Take Out...well, delivery

Who gets take-out anymore? It's too labor intensive, especially for something that should be easy. I call, I order and they ring the bell.

Before our move in mid-January we were very happy with our weekly sushi delivery order - Saga was good to us even if it took the an hour to deliver the goods. We moved on a Friday which is martini and sushi night for us. Our first night in the new place, the sushi came with a great salad, but the sushi wasn't what we expected. We gave them another chance or 2 before moving on. Next we tried another nearby restaurant called Fusha. Their sushi for 2 came with a Valentine's roll which was strawberry over rice. I don't know about anyone else, but sushi means fish to me. I even tend to question the California roll as sushi. I know it is crab, but it's cooked. I love eel so I guess I should just let California roll go, but strawberry is a no-go. I couldn't let the strawberry go - that was just wrong. We tried one other place and had lack luster results. This week we tried a new place and ding, ding, ding we have a winner! Thank you sushi hana for a nice dinner last night.

Brown Rice with Avocado and Cherry Tomatoes

Ever make, from scratch, the same dish for dinner 3 times in the same week? Well I did, plus I ate leftovers of it for lunch one day. This avocado and cherry tomato dish is quite tasty and I would make it for for dinner without being on the cleanse. After a couple of nights of steaming random veggies and throwing them into cooked brown rice we decided to try a recipe from the cleanse diet's site. We were very pleasantly surprised with how tasty it was and we cooked it again for dinner the next night and again a few nights later. Either this cleanse has so deprived our taste buds that brown rice, avocado, tomato, lemon juice and garlic now constitute high cuisine or we like to eat blandly more than we ever thought, which is probably not the case.

Here's the recipe:
2 cups short-grain brown rice, cooked
1 avocado - dices
15 cherry tomatoes - halved or not
2 garlic cloves - minced
juice from half of one lemon

Toss the last 4 ingredients in the cooked rice and serve - bon appetit!

The Brown Rice Cleanse Diet

Well, the grilled cheese and martini diet definitely has a down side and my waist line has been bearing the brunt of it lately. A week or so ago J and I decided that something had to change. We were both tired of shoehorning ourselves into our clothing and feeling uncomfortable and gross. We decided to kickstart our latest attempt to lose weight with a cleanse diet. I did some quick googling and found the 7-day brown rice cleanse diet on www.justcleansing.com. The diet is bland and boring - no caffeine, no booze, no protein other than brown rice and fat came in the form of avocado. I won't lie, there were days - especially days 3 and 4 - when I really thought about caving, but I didn't. I have 1 more weigh-in to go, but so far I lost 5.5 lbs and over the past week I have consumed more fruit than I have in the past 6 months. Hopefully I will stick to my new eating plan - brown rice, fruits and veggies from Monday through Friday at 5pm, martini and sushi on Friday night, some wine and good food over the weekend and then back to the grindstone Monday morning and avoid my old bad habits - half sandwiches in the middle of the day, eating off of Rex's plate, and an extra glass of wine during the week (as if those are my only bad habits).

Cheers!