Reduced Fat Mayo with Olive Oil

I have a extreme love for Extra Virgin Olive Oil. It has a great flavor and it adds a lot to anything that it is cooked with, especially meat and salads. So, when Kraft came out with their Reduced Fat Mayo with Olive Oil I wanted to give it a try. While I was glad to see it was Reduced Fat and not Low Fat (because I don’t think that even EVOO could save low fat mayo), I wanted to look up some nutritional information first. Olive Oil is much better for you, but what did that really mean for mayo?

One serving is 1 tablespoon, which provides 45 calories, 4 grams of fat, 2 grams of total carbohydrates and 95 mg of sodium. Regular Kraft mayonnaise has 100 calories and 11 grams of total fat, 1.5 grams of which are saturated. So far, it is looking good. The real question came when I bought a bottle and tried it. I was expecting more of an olive oil taste, but all and all I really liked it. It tasted a lot better than real mayo tastes and provides that healthy alternative for those of us that don’t really like mustard on our sandwiches. I think it is definitely worth a try!

Disclaimer: The writer of this post only eats mayo in tuna fish sandwiches. However, it was still amazing and tasted GREAT!

Speaking of tuna, it is by far my favorite sandwich of all time. Although, I am very very picky about my tuna fish, it has to be JUST so. Everyone in my family is the same way and we all have our own variations of tuna fish sandwiches. For mine, I take one can of StarKist ChunkLight Tuna in Water. I prefer the taste of this brand over any other brand. I also prefer it in water, not oil. The consistency of tuna in oil is just gross. (PS. I apologize for the sideways nature of this photo. It is straight on my camera and in the original computer file. However, no matter how many times I re-upload it, it turns it sideways. I don’t know how to fix it).

Use a can opener to open the can. Make sure it opens all the way and no little pieces are left still attached to the can, but don’t take it out just yet! Use the lid to press all the water out of the tuna can. This will probably take several tries.

After you have gotten as much water out as you can, you can take the lid out and throw it away, but make sure not to cut yourself! Blood is NOT a very good secret ingredient. Then use a fork to empty the tuna into a tupperware dish or anything else that you can mix it in and then store the leftovers.

I use a fork to get it out of the container because once it has been smashed and drained, it kind of turns into one big piece of tuna. The fork separates it into little pieces that are perfect for a sandwich!

Now it is time to start adding the good stuff! First, add 2 tbsp of mayo. In this case, I used the new olive oil mayo, of course!

According to Sparkpeople, you have have 2 tbsp for every half a can of tuna in order to make a balanced meal, however, I don’t like mayo so I only use 2 tbsp for the whole can. I usually eat yogurt with my lunch anyway, so that makes up the extra dairy I am losing by not adding all 4 tbsp. It also helps me to justify adding this next part! 1 tbsp of Mt. Olive’s Sweet Relish.

It is my favorite brand of relish and I love the flavor it adds to the tuna and mayo. Then you just mix it all together and BAM! Deliciousness.

This will make two sandwiches so just store the left overs in the refrigerator. After about a week, it gets pretty gross, so make sure to eat it before then! I enjoy my sandwiches with about a handfull of Sun Chips, Greek Yogurt and about 6 baby carrots.

Alice in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass

I just finished reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. I was reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes as well, but once I finished Alice, I HAD to read the second installment, Through The Looking Glass. I love these stories. It is a great little play on logic with Alice finding herself having to rely on logic to navigate this foreign and crazy land called Wonderland that she doesn’t quite belong to. I think it plays on the era in which it was written and how she did not fit into the society of the time and was looking for a place to call her own. Alice herself, although she sometimes loses her composure, is stubborn, brave, mature and determined. She handles a lot of the situations she is thrust into with just elegance and grace, a great quality for a child and great role model for other children.

During her journey, Alice meets some of the most unique characters. I think those characters were actually my favorite part. They are all so deliciously crazy. Carroll found a way to give each of them their own unique voice, which I really enjoyed and was very impressed with.

Because I was such a huge fan of the movies, I thought I would know what to expect, but I found myself constantly flipping to the next page and the next wanting to know what would happen next. It really was a delightful story and if you have not read it, I would recommend it.

