My supply of Lean Cuisines and Healthy Choices are get pretty low! So I have been watching the sales flyers. Finally, the local grocery store had all the Lean Cuisines on sale fir $1.88. Not the best price I have seen, but pretty good. I grabbed a cart, and headed for the frozen food section. I went straight for the Dinnertime Selects. They are normally the most expensive, and at $1.88 each, that was a savings of $1.41. I grabbed all of the Dinnertime Select Lean Cuisines except the Chicken Portabellos which are absoluty disgusting! I managed to snag 24 different Lean Cuisines. I may try to get back in a day or two and see if I can snag some more. Lean Cuisine makes a very limited selection of the Dinnertime Selects. I like Healthy Choice because they make a whole bunch of healthy low fat meals in that size!
What the heck is my ideal weight? I weighed myself this morning, and weighed in at 165.2 lbs. WHAT? I haven’t been this light for a long time!!! I worked out hard yesterday. I did an hour aikido in the morning, then a 10 mile bike ride in the afternoon, and an 8 mile run last night. I didn’t feel like I ate particullarly healthy yesterday either. I ate a Steak & Egg bagel thing in the morning. I love these, but rarely eat them anymore (maybe one every 6 months). I ate a couple grilled chicken breast sandwiches (with a light coating on real mayo). I remember eating spaghetti last night. I noticed afterward the store-bought marinara sauce wasn’t fat free. I gotta hunt down the fat-free stuff. I had small piece of apple pie (bought it at a bake sale raising money for woman with cancer), and some fat free ice-cream. I am sure I ate other stuff yesterday. I had to have!
Anyway, I weighed 165.2 lbs this morning! I haven’t weighed this low since college. I am not sure what exactly I want my weight to be. I have been trying to lower my body fat percentage. I don’t want to be a bean pole skinny person! Maybe I will eat more today to get up closer to the 170s.
Of course we do have a week long camping trip coming up soon. I will probably be eating a lot of junk during that trip. So maybe it is good that my weight is down now? 
I made some escargot last night. I made four different versions. I wasn’t happy with any of them! Two of them were regular fat versions, and two were low fat versions. The first two used garlic butter. One was from an Emeril Laggase cookbook, and the other I found on the internet listed as a traditional. They were similar, but slightly different. The first low fat version used Molly McButter and chicken broth in place of the butter. The next version used buttery spray, and was run through a blender. I had intended to put it into a sprayer, but the parsley, garlic and shallot was still too chunky. So sprinkled the buttery spray version over the snails. I didn’t have snail plates, so I used small cups that I normally use for Au Jus, or for prep work.
The two regular recipes weren’t all that good. They weren’t bad, but I have had much better! The Molly McButter had too much butter taste, and was kind of salty. The buttery spray version was just plain bad!!! Yuck! I spit it out.
Well, back to the drawing board. I need to search for more escagot recipes I think I will find a regular recipe that I like first, then try to make a low fat version. But then I might play too. I have an idea of using a marinara sauce. I made some mussels with a maranara sauce a while back. They were good, but messy. I try to use the marainara from that, but with the snails. I think that might be good.
I like escargot. I rarely have it though. The last time I had it was in a little restaurant across town. It was just okay. But the time before that I had it ona Carnival cruise ship, and it was the best escargot I had ever eaten. It was so good, that I considered passing on the rest of dinner, and just ordering more escargot. I didn’t. I did talk my brother into trying it, and he thought it was great to.
I was at the local grocery store looking in the canned fish section and saw cans of snails. Wow! It hit me that I could make escargot at home. I didn’t buy any at that time. But I started looking through my library of cookbooks looking for escargot recipes. I didn’t find anything in the many low-fat cook books. I kept looking. I was surprised to find escargot recipes in only two of my many cookbooks! Cookbooks that I thought for sure would have escargot, didn’t!
I looked around online and found some recipes. It seems like almost every recipe I found had tons of butter. Like a stick or two of it! Well that’s not low fat. But I have been formulating ideas of using Molly McButter or spray butter. I have a small spray I can use.
Snails in a can don’t come with shells. You need to buy the shells separatly, but they can be reused. Of course the grocery store doesn’t sell the shells. But I found them online.
I also need escargot dishes. I know I have had escargot not in shells. I was looking around on ebay and I found some escargot dishes with 6 little holes to hold the snails. I think I might be able to use these to cook the escargot without the shells. So I bought a pair of them.
I bought a can of the snails last night at the grocery store. So when I get the dishes, I will play with some ideas I have. What I may do is cook half a batch using regular garlic butter (non-low-fat), and half a batch with my low fat ideas. Then I can compare them.
Often, making a multiple batch of a recipe is not much more work than making a single batch. There are certain things that are easier to make in big batches than others. Whenever I make my low fat chili, I make a huge batch of it, pour it into tupperware containers, and freeze them. It doesn’t take that much more work to do it. Then we will have a bunch of chili in the freezer ready to pull out and heat up when we don’t feel like cooking.
This last weekend, I made a 6x batch of low-fat meatloaf. I mixed the stuff in a big salad bowl, divided it among 6 loaf pans, and baked them. We ate one for dinner, and we froze the other 5. That was on Saturday.
On Sunday, I made three low-fat lasagnas! Now this took longer. It took a while to get the big pot of water to boil so I cook the noodles. And it took forever to get that much lean ground beef to brown! But I baked the lasagnas, and then we divided them, and froze them
Our FoodSaver allows us to vacuum pack our food in the freezer. This is really cool beause we can have the food in the freezer much longer without worrying about freezer-burn. It would suck to make batches, store them in the freezer, only to have to throw them away later!