Low-Sodium Mini Meatloaves Recipe

My husband has recently had significant heart issues, and so he’s on a low-sodium diet. Since I’m the cook in the family, that means new recipes and new ways of preparing foods I know he likes.
Here’s one I made for dinner tonight: meatloaves and mashed red potatoes

Meatloaf

1 lb (or so) of 93% low-fat ground beef

1/4 sweet onion diced

1/4 bell pepper diced

1 egg

1/2 lemon’s juice

1/2 zucchini diced

oregano, garlic powder, black pepper, dried red pepper, Mrs. Dash (pick your favorite flavor)

ketchup (1 tblsp)

olive oil spray

muffin tin

Procedure

1. Dice vegetables
2. Mix in meat
3. Add egg,spices, ketchup, and lemon juice
4. Mix to combine
5. Spray muffin tin with oil
6. Distribute meat mix evenly among muffin cups
7. Bake at 350 for 20 minutes or until done
8. Flip meatloaves over and brown under broiler until golden

 

Mashed Potatoes

chopped red potatoes, skins on

1/4 sweet onion, finely chopped

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

plain greek yogurt

Mrs. Dash (fav flavor), paprika, dried red pepper, black pepper, garlic powder, pinch of salt (if desired), diced onion

Procedure

1. Put potatoes, onions, and garlic in a pan and bring to a boil. Lower heat to simmer and cook until potatoes are soft.
2. Pour most of the water off into a mug.
3. Mash potato mixture, using water from cooking to moisten.
4. In a bowl, mix yogurt and spices
5. Add yogurt mixture to potatoes and stir.
6. Serve with vegetable of choice

 

Pictures of Steps:

 

blushes

Quite to my delight and surprise, I was given blogging awards by two lovely ladies last month.  Now, compared to these funny, fantastic women, I’m a little turtle of an inconsistent blogger, so being picked is quite special.  Thank you.

As I hear that the beginning is a very good place to start, Ginger LaRue over at Ginger Doodles honored me with the Liebster Award.  She’s a firecracker, is our Ginger, with sweet caramel at her heart.  Right now, she’s blogging her way through December with beautiful music.  I’m proud to call her my friend.  How to describe Ginger?… Well, let’s put it this way, if this were the 1940’s, any pilot, including Lord Flashheart!, would be proud to name his plane after her.

She thinks I’m a Disney character come to life, bless her.  I may dance about the house barefoot and gather flowers from the garden, but Disney princess?  I mean,  teach the woodland creatures to waltz just that one time…

So, the  Liebster Award (German for Friend, doncha know) highlights up-and-coming blogs, those with less than 200 followers. I don’t know about the less than 200 of some on my list, but as that’s math, I’m just going to ignore it anyway.

The Rules:

Upon receiving the Liebster Award, you must do the following:
1.  Show your thanks to the blogger(s) who gave you the award by linking back to them.
2. Reveal your top 5 picks and let them know by leaving a comment on their blog.

3. Post the award on your blog.
4. Bask in the love from the most supportive people on the Internet – other writers.
5. And best of all – have fun!

My 5 Bloggers of Brilliance are:

1. http://www.adventuresofnotsupermom.com/  Because she kicks it up to levels unknown to blogger-kind! Seriously.

2. http://lifeofatallymom.com/ Because she is my sister and I love her.  Also she is a frugal-living genius and a great mom.

3. http://jefflaneaudiobooks.com/ Because he’s a fantastic up-and-coming writer who shares his novels as free weekly podcasts; I had the chance to interview him about his first novel for the podcast

4. http://scandalous-kate.blogspot.com/ Because she is Scandalous!  and she makes people snort beverages. On purpose.

5. http://www.talulahmankiller.com/ Because she’s brilliant, she’s back to writing, and her cats do not obey the laws of this universe

Also, a very special mention to http://thearkinspace.wordpress.com/ where the rather wonderful Doctor Thomas posts the Special Features to our podcast.  Check it out– it’s great fun!

Passing on the love.

 

Addendum: Yon Ginger above sent me a pretty awesome Christmas present!  Her delicious snickerdoodles and a mug from The Bloggess!

cookies and a sassy mug

 

Waiting

So, it’s now 2:12 pm on Monday, and my friend will be here to pick me up in about an hour , and she’ll drive me to the airport. I’ve done everything I can do short of putting on my shoes, and this is one of the hardest parts of waiting.  I’m comfy and at home and everything feels like usual, so it’s easy to feel lazy like it’s any other day.  But I’m bubbling over with excitement, and a bit worried about the actual travelling part, which is mostly because I’ve never travelled internationally before.  I’m finding ways to kill a bit of time (this being one of them), but the clock is ticking slower than it does during the afternoon of the last day of school.  It’ll be all hurry up and wait all afternoon, I know that.  Just wanna get started on my adventure!

