I've been trying this new thing lately, called making dinner at home.  It's a good idea!  I can't believe I used to hate going out to eat.  I seriously thought I would die.  That was a weird phase in my life.  Now I'm making up for it, I suppose.  But perhaps a bit too much.  Hence the making food at home.  Matt does some cooking too.  Here's what he made the other night.

Looks good, huh?  The sweet potatoes were awesome.  It's just chopped up potatoes (I think they're technically yams, actually) and onions with chili powder and olive oil baked for about an hour and 10 minutes.  So yummy.

Last night I was invited over to his parents' house for dinner and tonight we were lazy and had frozen pizza (because I had class and got home super late) but we didn't go out and the pizza was on sale for $4, so that's pretty good.  I spiffed it up with pico de gallo and spinach. 

Tomorrow I have caving class, which also goes late, so I'm trying to figure out how that will work.  My plan was wild rice stuffed pork chops and asparagus, so I'm hoping I can convince my chef to make it for me.  Tee hee!

I really want to make healthy dinners at home every night and work out on a regular basis.  I just have so much stuff going on all the time and it's hard.  Like tonight, after work, school and groceries, I was home for the night by about 8:30.  That's pretty typical.  Maybe I'm trying to do too much?

What I made for dinner.

This is a tough one because I have a lot of habits I wish I didn't have, but the one that comes to my mind first is this: I eat too much junk food.  In fact, here is what I am eating right now.

See?  Not photogenic.

But I'm going to try to do better.  Now that I am no longer going to the field, I have no excuse to buy tater tots from Sonic or gas station potato chips, or anything else of the like.  I really want to start my self made up diet again, which is basically not eating crap.  It's hard, though.  For motivation, my work has started up a biggest loser challenge.  We're on teams and whoever loses the most weight/inches in 13 weeks wins some sort of cool prize.  The collective weight of my 4-person group was somewhere around 630 lbs, I think.  My goal over the next 13 weeks is to help make this number lower, one potato chip/piece of candy corn/etc. at a time.  Maybe I should put the chips away now...

Meal planned for this evening:

Butternut squash soup (recipe courtesy Small Home Big Start)
Wild cod fillets
White jasmine rice
Broccoli

There are a lot of really good restaurants in Albuquerque.  I'd say there are more local dining options here than anywhere else I've lived.  It's nice, but lately I've been feeling like I'm eating out a lot, which can get expensive (and is not always the healthiest option either). 

So this weekend, I decided to make an effort to get to the grocery store and make up some tasty, inexpensive dinners at home.  One New Mexico staple is the green chile cheeseburger.  Yesterday, when I went to Sunflower Market, they were roasting chiles out in the parking lot.  They smelled really good.  So I picked some up, along with 93% lean ground beef, sliced yellow cheddar (both on sale), a red onion (75 cents), a few slices of bacon, and whole wheat hamburger buns.  

Last night, Matt and I cooked the burgers up on the grill.  We also grilled the bacon, which worked out really well.  And toasted the buns with a little butter, garlic and red chili powder.  In the end, we came up with this.

A green chile bacon cheeseburger that would rival any burger at a restaurant, and for about a third of the price.  We took a look at the grocery receipt and decided that we spent about $3 per burger.  At a restaurant, the same thing would cost around $9. 

And tonight, we're using the rest of the meat to make sloppy joes.  Yum!

Blue corn nachos with lamb steak sauteed in onions, rosemary and basil in garlic olive oil, topped with cheddar, fresh sliced jalapeno, and fire-roasted black bean salsa



Beef flank pinwheel with provolone and spinach

Despite the car crappiness, I did have a very nice holiday weekend.  Neither Matt nor I had ever been to Mount Taylor, so we weren't sure what to expect.  It's a volcano, so I was thinking steep-y steep with pine trees and stuff like that, which it did have.  But I wasn't expecting this at all.

This is the beautiful meadow where we had our campsite.  I loved it.  And there were quite a few more just like it.  We spent part of the last day scoping out other places we could camp next time.

Camping is not much without a campfire.  Even though I've been camping like a hundred times thanks to my job, and I know how to collect wood and build campfires just fine, I was not very much involved in these activities much beyond digging out the fire pit and putting rocks around it.  When camping with your significant other and his friends, it is important to remember that fire building is an important demonstration of male-ness that you probably should just avoid being involved in. 

So I took pictures.

This weekend I used the crock pot Matt's parents gave me for Christmas to cook my first ever pot roast.  The night before, Matt and I went to Albertson's to buy ingredients (and get enough stickers to pay half price for the wok that they were giving away).  Then we said goodnight and he went to work.

The next day, I began preparing my pot roast recipe, which I got from here, with some modifications.  My roast was 2lbs instead of three, I only used two potatoes and replaced the others with 2 tomatoes (because it's what I had), added two garlic cloves, and used low sodium chicken broth instead of beef bouillon and water (chicken because it's healthier than beef broth; I also used about 1/2 cup instead of 1/3, but it just depends on how soupy you want it).  Oh, and I added about 1/2 cup of green chile, because that's how we do it here in New Mexico.

In the end, it turned out pretty good.  I think I cooked it a little too long because I wanted to make sure it was done, so it was not as tender as I had hoped, but it was still pretty good.  Here's how it turned out.