Blogging about Bobotie

Last night for dinner I made Bobotie, a South African dish. It's the first time I've cooked anything South African.

Bobotie consists of a curried meat layer topped with an egg based layer. It smells GREAT when it's baking!

I got the recipe from the BBC Good Food website, but I made some changes. I couldn't find any allspice berries and so I used powdered all spice instead. I didn't use any sultanas as Matt doesn't like them. Finally I used 1% milk instead of whole fat. I added some greek yogurt instead to try and thicken it up a little.

Matt really enjoyed it! I thought it was nice, but I would not make it again for myself. I will make it again in future though, because Matt said he'd definitely like to have it again.

This morning we woke up to about 5 inches of snow on the ground. So we decided that we'd head down to the Cuyahoga National Park for a snowy walk. We stocked up before hand on a breakfast roll. It contained Irish style bacon, black and white pudding.

To be honest, it looks better than it tasted. The puddings were very plain and not at all spiced.

The walk, however, was great! It was so nice to trounce around in the snow through the woods. We did a relatively short walk, we aren't used to walking much of a distance in snow and so the hills that we usually climb seemed a lot tougher!

Delicious Diet

Now that I've finally unpacked from the move, I have been able to start back up on my low carb diet. It's going great, but I have been craving sweet things (which I don't normally crave, I'm a salty/crunchy kind of girl).
I've really been enjoying my lunches. They consist of tofu noodles, baby bok choy, 2 different types of mushrooms (both from the asia market), soybeans and bean sprouts all in a broth. I then have some greek yogurt for desert (no fat, small amount of carbs and LOTS of protein; 22g per serving!)

I've also started back up on my Chinese. I have my own room upstairs with a little space heater, although I'm not sure I benefit from any of the heat!

My two study buddies seem to hog all the heat!

The big move

Thursday saw a day that I had been dreaming of for a long LONG time... the final departure from Omaha.

Matt and I had managed to load the rental truck with all our belongings on Wednesday. It took a lot of time and energy, but we managed with just the two of us :)

Thursday morning we said goodbye to our first home together. I'm not ashamed to admit that we both had some tears as the realization hit that we were leaving a place with a lot of memories (both good and bad). I can't speak for Matt, but I felt comforted knowing that we were leaving together to continue our journey together.

We managed to leave pretty much on time that morning. We had rented a car dolly so that we could tow my car to Cleveland. That meant that Matt would be doing all the driving. It was a 13 hour drive but he managed to knock it out safely in one day.

Our two travel companions. They were great!

Today we unloaded the truck. Boxes and furniture felt a lot heavier today, our muscles were still recovering from Wednesday's loading.

For those of you who don't already know, my new year resolution is to adhere to a low carb diet (PCOS) and an important part of that is that I am going to have NO alcohol for the year.......... sigh! My mother-in-law had kindly gotten us some boxes from the local grocery store. More specifically they were from the LIQUOR DEPARTMENT! So today, when I would normally have been looking forward to a nice glass of wine at the end of the tough unloading I had to carry wine box after wine box, all with wonderful quotes as to how great drinking wine is!!!! But I have stuck to my guns!!

The low carb eating however has been harder to stick to these past 2 days. On the road we were limited to fast food. Today we haven't been able to easily locate cooking utensils or space to cook in.

So after all the truck was unloaded we ordered pizza.

Tomorrow will be better and I should also be able to go for a good grocery shop.

I did manage to put together the living room so that Matt could play his new Zelda came tonight. He 100% deserves some time to relax after doing all the driving!!!