What's on your Wednesday Menu, RNYers?

Helllloooooo everyone! Good morning. I got nothing today... It's been freezing and raining for what feels like forever! I don't generally think of myself as the type of person who is affected by Seasonal Affective Disorder, but I do think the lack of sun and no way to walk outside, is starting to get to me.

Accountability: Yay! I ate on plan and logged the missing time from my walk on the elliptical machine, instead.

QOTD: What are your last 10 used emojis on your phone? Mine say a lot about me, lol:

1. Heart
2. Smile
3. Balloon
4. Fire
5. Subway Train
6. Coffee Cup
7. Taco
8. Cheese
9. Cow
10. Kiss

Well hello Miss JB!

What are you doing up so early? Or rather so late for me? It's 1:30 am and I haven't gone to bed yet. I was trying to relax and thought I would catch up with OH posts before closing my eyes and saw your Wed post popping up. Sorry about your seasonal disorder. All you need is a little bit of CA sunshine, so you are officially invited to come and enjoy the sunshine and warm-ish weather.

PG&E decided the weather conditions have changed and there is no need to shut down our power, so a big hurrah for that.

I finished the third day of my liquid diet. It occurred to me that for my own surgery I didn't have to do more than two days of liquid diet, surgery was on Mon and I was told to do the liquid diet just for the weekend. Today (or rather yesterday by the time you guys read this) I caught myself a couple of times reaching out for epic chicken or parm cheese when I was hungry, instead had to redirect myself to yogurt. I'm not saying it's getting easier but it's not impossible, maybe because I'm doing it with/for somebody else. The silver lining is that since Halloween I had been kinda sneaking in a tiny piece of chocolate here and there and this liquid diet has put a stop to it.

My meals (3 days down 5 more to go):

• coffee, coffee, and more coffee with PP as creamer
• Fage yogurt
• SF jello
• Miso soup

Have a great hump day, everybody.

Oops, forgot the emojis:

kissing face

heart

Surprised face

Rolling eyes

Birthday cake

tongue out smiling

laughing with tears

yum emoji

balloon

argh face

I like how many expressive faces are in your emoji list. Mine seem to be mostly food, lol.

Good morning! Or is it Good night??

So glad you aren't losing power. I would draw the line on the liquid diet if there was no blender to use! How is your surgery buddy doing?

She is doing well, I'll be dragging her through the finish line if I have to.
Ooh, I hadn't thought of my blender in the power outage, shoot...now I'm really happy we are not losing power.

re: miso soup. I sometimes make instant miso soup when I'm having an "eating day". It's loaded with sodium and that plus the fluid really makes me bloat - ideal way to get me to stop eating!! It's magical!!

I have bought a block of Miso for a recipe and it has been sitting in the pantry for awhile. Can I just use it like bouillon cubes to make the broth?

I just buy the instant kind, but I've made it from scratch before.

It's been awhile, but as I recall, first you make dashi (fish broth) (although most people just buy dashi - you can get it at Asian food stores or maybe a regular grocery store if it's a really comprehensive one that has a lot of international food items). You can get the dashi in a powdered form where you add water, or you can buy liquid dashi concentrate in a bottle (and add water to dilute it). You heat up the dashi and then add some miso. You usually add something like diced tofu and some sort of vegetable(s) to it, too - like scallions, seaweed, spinach - anything you want, really - but those are common additives.

you can probably add the miso to something like chicken broth if you want - although it wouldn't taste quite the same as it would in dashi.

hey Teenie -

just so you know, that block of miso will last F-O-R-E-V-E-R in your fridge. I've had blocks of it for MONTHS in mine. So check for other recipes that call for it, too. It's a really wonderful additive to sauces for meats, etc. I think I even made a ginger-miso salad dressing once that was great. It tasted like that ginger dressing you get at Japanese restaurants. I'll see if I can find it.

update: Bah! I figured it would be on epicurious.com, since that's where i find most of my recipes - but nothing's jumping out at me. There are some miso dressing recipes as part of salad recipes on there (as opposed to standalone recipes for JUST the dressing), so it may have been one of those, but I can't remember. If I run into it though, I'll send it)