Eating Out and Homemade Yam Fries

It seems that this weekend’s challenge was discovering if we can eat out and stick to our way of eating.  Friday night we had a late dinner and tried out Montana’s.  Easy Peasy!  I had a delicious meal of a quarter chicken, and double the veggies.  I also had their sweet potato fries which I probably shouldn’t have eaten.  Yes i’m allowed sweet potatoes, but these were deep fried.  SO DELICIOUS!  It may have been bad, but I enjoyed it. 

Saturday we ate out again, at the mall food court.  Apparently Thai Express uses rice noodles.  I think I should have done more research myself, but I split a Pad Sew meal with my mom, and it’s seriously one of my favorite things to get when at a food court.  Yummy chicken, broccoli and delicious noodles. I love pasta.

Sunday we tried eating out one more time.  We thought asian food would be pretty good.  Despite the MSG we ate at a delicious chinese food place.  We had dry breaded veal (which was SO yummy, though the breading was probably a no-no), ginger beef, and some dish with chicken, mixed veggies and noodles.  I avoided the noodles, but ate some rice with my meal. 

So, though we ate some "bad" food, I think we did pretty good.  We chose things that were better for us than other things, and I think with practice eating out won’t be quite so difficult.

Though at the price of the food we’ve been buying and consuming, eating in as much as possible is probably wise.  FOOD IS EXPENSIVE!  I’m trying not to care, to tell myself that my health is worth it.  But over the past two weeks I’ve spent well over $150 on groceries alone.  I’m just not used to it. 

I made homemade yam fries yesterday.  (There is a difference between Yams and Sweet Potatos but it’s so minimal I can’t remember what the difference is.  Size maybe…)  I looked at a few different recipes and suggestions to get them extra crispy, one suggested coating them in a light layer of corn starch.  We’re not supposed to eat corn starch, but I thought I’d try a light layer of flour.  We’re not supposed to eat regular flour, so I thought I’d try some green pea flour.

They sure didn’t "lightly coat" very nicely.  I ended up with clumps of green pea flour on the sticks of yams.  But I decided to bake them anyway, and they turned out pretty good.  Kinda crispy, and they taste good if you can get past the green chunks on them. 

The next batch I decided to do differently.  I mixed a bit of oil with pepper, salt and paprika, and then dumped in the yam sticks and stirred it around until all the yams were coated.  They didn’t turn out quite as crispy, but they have a very nice flavor.

I think it will take more time to perfect this, but I’ll get there yet!