{Originally posted on Fit Bottomed Girls}

The Fit Bottomed Girls are all about enjoying all that life has to offer, and sometimes life offers dessert. And the FBGs love us some dessert—and not just the fat-free type. Unfortunately, over consumption of mouth-watering desserts can get in the way of maintaining a fit bottom, and most of them aren’t exactly easy to make anyway. Have you ever actually tried making a Martha Stewart dessert? I did it once in college, and after a whole day in the kitchen, while staring at a smug photo of Martha with her perfectly frosted lemon cake, I began to feel inadequate in all areas of my life. (If I can’t get this dang cake’s icing smooth, how will I ever find a job, let alone start a solid career?!)

The FBGs are here to help (and hopefully save you from any of the above-mentioned self esteem snafus). We have a recipe that is so easy even the baking-impaired can succeed. And I personally guarantee its deliciousness. The muffins may not win in a taste test with Martha’s desserts, but you can make them in less than 30 minutes and maintain your sanity.

For the Punk-in Muffins (”punk-in” has a double meaning here, acting both as slang for “pumpkin” and as a verb: punk-ing desserts Ashton-Kutcher style), you take a regular box of spice cake mix and mix it with only a 15-oz. can of pumpkin. If you can find a reduced-sugar spice cake mix you get bonus points.

Two important points to remember:

1. Only mix the cake mix and the can of pumpkin together. Do not—and I repeat do not—add eggs, water, oil, etc. The batter will be thick, but it’s right. Girl Scout’s honor.
2. Do not use a can of pumpkin-pie filling. Get the plain, pureed, boring regular can of pumpkin.

Mix the two ingredients together well, and spoon batter equally into 12 regular muffin tins lined with paper or sprayed with non-stick spray. Bake at 400 degrees for 20 minutes. Eat and enjoy guilt-free. Each big muffin has about 180 calories, 2 grams of fiber, 2 grams of protein and 4 grams of fat, and is filled multiple grams of pumpkiny spicy goodness.

And if you’re feeling extra adventurous, try the same base recipe with different flavors of cake mix. Lemon cake mix creates a fun, summery orange sherbet flavor, and any type of chocolate cake mix is delicious. You really can’t taste the pumpkin with the chocolate, and it’s super fudgy and moist. I made these last weekend during an intense chocolate craving. You can see the deliciousness!

{Originally published on What’s Cooking?}

This is Darrin’s (my bestest friend in the whole fat world) favorite breakfast. He fell in love with this simple, yet delicious breakfast since the very first time I made it for him. This breakfast consists of scrambled eggs with chorizo, avocado, queso fresco and corn tortillas (fresh hand made tortillas are the best).

Mexican chorizo is different than Spanish or Portuguese chorizo. There is a similar kind to those sausages called longaniza, but I haven’t seen it anywhere here in Ohio.

{Originally posted on Kelby Carr}

When I decided to work at home most days, a major MAJOR factor was having more time to make good food for my family. I wanted to use more fresh ingredients, and make more things from scratch. Oh, in my mind, I would be the uber foodie mom, baking and creating and freezing and canning and doing various fun food things. I should totally have a sustainable kitchen.

In my kitchen, I have gadgets for making yogurt, juice, pasta, even sausage. I have a bread maker missing just one piece. Besides that, I have the knowledge (or the ability to Google and find out) to make any number of things from scratch. I have plenty of land to grow my own stuff, and I live in Asheville, NC where it is super easy to find cool locally grown produce.

Yet, my gadgets and cookbooks are gathering dust. I still hit the Super-Walmart so I can super consume. I spend $200-plus at least once a week on groceries. And I do still, sometimes (although definitely less and less often as I am at home more), give my children processed, packaged crap. OK, I said it. I may be a foodie mom, but I am a real mom. I am buying things in extra packaging for extra money and being totally non-green when I could just make and store things at home. Criticize away, if you must.

I blame life and having lots of work and having three kids and all of that. But when my twins were babies, I was working full-time and making homemade baby food and pumping milk for them to have at daycare. It wasn’t easy, and I was pretty much psychotically exhausted. But it should be even easier now, much easier. So I clearly CAN do it.

