Man Meals

So, this is Lonnie - Stephanie's other half.  My wife is an absolutely amazing cook.  We both really like cooking, which sort of sucks when you have a really small kitchen like we do.  This often ends up in us not cooking together, which is fine since we'd probably spend more time arguing than cooking.  Stephanie and I are complete opposites in the kitchen.  Stephanie follows the recipe and measures stuff.  I on the other hand, just make things up.  Whatever sounds good is what ends up in the meal I make.

So far, we're almost 8 days into this not eating out thing and it's good + bad.  I haven't really been craving anything in the take out world, and I'm sure the fast food that's voided from our diets is a plus in the healthy category.

With my running and weightlifting, I take in large amounts of protein - most days, around 1 to 1.5 grams per lb (so 200-300 grams per day).  This is easily achieved by consuming a lot of tuna or protein powder, but that can get pretty boring and there are only so many ways to tweak a can of tuna or whey protein.  Last night, I got the craving for some "Man Meals" as I like to call them.  Good timing as we have some frozen meats and some bacon in the fridge.  Oh, I found a couple all beef hot dogs in there too.  Might as well throw those in the mix.  Meat = protein!

I decided that I would use the bacon + hot dog for breakfast! It was with that, I created my Bacon weave wrapped hot dog.  I set it up, coated it in some salt/pepper and let it sit overnight.

You've got to have some carbs with breakfast too right?!  I decided that they should come from a pancake and figured what better way to serve it all than to wrap the bacon/hot dog combo with a pancake!  First, I fried up the bacon roll.  It took a good 30 minutes of turning & frying.  Now, it was time for the pancake.  It was a massive pancake (which I had to have Steph make since I'm terrible at it).  I rolled it up, put a touch of syrup on it and I ate half - good enough for me:

Continuing the day of my Man Meals adventure for lunch, I had some chicken bratwurst in the freezer to use up.  In the fridge I found some leftover mushrooms.  I defrosted the Brats just enough to be able to slice them, remove the casing and grill them.  I sliced off the mushroom stems and gave them a shot of olive oil, salt, red pepper and black pepper.  Popped them into a 425* oven for 20 minutes, stirred them, added some roasted garlic and put them back in the oven for 5 minutes.  With that, I had another high protein, low fat lunch:

With this, I am done cooking for the day, but Steph is as usual already in the process of making an awesome dinner.  Check back tonight for details on it.