I am going to get back to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes now that I am finished with these two delightful stories and I will review on it next week! Oh, and before I go….NEW LIBRARY CARD!

My old one, which I have had since I was 8, was apparently deactivated. They wouldn’t let me keep it, which I am kind of sad about. (Again, I apologize for the sidewaysness. I am trying to figure out why it is doing that and how to fix it, I promise!)

My Reminder

Today’s health and beauty segment is brought to you by my weekend of carb overload, followed by sickness and a massive migraine headache.

 

It is lady time and during lady time I always want to eat everything in sight, the worse for me it is, the better. I spent from Thursday of last week, until Saturday night eating loaded baked potatoes, mashed potatoes (with a little bit of chicken) and gravy, rolls, Sonic and lots and lots of Chinese food. Oh, and we can’t forget the ice cream and the ice cream sandwiches. Not really a problem for most people, just a little bit of guilt and then they move on, but for me it was worse.

 

I have been eating so much healthier lately, that introducing this many carbs (which turn to sugar when they break down in your body), sugar and greasy fatness into my body was making me feel rather sluggish. For a girl who is insulin resistant, you can imagine the war it was playing with my pancreas as well. Normally, I drink about 10-12 cups of water a day, however, I had not really been doing that last week either, so when I got thirsty, instead of grabbing my normal bottle of water, I got a Lipton Green Tea with Citrus. Sounds kind of healthy, right? Wrong. It has 21 grams of sugar per serving! That is more than Dr. Pepper! I did not read this before I drank half of the bottle. With the other sugars and carbs in my system, that half a bottle of green tea was my undoing. I crashed, hard, and got very nauseous. I almost threw up behind one of the nurseries buildings here in town and I got very flushed. (Another side effect of me not drinking any water, my hair and skin are so dry! It is breaking like mad today!)

 

Since that moment, I have been back on my regularly scheduled eating habits, but I haven’t fully recovered. I am still nursing a huge migraine that I have not been able to kick for two and a half days now. When your body gets used to certain things, like eating healthy and consuming a lot of water and those things are suddenly taken away or replaced with crap your body reacts just as drastically. Before this weekend, I hadn’t noticed how much better I felt and how healthy my skin and hair was becoming. Now, all I want is to go back to feeling good again. How I ever functioned in my life feeling this way before is beyond me.

 

This was definitely a reminder for me on why I chose to change my lifestyle and why it is important to maintain that change!

More Gardening Fun with Flowers!

I have spent so much time in the last three years in front of my computer writing papers and studying that I haven’t made it outdoors very much. Now that school is over and I have more time to go out and enjoy the outdoors, I am really trying to find activities that allow me to do that. My new obsession is gardening. I know I showed you guys’ pictures of my vegetable garden, but this weekend I did a different kind of gardening. I planted flowers!

 

This morning we planted the flowers into our front flowerbeds with our regularly scheduled perennials. See, we keep all the bigger stuff the same; the same trees and bushes. Then, every year, we go out and find different annuals to put along the border and in the hanging flower baskets, just to spice it up. So, yesterday, my mom and I spent the day at various flower nurseries around town picking the perfect flowers to add to the front flowerbeds. We ended up with petunias, dahlias, moss roses, bleeding hearts, a columbine, snapdragons, a calibrachoa, darla whites, lobelias and dianthus’. (There were two others but I can’t find the tags and can’t think of their names).

 

 

 

 

 

I know, it is kind of hard to see some of the new flowers just yet. They are still so small!, but It is going to look great once all the rose bushes bloom and the flowers start to grow!

My work is not over just yet though, as I type this, my dad is cutting out some wooden timbers we are going to use to create a raised bed for the strawberries here in the back vegetable garden! Speaking of the vegetable garden, it is coming along nicely, despite two hard freezes between now and two weeks ago. Gotta love Oklahoma weather!

 

 

It is almost time to start planing tomatos, cucumbers, corn, green peppers and the herbs! Look at all the pretty little starts just waiting for their turn!