Greek Chicken Gyros with Homemade Za’atar Naan

I can’t really say I truly live in the “sticks” but it’s the sticks from where we moved from.  Oak Park is a bustling town, houses are close together and the last house I lived in was on a pretty busy street.  I can still see Tony’s expression when we were sitting in the living room and could hear the cars and motorcycles go by, or ambulances, and his reaction was “how the hell can you live with all that noise?”  Easy – it’s what you grew up with so you are used to it.

So when we moved an hour away fourteen years ago today (wow!) it was so . . . QUIET!  We have no sidewalks, street lights and the sounds of the birds chirping in the morning took a while to get used to.  One thing I do love about where we live?  I can walk in the morning in my pajamas.

Another glorious walk before work.  I passed over a bridge over the channel of the river – that second picture on the left is of a giant carp.  Again 63 degrees and no humidity!

The other night when I was out and got pulled pork sliders, I actually only ate one of the three.  I pulled off meat from one of them and weighed it – 2 ounces of meat!  So I made open faced pork bbq egg white scrambled sammies.  Holy balls was this good – the slight sweetness from the bbq sauce, and then the peppery bite of the shredded radish. This whole plate of food was 430 calories, 13 fat, 39 carbs, 4 fiber and 36 protein – kept me full so long.  And all that delicious fresh summer fruit is totally insulin worthy!

I had a meeting after work so I switched up my workouts.  I ended up doing my strength at lunch.  All I can say was that when I got back to the office, I found it difficult to move my arms to type anything.  This took me 40 minutes to complete.  Only thing I wasn’t able to do?  The inverted row – it’s like laying down under a barbell and pulling yourself up – I could only pull myself up 5 times before having to admit I wasn’t strong enough to finish the sets . . . yet.

Does anyone know how many pounds the actual barbell is?  I only had 5 pound weights on the e-z bar curl, but holy balls that was hard.  I will tell you that I wanted to just half ass it and do half the reps, or cut one set short – but I stuck with it.

So I had more balls in my mouth for lunch yesterday.  My take on Half Baked Harvest’s Vietnamese meatball lettuce wraps.  I even made her delicious green cashew sauce only to drop the jar in the office kitchen as I was putting my lunch away.  And I forgot to the mango and peanuts over the top.  Since I knew it still needed some kind of “sauce” I ended up mixing a couple teaspoons of tzatziki sauce with sriracha – not as good as the other sauce, but it worked.

My store sells marinated Greek chicken kebobs for $1.99 a pound.  I love that they are already marinated and all I have to do is throw them on the grill.  Over the weekend I made naan dough – you can make it way ahead of time and I love that I could just pull off a portion of the dough from the fridge and cook just one up at a time.  I first learned of za’atar seasoning from Abbe at This Is How I Cook.  When Jessica and I went to the Spice House in Milwaukee (hi Jessica!) I bought a 1 oz. portion.  It was sumac, thyme, sesame seeds, hyssop (don’t know what that is!) and oregano.  I knew it would be perfect on the naan bread.

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I just realized that I did a couple plain ones and those happened to be on top – but I definitely loved the flavors of the za’atar.   The stats are pretty good too!

I just chopped up some carrots, cucumber and red cabbage and topped my gyros with some tzatziki.

So good!  The naan is so fluffy and chewy, and then you have the charred bits on the tender chicken.  Okay, I really want another one right now and it’s only 7:45 in the morning!

I got my steps in too!

Sadly I have to spend my morning at our office storage unit moving boxes.  I opted out of my morning walk this morning because I know it’s going to be very tiring.  My boss said to me “don’t lift anything too heavy.”  Um, not sure how that’s going to work since we are moving dozens and dozens of bankers boxes full of paper.  Not sure that manual labor was part of the job description of a legal secretary?  I am looking at it positively though – strength training and getting my steps in!

Make it a great day!