Freebies
8:55 a.m. - 2007-01-27


I realized yesterday that in all the excitement this year so far, with my dad being in the hospital etc, I completely spaced out on my sister's birthday and assigned to it the date of my grandmother's birthday, the 27th. I had it in my mind to call her today, but I am a week late. However, Auntie M came down for a visit yesterday, and while I was talking to her, she says we are taking January out to lunch today, so that is good. January is supposed to drive over here, then we will treat her to lunch, possibly at the Italian place in the next town, where I can get a caprese salad and stay on the diet. I was pleased to see that I am down another few pounds this morning, making a total of about 12 lbs down or more, the real amount being a mystery because I forgot to weigh myself when I started, so have only a general idea of how much I have lost. As long as the general trend is downward, it is all good.

I am finding the South Beach Diet easy to stay on, since it is mostly healthy eating, and it also gives me a chance to try food experiments. I ordered the George Stella books from Amazon and am trying some of the recipes therein. In particular, I am interested in baking recipes that reduce the amount of wheat flour, just like some of the recipes in the pastry cuisine of Austria. I like using ground nuts in place of some of the flour, and that seems to be what some of the recipes in the Stella books do. So far I have tried cornbread made with whole wheat pastry flour, cornmeal, an ground pecans, and it was absolutely delicious (but that may be just the carb starvation talking, but really, it was quite lovely), and some muffins from the Stella book with coconut and almonds.

Today we have to go look in the storage compartment of Pastor B, who died last month in his 90's. His family is from Canada and New Zealand, so they cannot take the big pieces of furniture or afford to have them shipped home, so they want them to stay in our family, since my father-in-law was such a friend and help to Pastor B. EG said as how our two girls would be setting up their own apartments this year, that they should have the furniture, so we are off to look it over and arrange to move it to our storage unit. I rather like storage units, they are so clean and efficient. Anyhow, it should be interesting.