BB Power

I HATE packing lunches. I have yet to meet a woman who enjoys packing lunches for her hubby and family everyday. My mom did it for all the years we were growing up and she's still doing it for my daddi-o, but I know in her heart she secretly hates packing lunches. But - it's not cost efficient or healthy to eat out for every single lunch for the both of us - been there, done that. So, what I've taken to doing this summer (and I really like this method) is on Sunday evening - either Clint or I grill 8 chicken breasts. Chicken is almost always on sale at Meijers either fresh or frozen, but fresh is soooo much tastier. Apparently Sam's Club has huge chicken breasts for sale at 1.99 a pound - always, so we're going to check that out. Anyway - grill up the breasts and then I set up a little assembly line of 9 square gladware containers and two bags of lettuce, 3 cucumbers and about 5 peppers (I love the colored peppers) and then I just assemble 9 salads and stick them in the fridge. When the chicken is done, I bag up 9 bags of breasts and stick them in the fridge in a bowl. Then I also bag up 9 bags of baby carrots as well and stick them in a different container. Grab and go - baby! And it's a tasty healthy lunch that I don't have to do every single night. Takes me only an hour on Sunday evenings for the whole week!

For the past two weeks I've also bagged up these brownies from a recipe that I found online - it's a Weight Watcher recipe that I stumbled on during my days of Web surfing. I was a bit incredulous at it, so I wanted to try it. All you do is get a chocolate brownie mix, dump it in your mixing bowl and then take a normal size can of black beans, drain the juice out of the can while keeping the beans in it. Then fill up the can of beans with water and then puree the heck out of it. So that the skins are all pureed and everything. I have a Magic Bullet (WHICH ROCKS) and it takes about 1 minute to do! Then dump that in with the brownie mix and blend up. Then bake according to the directions on the mix. It totally works! They are a bit of a different consistency and I like to melt about 1/2 a bag of chocolate chips on top for a "frosting", but they are pretty healthy (for being chocolate) and give a big boost of fiber! There's a little something off about them, but not that much and I really like them.

Well - I had been packing them for our lunches prior to this week and this week, I just have little snack bags of something sweet to go with our salads. Anyway, the salad, carrots and brownie have totally satisfied both Clint and I until dinner - I remember coming home from teaching and just wanting to SCARF while I was getting dinner - cuz I was so hungry. Not these days. This week both Clint and I have been SOOO hungry in the afternoon and just feeling like the salad wasn't enough. And we figured out that it was because we were missing the black bean brownie!! Isn't that incredible? Seriously - the brownies were only maybe 1-2 inch squares and they would hold us for 5 hours!!!!! Having just figured that out, I was totally amazed. Gotta get me some more of those made! I'll have to add it to the Sunday evening line up.

Another recipe that I tried from WW (I'm not on WW, but the bb brownies led to this one and I didn't believe this one either) is to make a cake out of a cake mix and a can of Diet Coke. Is that crazy or what??? So, I tried it. Dumped my chocolate cake into my mixing bowl, added a 12 oz can of DC and mixed it up. Baked it according to directions and out it came!! It really light and fluffy and I eat it with Cool whip, rather than frosting because in the beginning it was so light that it looked as if frosting would tear it up or be too thick tasting. The cool whip is really tasty on it. Is that amazing or what? Apparently the DC only really tastes good with chocolate cake mixes and for white or yellow cake mix they recommend fruity pop like 7up or Sprite or red pop, etc....

How crazy is all of that???? The power of carbonation and the black bean can totally eliminate the need for eggs and oil in a recipe. Who figured this stuff out anyway???