So I’ve decided I will create this public Sustainable Kitchen Project as a way to motivate myself, to keep myself honest, to connect with other moms who want a more self-sustaining kitchen, and to track my progress. I’ve already started in a few ways, and I’ll post about these very soon. For example, we are starting an organic vegetable garden. Here is a lettuce seedling I’ve started:

{Originally posted at Missives From Suburbia}

The Ambassador is a notoriously picky eater. More so than the average two-year-old from what I gather by comparing notes with my mom friends. I’m sure it’s a stage. Well, I hope it’s a stage, and he hasn’t inherited my father’s abysmal taste in food (everything dry, please, and burn if it you have the time, thanks). I suppose we’ll find out in about 20 years or so.

But really, it’s bad. The Ambassador won’t even touch the usual kid foods. No chicken fingers, no hot dogs, no pizza, no spaghetti, and let’s not discuss condiments of any kind. We’ve resorted to things like boxed mac & cheese, Hamburger Helper — which I’d never even tasted before a couple months ago — and our current fallback, Taco Bell’s Beef Combo Burritos.*

Truth be told, Hubby does end up taking the kid out to lunch more than I do, but that’s because I’m too lazy to leave the house most days, not because Hubby is any less concerned about The Ambassador’s nutritional well-being. Anyway, knowing how often they dine out together, it didn’t surprise me the other day when we swung by the Taco Bell in midtown Minneapolis (aka, the Taco Bell voted most likely to be held up at gunpoint), and Hubby said, “Hey! That’s the pimp and the hooker I told you about last time we were here!” Uhhh… refresh me on that one, honey?

Originally Published on Dutch Blitz

I was a “big girl” growing up.

I was not comfortable in this body of mine. Yes, it was my body, but I felt as though it did not belong to me. I struggled with the fact that friends of mine could eat McDonald’s, and candy, and wear skinny acid-washed jeans. I would hang with them and curse my chubby thighs and flabby arms. I would shake my fist and silently scream, “It’s not FAIR!”

I resigned myself to the fact that I was destined to be BIG. My friends had flat stomachs and no inner thigh to speak of and it was so foreign to me. My thighs rubbed together as I walked and would get red from the friction.

There were a couple of stints where I got skinny. Because I did not eat. I remember when I was in grade eleven, I ran into an old friend from out of town. She praised me with those words I longed to hear. “You are so SKINNY!” And I told her (innocently) that I had not eaten in forty-eight hours.

That would be TWO DAYS.

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Originally published on Gild the Voodoolily.

Last weekend Scott and I went to the coast for the night. I had been having an uncharacteristic jones for the hubbub of Seaside and its bumper cars, corn dogs, caramel corn and salt water taffy, but we couldn’t find a room there and so settled for Astoria. A couple of hours of walking around Seaside and taking in the delicious smells of childhood was enough to sate me, and the crowds made me glad for our reservation in the sleepy history of Astoria.

Our hotel was adjacent to the marina, and if you wanted to spend ~$200/person and 12 hours on a cloudy sea you could partake of a charter fishing trip for tuna, salmon, halibut and/or dungeness crab. Even better, you could just walk down the pier and buy fresh albacore from a dude on his boat for only $1.50/lb. Having had some foresight, we had packed an empty cooler and bought an 18-lb schoolie from the guy.

“You want me to fillet it for you?”

“Nah, I think I can handle it,” I say smugly, having seen that one episode of Top Chef where the Quick Fire Challenge was to fillet fish.

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Originally published on Kalyn’s Kitchen

This time I’m writing about one of my very favorite summer vegetables, spagetti squash (also spelled spaghetti squash), so it’s luckily for me that WHB can be about any type of herb, vegetable, plant, or flower. I learned from Wikipedia that spagetti squash is also called vegetable spaghetti, vegetable marrow, noodle squash or squaghetti. Squash is something I’ll be eating a lot of over the next few months as my garden starts to produce it in copious amounts.

Squashes are divided into winter squash (which ripen late in the season, can be stored through the winter, have hard outer rinds, and must be eaten cooked) and summer squash (which can be eaten rind, seeds, and all, and which can be eaten raw.) I like every type of squash, but in my garden I mainly grow summer squash since the winter squashes produce huge vines and take a lot of space. Winter squash is something I’ll be buying from the Salt Lake Farmer’s Market later in the season.

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Originally published on craftykeg.

I love twice baked potatoes. If they weren’t food, I would marry twice baked potatoes. So, when my sister and I were talking about a side dish to make for a party at her house (during the weekend of our brother’s college graduation!), we were sad that twice baked potatoes would be too much work for 27 people. So, we decided to turn it into a casserole! It was a hit, and was all gone by the end of the night! The recipe is below.