Vietnamese Pho

When I was getting our taxes done with our accountant last month, she got to the part about charitable contributions.  Huh.  Other than donating clothes to Goodwill, that was about the extent of our charitable contributions – I thought to myself “how sad is that?!”  Even though I work two jobs, that doesn’t mean I can’t find a way to give a little.

So when I read about my friend Karli’s cousin and her cousin’s son, I knew immediately I wanted to do something.   Her cousin and her cousin’s son have been hit with EColi, and while her cousin has been released from the hospital, Connor is still in the pediatric intensive care unit fighting for his life.  You can read about him in this article.  They have a fund raising page, and I decided to donate $25 on a monthly basis.  The way I figure it, that’s a tip at one of my tables once a week – I can afford that and pay it forward!  If you would like to help out, I would appreciate it – the fundraising page can be found here.  Thanks!  Look at how cute he is!

Over the weekend I made some brown rice and for breakfast yesterday, I added salsa to the brown rice and added that to my breakfast burrito – 1 tablespoon “refried” beans, 1/4 cup brown rice with salsa, egg whites, cilantro and 1/2 ounce of cheese.  This is another LaTortilla factory tortilla – low carb – 80 calories and a whopping 13 grams of fiber.  I just love how soft and chewy they are.  With some fresh fruit on the side.

My blood sugar was 224 before working out – perfect!  I was excited to see the changes at the gym, but when I got there, I realized it’s really only half completed.  The new flooring is down, but more than half of the machines still had brown paper over them.  I did check out a few of the machines:

This one is way cool – has a built in t.v. and tons of different workouts.  I think this is the machine I am going to do today.

I ended up doing this machine – its sort of like an elliptical, but your feet go side to side.  You can control how far apart the feet separate, if you want to target your thighs, quads, etc.  Holy balls – I did this machine for 15 minutes and my legs were screaming!

I saw this big machine too – I’ll need to have some help figuring this one out though!

Because I spent so much time looking around, my workout was only 35 minutes – I finished off with a 20 minute walk on the treadmill at 8% incline.

So over the weekend I bought a $5 rotisserie chicken and on Saturday’s post about how I was going to use up all the chicken.  First up?  Vietnamese Pho!  Now, I’ve never had an authentic pho before, but this is my take on it.  I could be completely wrong, but either way, this was amazeballs.  Saturday I separated all the meat.  I took off both breasts and packaged those up, and I put the legs and wings in a separate bag.  I put the carcass in a pot, skin and all, with 4 cups of water, 2 teaspoons of chicken stock powder, and four good size chunks of lemon grass and cooked that down.  I cooked that for about 30 minutes, let it cool, picked out all the skin and bones and put that in a container.

Yesterday morning before work, it was time to put the soup together!  I went to get my stock and had to throw out TWO inches of fat that had solidified on the top – ew!  I ended up using 1 cup of the chicken stock with 3 cups of chicken broth for the base of my soup.[amd-zlrecipe-recipe:34]

That is two servings.  I heated up half and dug in!  Each serving:  328 calories, 6 fat, 34 carbs, 2.5 fiber and 29 protein.

I can’t tell you how much I love this soup – note – you do not eat the lemon grass stalks, it’s just for the citrus flavor.   This one is going to be on the regular rotation – it may take over my lasagna soup obsession!

So I got home and Tony was outside smoking a cigar and poured a glass of wine for me – it’s so nice to sit outside!!  Dinner was easy, so we sat outside for probably 30 minutes.   I had Cobb Salad on the menu.  I used to suck at making hard boiled eggs, but here is the secret to the perfect hard boiled egg.  I used one chicken breast from our rotisserie chicken – this breast was 6 ounces, so we each got three ounces of meat.

I used blue cheese dressing after this picture was taken – I also had shredded blue cheese on mine too – I puffy heart blue cheese!  This took forever to eat and it was delicious.  Now that we are starting to get better weather I think we’ll be having salads for dinner more often.

I love my Fit Bit!  For those of you that have them, I have no idea how to add you as a friend – any clue?!  I love when I am close to getting my 10,000 steps, it sends me a text message that I am almost there, or once I hit it, I get this:

Nailed it!

Stats for the Day:

• 1559 calories, 115 carbs, 110 protein, 72 fat, 21 fiber
• 41% of calories from fat, 28 from protein and 29 from carbs
• 35 minute workout at lunch
• 4.45 in steps!
• average blood sugar 141

Time to jump in the shower and get on with the day – I hope you can find some spare money for Connor!