Adventures await

Hi.

I know, it’s been a long while.  How’s everyone?

Me, well, I’m two weeks into my summer vacation, and I admit to enjoying a few extremely lazy days lately. 

However, here’s the big news, are you ready?  In four days I get on a plane to visit England for two and a half weeks!!!  I’ve been planning the trip for the better part of a year now, and have been actively counting down the days since February.  Now it’s finally here, and I’m nearly ready to crawl out of my skin with excitement!  I’ve never been out of the US before. I’ve always wanted to visit England, as do most of my friends, given the number of them who’ve begged to stow-away in my suitcase the past few weeks.  There’s the Flashing Blade podcast picnic on the 2nd of July, where I’ll get to actually meet many of the people with whom I’ve only tweeted or Skyped or Facebooked or such [my inner grammar nerd is really rebelling at turning all of those words into verbs, but as I’m on vacation, I shall tell her to shush].  Incredibly looking forward to seeing friends in person!

And, most importantly of all, I’ll have over two weeks together with my fella. You know, on the same continent, which will make a nice change.  Yes, *blush* as pretty much everyone knows by now, my co-host Dave and I are a couple.  Have been for quite awhile now.  I can see the knowing grins of our PDAIS listeners from here.  Yeah, you were right, guys 😉  Though we’ve tried to be a bit discreet, as long-distance is hard enough without everyone watching, I suspect this will come as a surprise to no one at the picnic… or on the twitters. 

We’ve got such adventures planned!  In addition to the picnic, there’ll be Shakespearean theater [Tennant and Tate in “Much Ado About Nothing”!], touristy wanderings, the Doctor Who Experience, and all kinds of wonderfulness.  Hence the update here on the blog.  I’m going to try to write down some of my England adventures– partially so I don’t forget how marvelous they all were amid the whirlwind of what I know will be a blazing fast two weeks, and partially to let my friends enjoy vicariously, the second best thing to stowing away.  Our goal is to do a few podcast discussions together and put those up on the PDAIS feed, so these might act as a supplement to those as well.  Anyway, adventures await!

to make your Friday more fun

Hi… um…. it’s been awhile.  again. 

So… since December… what’s been going on? 

We’ve just finished our Spring Break– which was the first Spring Break (since what, 1996?) I’ve not spent with my family.   My mom came to visit at the beginning and the end of the week, though, and it was really nice to see her.  Becoming adult friends with my mother is a great joy, really.

Most of my creative energies these days are going into preparations and recordings of our podcast, Professor Dave’s Ark in Space– PDAIS, for short– http://profdais.libsyn.com  My co-hosts (our team has grown to 5 people now:

Professor Dave, Doctor Thomas, Viki the Vixen, International Sensation Danielle, and me!).  I so much enjoy our discussions!  I’m earning my comic book nerd card at the moment, as Doctor Thomas introduces me to graphic novels.  In this latest one, we talked all about the Asterix books.  I now understand the reference in the Eddie Izzard routine about Mister Dog.  🙂 

Oh! Oh!  And I really want to tell you about, though, are tongue-in-cheek radio serial episodes Our newest escapade is our PDAIS Presents: http://pdaispresents.libsyn.com/  Right now we’re Superheroes.  Doctor Thomas writes our scripts.  If you laugh even just half as much as we do while reading and recording them…

Work-wise, well, it gets intense this time of year. A mixture of calm and relaxed days (like today) and really difficult and frustrating days (like yesterday). I’d tell you some of the shenanigans, but you wouldn’t believe me!  [Here’s just a snippet.  I had to say the words, “‘He threw it at me first’ is not an acceptable reason for throwing books across the room.” And that was before 9am in the morning. Le sigh.]  Three weeks until our big state test, so the pressures to make the kids perform is ramped up to 11.   I’m up to my ears in grading most of the time.  Starbucks becomes a bit of a second home, as massive amounts of solo venti peppermint java chip frappachinos are required to deal with the hundreds of weekly journals. 

Personally, well… let’s just say that I’ve got a really wonderful fella and am silly happy.  *blush* 

Also (and not unrelated to the previous point), I’m planning a trip this summer [end of June/ early July] to London, England– actually finally bought my airline tickets this week, which left me dancing about the living room with excitement and glee! 

Well, that’s about that.  I’ve updated my Library Bag links along the side, and after tomorrow’s library trip I’ll try to remember to update them again.  Tonight, I’m curling up with the new Carrie Bebris book.    I’d like to blog about the Kat Atkinson novel, as it had quite a few interesting points.  Oh… and in a few months I might have a really cool short story collection by a fantastic to review for you.  I should also blog about ‘Blue Box Boy’ by Matthew Waterhouse, as that was pretty special too.

Right. Calling it a night, ya’ll.