6/16 Oatmeal

I used to be the type of person that put at least a tablespoon of sugar in her coffee every morning and would eat oatmeal out of the packet or cereal with a lot of sugar and not a lot of nutrients for breakfast IF I ate breakfast at all.

Lately I've been better about breakfast, definitely, and I make sure I eat something every morning. I've been eating either eggs, yogurt and fruit, banana or high-fiber cereal with my morning coffee without sugar. But I hadn't tried going back to oatmeal because I was afraid of the carbs. However I have a new-found obsession with oats and thought I would try to make my own oatmeal rather than buying it from the box/packets.

I know this all sounds completely basic but for me it's a milestone...I've never cooked 'clean' foods before and I know how to bake really well but I've never stepped out of that comfort zone. I know people do this all the time and it's so normal for them but for me it was a big deal haha.

Basically I just warmed almond milk with the oats in the microwave and added cinnamon to the mixture. Then I cut up a banana, ate half of it, and put the other half on top and drizzled some honey. It looked actually quite pretty but it doesn't show up as well in a photo.

This breakfast was soo filling and high-energy that I didn't even worry about the calories. It was only about 300 anyway. I'm glad I decided to try it and I'll probably make this again for breakfast soon. I like the fact that I was able to flavor it how I wanted and add what I wanted to it. I'll keep experimenting.

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Mango Froyo & Banana "Ice Cream"

I found this recipe online for mango frozen Greek yogurt so I bought a couple mangoes and decided to give it a try. I don't have a picture because it kind of just turned out to be the consistency of a smoothie, and I'm not sure why. I followed the instructions pretty well; they were simple enough anyway. I tried to add banana and then ice to see if it would get thicker but I think it just made it more smoothie-like.

As for the taste well it was amazing. It's such a simple recipe; you literally just blend frozen chopped mangoes (and I added frozen banana), a little almond milk or coconut milk, some honey, and Greek yogurt. I think I may have added too much almond milk, which may be the reason it turned out as it did but it was really hard to blend without it.

I may make this again just as a smoothie but I am pretty glad I tried it. It was a great post-workout snack. Each serving is only like, 140 calories too, which is pretty sweet. I ate a serving and a half though just because I kept trying it to see if I liked the consistency.

A couple days ago I tried something similar, blogilates' banana ice cream which I had been wanting to try for like, ages, and it was sooo good. I was pretty hungry at the time but basically it's just frozen banana, a bit of peanut butter, I added some honey and almond milk, and it was perfect. The consistency was good, the taste was amazing, and it made me feel like I was eating real ice cream. Such a good snack. I'm amazed. The size was a bit small but I think it was a good pre-workout snack or probably a good post-workout snack too.

Here's how it came out:
(the picture makes it look kinda gross but you can still see the creamy consistency)

Anyway I'm happy I tried these and can't wait to try more snacks.

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06/15 Dinner: First Try Baked Fish

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Healthy Banana Pancakes / Waffles

As I was looking for new recipes to try and I really wanted something that would replace my high-carb breakfast tendencies. I absolutely love bananas, and eat at least one banana a day, and have been trying to use oats and healthier flours in my foods so when I came across this recipe I knew I wanted to try it.

I take absolutely no credit for this recipe at all but I am pretty proud of myself for making it and it turned out pretty well so I will definitely be making it again.

The recipe calls for milk or buttermilk, which I replaced with almond milk one because it was the only milk in my fridge and two because I like the simple taste of unsweetened almond milk and it's pretty healthy. Everything else I had in my kitchen so that was the only thing about the ingredients that I changed.

The recipe is also one for waffles, but being that I don't have a waffle maker, I decided to use the batter for making pancakes instead. I read online that it's fine to do this.

So I mixed the oats, whole wheat flour, banana, eggs, applesauce, almond milk and a few other ingredients together and it came out looking like this:

It was a pretty thick mixture and there was a lot of it, so I was pretty content because I knew if I burned any or screwed anything up I had a lot of chances.

