It’s funny living in the midwest when you feel that 30 degrees is so warm, but that first day in October or November when we dip into the 30s, we are like “it’s so fricken cold! Why do I live here?”  But have subzero temps, it was a joy to walk to the office in 30 degree weather.

I plan on posting my take on Emily’s cranberry orange oatmeal bites later this week because I tweaked her recipe a bit, but these are only 3 points and are tart and delicious.  I used no calorie Spenda as my sweetener and added a bit of flour to make them more muffiny – so good.  I paired that with a 1 point egg white and spinach omelette and fruit on the side for 4/23 points for the day.

I ran some errands with my sister at lunch.  She joined Weight Watchers again online so we went to the WW location we used to go to on Thursdays to get paper materials – while all the material is online, we are both old school paper people.  

Jacob has been having some tummy troubles and he read online that if you boil rice and drink the liquid from the rice and mix it with other stuff (tumeric maybe?!) it would help.  I asked what he was going to do with the rice that he cooked and he said “probably throw it out” so I took it and made this beef and veggie stir fry.

Only one tiny problem – the rice tasted like ass – it was gummy and awful and made this lunch not appetizing at all.  I picked out the meat and ate that, and ate a banana before getting busy at my desk again.

Here’s the tiny problem with taking insulin.  You have to take insulin to meet the food you plan to eat.  But if you don’t eat the food you planned the insulin for, the insulin keeps working and without having the food there to meet it, your blood sugar drops.  Luckily I had a few extra minutes before catching my train, so I hit up the French Market and picked up a small bag of grapes – that did the trick!  And no gummies were

consummed at all – #nsv

It may have been the low blood sugar, but these grapes were delicious.  I much prefer red grapes to green ones.

I had to replace my food processor which died about six months ago.  By died, I mean the bowl of the processor completely broke, the handle never met what ever mechanism is on the inside to make it lock.  It was a super heavy KitchenAid that Tony bought me probably 12 years ago?  I thought I could just buy a replacement bowl, but the cost of that was $40, or about half the cost of getting a new one.  I used some Christmas money to buy a new one over the weekend.

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I’ve missed my food processor because I like to grind my own chicken breats.  Turns out you can’t do that in a blender.  Not that I know that first hand, just telling you that from a friend. 😀

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Gina from Skinny Taste has a chicken marsala meatball recipe on her blog that I adapted to make this version.  It’s not too different, other than I threw all the meatball ingredients in the food processor, ditched the egg because I didn’t think I needed it, used cilantro instead of parsley, reduced the amount of Parmesan cheese, and I make a quick marsala sauce with corn starch vs. flour.  So basically the same – ha!

chicken marsala meatballs

I couldn’t help but think how much Tony would hve loved this dish.  He loved chicken marsala and it was a special treat for me to make it because I didn’t like mushrooms then.  

While this dish took about 40 minutes from beginning to end (that including unpackaging the food processor and washing it) this is a great meal plan dinner – you could have made the meatballs on a Sunday, cooking them 75% through, and made the egg noodles ahead of time, then you would only have to make the marsala sauce on a busy weeknight.

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Roman liked to patiently remind me that he likes meatballs and mushrooms too!  #socute

Did you check out my giveaway yesterday of my brothers AUTOGRAPHED new book?  You can leave a comment and I’ll be picking a winner on Friday – good luck!

Happy Tuesday – make it a great day!