And you will find no moss on me! I’ve been busy keeping the garden going, visiting the tulips and trying to come up with some new designs for both the care/launder instruction gift cards and the towels! And on top of all that, I have been trying to get back to my fighting weight – whatever that number is. I can tell you what number it’s not.
In an effort to get back to getting back into shape and get healthy again, I started going back to the nutritionist. After we went through what I ate the day before she told me that I needed more protein in my diet. Fun fact, she told me when you get a craving for sweets, it can be because you haven’t had enough protein! Here’s one of the many reasons why I love my nutritionist, she doesn’t give me a strict diet to follow. Her philosophy is to make eating healthy something that is sustainable. She wants me to be able to have a healthy balance of foods and not to deprive myself of things. When you start to deprive yourself, if you slip, and say, eat a piece of really rich and yummy chocolate cake, then you beat yourself up, you get depressed because you feel like you have no willpower, and why bother if you don’t have any willpower, and we all know where this is heading… Another reason I love my nutritionist is that she tells me to eat butter and to drink full fat milk. She told me that farmers use low fat foods to fatten up pigs for slaughter! I gave her my “say what?” face and she explained that they reason they give them low fat foods is because one of the things that makes you feel full is fat. So if you eat and drink a lot of low fat things, you will not feel like your full and will tend to eat more. Now I’m sure you’re saying, “your nutritionist is a quack.” No way, Jose! This is my nutritionist. As a favorite comedian of mine once said, “She kicks butt like a cross-eyed Rockette!” She’s a big proponent of eating natural foods and if you can’t really pronounce the ingredients, you probably shouldn’t be eating it. But she also realizes that sometimes, life happens. Sometimes you just need a couple of doritoes to get you through a meeting.
And with that, I will share with you a couple of my new found favorite recipes. I found this one at the Kitchn. It’s a quick and easy tomato sauce. The basic sauce 4 ingredients (and all things you can pronounce). You can find the recipe here. The great things about it are:
You don’t need a lot on your pasta or whatever you are putting it on.
It makes about a jar of sauce (I have a mason jar that I use to keep it in when I make it. I have not tried freezing it. I don’t think it would be a problem. But if you try it, let me know if it’s just as good when you thaw it and use it).
And you can customize it – add veggies, add sausage, add olives, lots of garlic… however you like your sauce!
Since I tend to be pretty busy, I use Sundays for making my meals for the week. This includes my breakfasts. I have just started to really enjoy the yumminess that is, steel cut oats. Again, from the Kitchn, I found this little nugget about cooking the oatmeal the night before and then putting it into mason jars as a single serving size breakfast! Genius! I followed this recipe for cooking the oats. On Monday morning, I ladle in some oats in a half pint mason jar and add some milk (full fat… none of that pig food low fat stuff!). I then bring in all jars of oatmeal (the recipe makes roughly 5 jars) along with a small container of brown sugar and some homemade jam. When I get to work, I put the oats in a bowl, microwave for about a minute, add my toppings – the brown sugar or the jam (if I’m feeling real saucy I add both) and have my breakfast.
Enough food talk, let’s take a little photo break! Here’s a couple of my favorite photos from the Tulip festival in Skagit County. We visited two different farms – Roozengaarde Farm and Tulip Town.

This was at Tulip Town. All those stripes of colors are tulips. Including the green in the front photo.

This was also at Tulip Town – side note… don’t wander to far down the rows of tulips. I got in a warning for it when I was walking back from taking this photo. It was totally worth it.
The rest of the photos are from Roozengaarde Farm.

Who says it has to be just tulips? This one of the millions of daffodils that were in bloom as well.

I love one. The color was amazing! I believe this is what is called a double tulip.

Some lovely white tulips.

These were some of my favorites because the colors in them reminded me of poppy colors.

I loved these. The colors we muted compared to a lot of the other tulips. But even though they were muted I couldn’t take my eyes off of them. I’ll be ordering some of these to plant this October!
I’ve got rolls more photos from the tulip festival. So if you want to see more, let me know and we can all oooohhh and aaaahhhh together.