When the cat's away...

the mice do play! 

My husband was out of town rock climbing for the past week... he ended up in Red Rocks near Las Vegas... and while he would just as soon never go to Vegas again, he did have what sounded like a pretty good time rock climbing..

I love this picture... even though he's just planning for a climb and not actually climbing anything!

Soooooo..... I had all these great vegetables around... and while I would normally make them for side dishes or lunches for myself, I decided that I would make some main dishes for dinner out of them.  While my husband is a lot of wonderful things, he tends to like having meat around in some form.  I do cook meatless about once a week, but, I'm not sure he could have done the week that we did.

I made...Sweet Potato Enchiladas... totally YUM.  Even if you don't like sweet potatoes, you would like this.  The seasonings in the sweet potatoes make it seem like a nice creamy filling... if you didn't know better, you would never guess!

Photo credit goes to "Happy Healthy Mama"

Then we also had Stuffed Poblano Peppers.... which turned out to be another winner.  If I were to change anything, I would make sure I used the right kind of cheese... I had briefly looked for the cheese this recipe called for, Target didn't have it, so I ended up using the 3 cheese Mexican blend that Target did have, but I think it would have been even better with the right cheese.

Photo courtesy of Chow.com

And for my last all veggie dinner, I made stuffed zucchini.  I am still looking for the link to this recipe (the problem with having more than one computer!), and will post it as soon as I do, but the basic gist is that you saute the zucchini middles, mushrooms, and cheese together and pile them back into the zucchini shells and broil until browned.  Another winner.  I will be very sad if my recipe is lost in cyberspace somewhere! 

I'm sure by now, my son especially, was really hoping dad would come home soon, but I was having too much fun to quit.  And the people at work would watch me get out my lunches everyday and wonder where I found out about such things.  (Not a secret, I have internet access and know how to use a search engine!)  I felt like a weird sideshow.  Maybe they were just jealous because they had their bland boxes of Lean Cuisine waiting for them?  I know I would have been!

Making all of these recipes made me want to eat better each time I made something.  I was very conscious about what I was putting in my body and felt it was showing in my running.  I felt physically much better by the end of the week... and my running was showing.  Each morning I was feeling like I could push a little more. 

Yes, I am back to cooking things with meat.  Not a bad thing.  I didn't miss meat, but I felt like I found out about a whole food niche out there that needed to be discovered by me.  I know I'll be trying to work it a little more into our normal food rotations.  I'm just not thinking that hubby will be thrilled to sit down to enchiladas when he finds them filled with sweet potatoes!