Archive for December 2nd, 2008

On Sunday evening a friend came over to teach me how to make turkey pot pie. I knew it wasn’t hard after her telling me the ingredients but didn’t realize just how truly simple it is!

Ingredients:

  • leftover turkey, chopped into pieces
  • 2 cans of cheddar cheese soup (I bought the campbell’s brand, but there is probably another available if you look around)
  • 1 can cream of mushroom soup
  • cup of milk
  • few stalks of celery
  • two small onions
  • leftover corn
  • leftover green beans
  • phyllo dough or puff pastry or pie crust
  • salt and pepper

Basically it is a montage of your Thanksgiving leftovers!

First we put the chopped up onion and celery in a pot so they could cook just a bit. Then we added the two cans of cheddar cheese and can of cream of mushroom soup. We also added the milk to thin it up, but it was still fairly thick. Let it warm up a bit then added the turkey and corn (there were no green beans leftover to add!).

We had a lot so poured it into two casserole dishes – one square (I think 8×8 or maybe 9×9) and one round (same size). The filling came about halfway up the sides which is why we used two dishes, we figured using just one would cause a mess in the oven!

We used ready made pie crust and topped the turkey mixture with the crust, poking holes in the top. Then bake at 350 degrees for around 30 minutes – really it is until the top has browned.

Simple! It was so good. What we had made enough for eight adults and three or four kids – which is just us and our friends and seconds and lunch the next day. It was just enough that we loved it and didn’t get tired of it since we had been eating leftovers all weekend anyway. This is a great way to use up everything before it goes bad too. We had a 22 pound turkey on Thanksgiving and still had a lot on Sunday when this was made.

Sorry there are no pictures, but I will make this again (if not at Christmas then with a chicken one of these days) and even if there were pictures, it would be the empty dishes, hahaha. Enjoy!

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Catch up to where we are today: I’ve gained weight back. Not all the 20 pounds I lost this spring, but easily 10. I try to not obsessively weigh myself and that 10 can sometimes be five and sometimes be eleven! But ten is what I’ll say because more often then not, it is anywhere from 8-10. Anyway, we have a small gym (really a workout area) at our community’s main office and I started working out a few times a week in October. That few times a week slowly became once a week and then the last two weeks, not at all.

That has changed as of today! Over the weekend a friend told me about the Body for Life program. I don’t think I’d heard of it before she mentioned it but it sounded good. After thinking we’d have to buy the book to follow the program, she found the website and from there we got a week one menu plan as well as a shopping list!

Basically you follow this eating plan and also work out for six days of the week. On the seventh day you get a cheater day – you don’t have to exercise and you can eat whatever you want. By browsing the website we found several of the champion food plans and lots of success stories. (

Today I had a breakfast burrito – whole wheat tortilla, eggs, cheese and low fat (or maybe it’s fat free?) sour cream. You are also directed to drink a glass of water with every meal, which I do anyway so no biggie there! For a snack I had a bar – the brand they recommend, and they are bland tasting – good thing I only bought one! For lunch I am planning on having a turkey sandwich (turkey, lettuce, tomato, cheese) and an apple.

I am very excited to do this plan! I think what makes me excited is having a partner – my friend lives right around the corner from me and it’s easy for us to work out together. We also have lunch or dinner together sometimes so the eating plan will be easy to follow too. Really, it’s an easy eating plan and hopefully the workout will be easy too since I have a partner.

How are you doing with weight loss, staying in shape or getting in shape? Maybe it’s time to start a new plan!

I’m not worried about starting now, around the holidays, because you get a cheater day. The excitement of losing weight will help not eating all the holiday cookies and fudge I wanted to make. I suppose now I’ll just bake on the one day a week.

First baby goal: fit size smaller comfortably. I can fit it now, but it’s not so comfortable!

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