Our Weekend

Hi guys, I'm happy to see that most of our friends on the East coast got through Hurricane Irene with not much damage and just a short power outage. Glad everyone is safe.

We had a great weekend (despite the horrible heat of over 110 degrees!!) and I actually took my camera out with me (so I'd have something to blog about this morning) ;-)  First off, let me share something I made on Friday  - for the past couple of weeks I've been watching my carb intake. I've actually been trying to stick to the Atkins diet and limit my carbs to just 20 per day. I was doing ok, but then last week we had book club night and of course I just couldn't not taste all the wonderful food we brought. I had a couple of days eating whatever I wanted and suffered the consequences with a 2 1/2lb gain on the scales by last Monday morning! SO, I jumped right back on low carb again the next day, and I started browsing Pinterest for some recipes - I also made a 'low carb' board :-)  One of the recipes I found was this one,

It looked like a loaded baked potato chowder, but it said low carb so I knew it couldn't be potatoes. It is actually a Creamy Cauliflower soup with Bacon, Cheddar and Chives. If you click the picture above it will take you to the recipe.  So I tried it, and here's mine . . .

It was super thick and super creamy, really rather decadent tasting and I could only have a small cup full. But I really liked it. Jason tried it the next day and even he said it was good (considering it was cauliflower!). I like the 'pretend mashed potatoes' that you make with cauliflower so I knew I'd like this. Even Kristen said it was nice, although she didn't ask for a bowl, just had a spoonful of mine!

On Sunday we went out for brunch. A rare occasion for us, usually I make brunch at home on the weekends with eggs and bacon and homemade waffles. It was rather nice having it all made for me this weekend. We went to IHOP, Kiki's favorite for breakfast cos she loves the smiley face pancakes!

I was being really good and stuck to my low carb, and had the sampler platter . . . 

I asked for some toast instead of the pancakes and allowed myself one slice of wholewheat (to dip in my yummy eggs) :-)  Jason, (who said he's going to start low carb today with me!!!!!) had what I'd call a 'last supper'! Huge glass of orange juice AND his favorite Chicken Fried Steak, along with gravy, eggs, hash browns, and pancakes! What can I say?!!

After we ate, we took a drive through the old neighborhood we used to live in. It's a gated community with beautiful hill country views. (for those of you who don't know, we moved from there about 5 years ago because we thought we were going to move to Denver with Jason's job. We rented for 6mths after we sold our house, then decided we didn't want to leave TX, so we bought the house we are in now, in what I call a 'normal' neighborhood where Kristen can ride her bike and play outside with friends).

Our old 'hood' has had a new section added to it which we really had never seen. There are some gorgeous homes in it, all well over half a million $ - and yes I did manage to snap a picture.

Yesterday I also made a recipe from PW's cookbook. I'm going to share that with you all tomorrow. Did any of you see her new show on Saturday? What did you think? And what did you do this weekend?