The first one came out almost perfectly, so I was getting excited and a bit greedy, but all of the ones after that started to look more burned. I lowered the heat and thought this would help but they still came out darker than I expected. I was also worried because the inside didn't seem cooked, but after looking back on the recipe it said that they would be moist, which makes sense because the banana chunks don't really "cook" like regular pancake mix.

I thought the oil might have been the problem, so I cleaned the pan and tried again and they were still kind of burning so I gave up. They still tasted great though, even though they were darker, so I don't think it is actually as big a problem as I thought it was. I just like things to look pretty.

I topped them off with some blueberries, and this recipe made me 8 pretty decent sized pancakes. I shared them with my roomie and saved the rest so it does a good 4 servings. I also put the recipe into the app "My Fitness Pal" which I use religiously, and it said each serving of 2 pancakes was about 300 calories. Now, I don't know how accurate this is but I'm assuming it's close!

I'd say that's a good breakfast. It kept me full and satisfied and it was sooo tasty! I am definitely doing this one again. It's nice to know it's whole wheat and I know everything that I put into the mix. I'm feeling pretty happy about this recipe!

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Dinners

One of the reasons that I decided to start looking for new recipes is because I honestly don't know much about cooking. I'm a pretty simple person and I don't like thinks to be too complicated for me. This summer is the first time I am living on my own in an apartment (I was in the dorms last semester) so I'm kind of a newbie at cooking every day for myself. At first all of my meals were like this:

Literally, chicken breast, salad, raspberries, milk, and maybe some pasta or mac&cheese. Every day.

The closest I really got to changing that was this:

More chicken, more pasta, but now with pasta sauce. I was so lost with making dinner. The thing is, I helped my mom alot in the kitchen in high school so I /should/ be able to know how to cook pretty well, but honestly I was a little too lazy to buy all the ingredients required for most of her recipes.

So I moved on to a couple more interesting meals like this:

Perogies, which I love, stir-fried with chicken and broccoli. Still not very interesting.

I tried stir fried rice, but it's still the same basic concept. Yesterday I tried to spice it up a little by making this:

It's a whole wheat tortilla wrap with ground turkey, brown rice, homemade guacamole (pretty healthy, I used to make it alot with my mom) and some spinach. I added vanilla yogurt and fruit to give myself a sweet dessert.

So obviously, I need some help finding some more interesting dinners. I like eating simple like this, but it gets a little boring.

So I'm going to start small with recipes and interesting snacks and breakfast foods and then move on to lunches and dinners if I can. :)

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Introduction

Hello blogging world~

I'm Hanna, a 19 year old college sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin and this summer I decided that I would try to clean up my diet by eating healthier foods and more home-prepared meals rather than eating out of the box or eating out.

But I also want to keep my diet interesting and fun so I decided I would try 1-2 new recipes a week. To document them I thought what better way than to blog about them. I have a couple other blogs that I keep up with but I'm pretty inspired to keep this one up as well. Hopefully things will go well!

Something that I have had trouble with in the past is eating regularly; I would snack a lot but never have real "meals" which resulted in me eating a lot of calories but not a lot of nutrition. I had an addiction to carbs and it caused me to gain a lot of weight.

This summer I have been working out pretty regularly and also trying to eat clean, no more animal crackers (which are literally my favorite thing) and more fresh fruits and veggies and more protein!

I've been a fan of Blogilates for a long time and some of Cassey's Cheap Clean Eats recipes inspired me to try to find healthier ways to eat yummy foods. I've been using Pinterest and google to find some recipes I want to try and today I started with healthy whole wheat oatmeal banana pancakes. I'll try to make a post for every recipe that I try.

I'm not a very good cook so I'm looking for simple recipes that I can keep up with and will inspire me to keep going. I love baking and always have so I started with something more on the baking side but I'm going to try to move up to some dinner meals later on.

There's not much else to this blog! I might update a couple posts about my workouts and how that's going to keep me motivated but I'm going to try to keep this mostly about my clean eating experience. I admit I'm not the best about being consistent BUT I am working on it.

So here's to this little journey of mine!

Hanna

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