants on, she didn’t really want to clean.  Our house is never really messy, but you know every once and a while you have to go the extra mile to clean – I actually had dust on the top of our mirror in the bathroom!  So I spent a couple hours cleaning the bathroom and kitchen.  I always love the smell of a clean house.

I took Friday off from working out, so I had to get back at it on Saturday.  On the strength menu was biceps/back/abs/sprints.  The strength portion took me 50 minutes!  Now this was the first time that I did cardio right after strength, and I have to admit, it was tough.  But I stuck with it.  30 minutes of sprints, this time 30 seconds on, 30 seconds on the rails, at an 8.0 mph pace.

I have to admit, doing a 90 minute workout all together was a bit rough, but I am proud that I pushed through even though 10 minutes into the sprints I kept telling myself to stop.  But I have all my friends on my Healthy for the Holidays page cheering me on, and I can’t be a good role model if I say it’s okay to quit, because it’s not.

Holiday weeks are always a weird grocery/menu planning week.  I decided I only needed to pick up a few things and to use up what I have at home for our dinners this week.  I ended up picking us up a really big baked potato and two sirloin tip steaks.  Check out the price of these two steaks!  The price for regular sirloin steak was $8.99 a pound.  And since we split one steak, it our steak was only .82 cents per serving.  Love it!

Because these steaks are on the thinner side – I adjust my rule of 2x2x2x2 – meaning 2 minutes on one side, 2 minutes on the other side, then flip direction and cook 2 more minutes per side.  This time I did the first 2 minutes per side, but then just 30 seconds on the each flip.  I served it with sauteed mushrooms and blue cheese (for me) with half a baked potato with bacon.  We ended up splitting one of the steaks and the baked potato – a few years ago we both would have eaten a whole steak and potato each!

The blue cheese made the dish for me!

I sent Tony a picture from Pinterest on Friday and said “I am going to make these for you this weekend.”   Yup.  Bacon Pancake Dippers!  The only difference was that I made my buttermilk pancakes from scratch – so easy!

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 I wish I had a squeeze bottle to squeeze out the batter, but I ended up just ladling out just enough batter to cover the length of the cooked bacon, put the bacon in the center, pushed down a bit, then covered up with a little more batter.  These probably turned out bigger than I intended – I ended up with exactly four dippers (two each!) with the pancake batter above.  This actually turned out to be both my breakfast and lunch, so I am okay with it.

I used a pie pan and a pitcher to weigh down the bacon so it would stay flat.  I put that on facebook and my friend Christina recommended baking the bacon – it stays flat that way!  Thanks for the tip Christina!

Holy shizz – so good!  And this would be perfect for a crowd if you are having a bunch of people staying with you over Thanksgiving.  These can be made ahead and then just warmed up in the oven.   And again, this ended up being my breakfast and lunch!

I made a goal of 125 miles of something for the month of November.  I still had 79 miles to go after my sprints on Saturday, so decided to ride the exercise bike at the gym for 60 minutes, and just see how far I got.

I only had it on Level 4, so it was more like a sprint, but not bad to be almost 16 miles in 60 minutes! 😀

After a busy day and working out, I wanted a super simple and easy dinner.  My Company Salisbury Steak.  So good, so simple and pure comfort food on a chilly Sunday night.

I have to give a HUGE shout out to my brother Charlie for moving my blog over to a self-hosted site.   With five years of content AND 25,000+ photos, it was not a quick task by any means.  I am still nervous, because I really still have no idea what I am doing, but I think this post will turn out alright.  Next step is to get Live Writer over to the new hosting site – I can do a blog post in like 20 minutes using Windows Live Writer!

And I am so happy to say that my blog friend Veronica had her baby boy over the weekend.  V and her husband Den had been struggling with infertility for 10+ years.  She’s insulin dependent diabetic like me, so any pregnancy was going to be high risk, but she maintained her blood sugars throughout the whole pregnancy and actually had one of her lowest A1C numbers while pregnant – 5.3 (which is amazeballs in the non-diabetic world!)

Even though he’s just born, don’t you see a smile on his face as if he’s saying “I’m home!”   V – you are going to be the best Momma!  So happy for you!!

Alright, let’s get this show on the road.  Just because it’s Thanksgiving week doesn’t mean you can strap on the feed bag already!  I have a few indulgences I am going to partake in on Turkey Day, but until then, it’s sticking to the program – and I need to get out the door to start WEEK 10 of my strength training – can’t believe I only have 3 weeks left of this program!

Make it a great day!