Tag: Tuesday Tips

Food review: Trader Joe’s Chunk Light Skipjack Tuna in Water with Sea Salt

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I occasionally look for a new can of tuna and I wanted to share my thoughts on Trader Joe’s Chunk Light Skipjack Tuna in Water with Sea Salt. Sometimes I want a lean protein in my diet and fish fits the bill. I like my canned tuna to look tender and juicy without being held together by weird fish jelly. It should taste good too. Also, I prefer to eat smaller fish because they have less of a chance to bio-accumulate bad things like mercury. Trader Joe’s canned tuna looks fresh and pinkish (not dead grey), tastes moist and delicious (some other tunas taste dry despite being immersed in water) and has just the right amount of salt. Also, skipjack tuna grow up to 1 meter in length, so they are not the super huge tuna we see on television. The can’s label says the fish are “pole and line caught” and there is an emblem saying “Dolphin Safe”. It’s really one of the best cans of tuna that I’ve had. Give it a try! One 4 ounce can goes for $1.69, so that’s $0.42 per ounce for those that care about the unit cost. That’s a great price for a great can of tuna. Also, the whole can has 110 calories, which is 25g protein, 0g carbs and 0.5g fat. Lean indeed!

Foiled again with kitchen cleanup? Not with this life hack!

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They say that fat loss begins in the kitchen. If you are one of the chosen few to have learned this – whether taught or learned by accident – then the kitchen food scale is one of your most trusted weapons in your arsenal for taking the offensive against excess body fat. Still, every time you measure out your 4 ounces of baked chicken breast or 6 ounces of sweet potato, that scale should be wiped down. Or does it? Now, I’m not at all suggesting that you add half an ounce of salmonella to your meal along with an ER visit. What I mean is, if you lay down a piece of foil on the scale, then the weight of the food that you are measuring remains practically the same and all you have to do for cleanup is toss out the foil. Every day I pull about 4 inches from the roll and tear that off, so it’s a 12″x4″ sheet. Then I tear that up by hand into several 4″ strips. The first time you will end up with a piece of foil shaped like Italy, but after you do it a couple of times, you’ll be a master of foil tearing. Seriously, having these little foil strips in the cupboard saves me a lot of annoying clean up time during the day and makes using the food scale far less cumbersome. I hope you find it useful too!

Want to make your ground beef less fatty? It’s super easy!

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Ground beef and other meats often have a high fat content. Perhaps they have more fat than what you need. Browning and draining the meat gets a lot of fat and water out. If we are talking about 80/20 ground beef then 4 ounces of raw meat becomes 3 ounces cooked and loses 68 calories from 7.6 grams fat just from regular draining. To get even more out is really easy! Put a paper towel on your plate, place the meat on it and use your spatula to move the meat around a bit to let the paper towel do its job of absorbing. When you toss that paper towel away, you’ll feel how heavy it is with that extra liquid. It should save you about an extra 40 fat calories from 4.5 grams fat!

The rice cake: made better with chocolate?

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What fitness endeavor hasn’t eventually come across the rice cake? It is simple, low calorie, crunchy and tasty. Its most subtle and perhaps most important point of appeal for the fitness minded is that there is a lot of it to munch on for so few calories. In other words it is high on the, “best bang for your buck,” scale of snack satisfaction. Enter Quaker’s Chocolate Rice Cakes. Like many products, they look chocolatey and boast chocolate pieces in them (each cake is 60 calories, with 1g protein, 1g fat and 12g carbs). Quaker does it differently and their execution is spot on. The chocolate flavor is just right for the rice cake, but the real finesse is from the chocolate pieces. They are not merely the random flat broken pieces or chunks that you see in many other snacks. They are small peppercorn-sized pebbles that have just the right toothy bite and burst of sweetness. They are sometimes alone and sometimes clustered, giving variety to each encounter. Their distribution and amount on the cake is good too – never just on one side or otherwise absent. Our family is constantly fighting over them and we can’t seem to keep enough in the pantry. Well done Quaker!

Yummmm

A dose of good cheer!

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I’ve killed a lot of plants in my day. Not on purpose. I just never seemed to have a green thumb. I think I tend to over water them. After moving into a new home not too long ago. I bought a fake fiddle leaf fig tree. I’m not a big lover of fake plants/trees/flowers but I had just moved, was low on cash and didn’t trust myself to keep it alive. I found a nice fake tree at HomeGoods and It was really cute but I knew one day I wanted to replace it with a real live tree. After a while I started going to a few shops to price fiddle leaf fig trees and oh my gosh…. have you priced them lately?? For a five foot tree they were about $200! At that price if I killed it I would be pretty upset that I wasted so much money for being careless. Cut to one day while I was at work and my coworker mentioned that she found some cute stuff on Facebook Marketplace. I have been on Facebook for many years but literally never checked out Facebook Marketplace. Have you looked???? You need to! It’s awesome. It is similar to craigslist but there is something about it that seems less murdery haha. Anyway,  I went on there and happened to stumble on the garden section and wouldn’t you know it…. someone listed a real 5’ fiddle leaf fig tree for $60!! Not cheap but not three times the price that you would find in a store! I wrote the girl selling it and we arranged a pick up time and then I adopted my new tree! It proudly sits in my dining room and I bought a cute wicker basket for it to sit in from HomeGoods… I read directions on how to take care of it and so far it has been thriving! It makes me so happy! On a side note…I have been hearing a lot in the news about how plants can boost your mood, calm your stress levels and blood pressure and increase your creativity among other things. I was going to say I haven’t noticed a change in myself but I did just start this blog with my husband so maybe it is boosting our creativity!! Time will tell! In the mean time I gotta go and see what else I can find on the marketplace! Maybe our teens could use some plants in their rooms! Check it out and then tell me your favorite Facebook Marketplace purchase!

Vitamin B-12 Deficient?

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Some people get a vitamin B-12 deficiency. B-12 is an essential vitamin (that is, our bodies cannot produce it) that supports nerve cells, red blood cell formation and DNA synthesis. For me, it manifested as a “brain fog” which felt like everything was run through a black and white television grain filter. I confirmed it with a doctor, and doctors offer B-12 injections. I opted for oral B-12 drops (purchased online). The “brain fog” lifted. I think the deficiency is from the low replenishment rate. We keep using our own stores but don’t get enough from the food that we eat. As we get older this cycle develops into a deficiency. I like using B-12 (in the Methylcobalamin form) that comes in a dropper bottle and I place a few drops with the dropper under the tongue. That basically tries to get some through the capillaries in your mouth and the rest from being ingested. Vitamin B-12 is a very large molecule and is easily destroyed, which is the reason that half a dropper is 50,000% the recommended daily value. You take a lot and statistically some will survive the digestive process. Basically, B-12 supplements are something that helped my brain fog, but please remember to talk to your doctor about your situation.