Click Below for Certification Info!
|
Happy Football Sunday!
I’m excited because our chicken have finally begun to lay eggs again. (No more buying those icky store eggs that you don’t know how long they’ve been around!)
 Farm Fresh Eggs Our chickens were molting, which means they were losing their feathers (then they grow new ones.) We have 24 chickens. There has been nary an egg since a couple of months ago. I’m just so excited! After we got our first 2 I decided a farm fresh omelet was in order for breakfast the other morning.
 Farm Fresh Egg Omelet How great does that look? The one thing that I noticed about our eggs is that they are so yellow compared to store bought eggs.
I’ve been working really hard on our marinade business this past week. We are introducing Gift Certificates this week on our website. I developed them myself and had them printed up; they should be available on the site Thursday. Go to Bare Bones Marinade to get yours this week. They would make great Christmas presents!
Talking about the marinade, I’ve been trying to draw web traffic to our FaceBook page. There are lots of tips and pictures of clean foods that I’ve been cooking with it. You can “LIKE” Bare Bones Marinade here. That would be a tremendous help to our getting the word out and we are also running a promotion where the 250th person to “LIKE” our page WINS A FREE BOTTLE OF MARINADE!
I wanted to show you the ingredient list from the bottle. I love our marinade.
 Bare Bones Marinade Ingredients With all of my cooking lately, I feel like Betty Crocker, LOL. Yesterday I made jumbo shrimp and marinaded them in our marinade.
 Uncooked Jumbo Shrimp I actually grilled them inside on my Foreman Grill because it was rainy and damp out yesterday.
 Grilled Shrimp in Bare Bones Marinade These would make a great appetizer! You only need to marinade them between an hour and 2 hours. You cook for maybe 3 minutes. They turned out perfect. My daughter, who doesn’t eat seafood, said “This tastes like heaven”. :)
We finally put our star on the Christmas tree December 2. I kept forgetting to share the picture with y’all, so here it is.
 Christmas Tree 2012 Today was also project day. Aidan has a project due on Tuesday for reading, and I wanted to get it done because his band recital is also Tuesday and he’s not feeling well. I’m really proud of his project!
Apparently, what you are looking at are the Appalachian Mountains, and a trail down to a Department Store. He’s depicting a scene from Where the Lilies Bloom. He did a great job!
I actually wanted to share my Green Juice Recipe. Ingredients can be adjusted for your individual tastes, of course!
Ingredients:
1-2 bunches of Kale (don’t use bagged, you don’t get enough juice that way).
1/2 – 1 bag of spinach
1/2 lemon
1 good sized chunk of ginger
5-6 carrots or a few handful of baby carrots
4 apples (use red for a sweeter taste, green for sweet and sour, or a combination of both!)
Enjoy!
Good Morning and Happy Friday!
Today is going to be a good day. My tasks for today include picking up some bassoon reads (yes, I said bassoon…Aidan plays in the school band and that is the instrument he chose).  We are proud of him! Next week is his winter concert…I am sooo looking forward to it.
Then I have to hit up either BJ’s Wholesale Club or Walmart for groceries. We are empty! Grocery shopping is not my idea of fun, but I have extras on the list and there are some little things I need to pick up for the kids, because you just can’t buy that stuff online. (I hate shopping, period….especially around the holidays unless it’s online. I can spend hours doing that!)
Christmas shopping tip: I ordered some Christmas presents last night from ThinkGeek.com. They have some really cool items, and most aren’t expensive.
Yesterday was a busy day. We decided that gift certificates would be advantageous to our business, Bare Bones Marinade. So I designed them and I’m just waiting for the go-ahead to order them today. Our second product is in the works, also. Exciting news for our business!
I know that everyone likes comfort food and I’m as guilty as anyone else. Comfort food can be very high in calories a lot of times because of the use of breads and cream. I make a wonderful Taco Soup that I would love to share with you. Everything can be bought organically to make it clean and free of preservatives.
 Simmering Taco Soup This soup is healthy for you because it has lots of beans, lean ground beef, tomatoes, chopped green chilis and corn. I like to put a bit of sharp cheddar cheese on top and use a bit of sour cream. This meal costs less then $10. You get probably 6-8 servings out of it depending on the size of your bowl!
 The finished product…Taco Soup! Taco Soup Recipe (recipe can be doubled, tripled, etc. Make as much as you want because the flavor will not be compromised.) Remember…all items can be bought organically!
Ingredients:
- 1lb. lean ground beef
- 1 package of taco seasoning
- 1 package of ranch dressing (not bottled).
- 1 can whole kernel corn
- 1 can chopped green chilis
- 1 can chili beans
- 1 can kidney beans
- 1 can diced Rotel Tomatoes and Green Chilis
- 1 can diced tomatoes
- 2 cans water
Directions: Brown ground beef. Add taco seasoning and ranch dressing mix. Simmer until combined. Add all other ingredients and their liquid. (DO NOT drain!!) Stir and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 30 minutes.
VOILA! Dinner is served.
 MMMMmmmmm! Enjoy!
Happy Football Sunday!
Hope your day is great
In the last post I mentioned the dry brine that we used from Williams-Sonoma for Thanksgiving. I love this brine, so I roasted a 5lb chicken with it the other day.
 Chicken before cooking It already looked great, but it even looked better after some slow roasting.
 Chicken after slow roasting It was wonderful tasting, and not dry at all. The brine really helps with that, especially during roasting.
 Dry brine. The way to go! I also wanted to show you the brine.
 A quality addition to your spice cabinet. Anyway.  Moving on…
I know I also mentioned our marinade business, Bare Bones Marinade. I just wanted to show you all that even though you can use it on every type of meat or fish, there are also other foods that it tastes really, really great on.
Firstly: the baked potato. Baked potatoes are very bland, in my personal opinion. Unless you load them up with things that aren’t especially great for you, such as butter, cheese, and sour cream. (Everything in moderation!) However, I learned that Bare Bones Marinade tastes great on a baked potato the other night. It adds a ton of flavor without the added calories and fat. Oh, and did I mention that it’s clean eating as well? There are not any preservatives or junk in our marinade. It’s that simple.
 Baked potato. Not bland anymore. The other foods that Bare Bones is great on is vegetables. (Which can be bland also without the add-ons mentioned above.)
 Broccoli. With flavor! I wouldn’t go into business with something that wasn’t as versatile or didn’t taste good. I am a foodie, after all!
The other night we cooked up some roast beef from Buffalo, NY. We lived in Buffalo, NY for many years before we were married. We really miss the food, so every once in a while for a surprise for my husband I place an order from BuffaloFoods.com. You can click the link to see the website. Buffalo is a junk food mecca. Pizza and wings…OMG. Definitely the best ever.
We ordered some cooked roast beef which is made by Redlinski. Warmed it up in the frying pan, put it on a bun with some horseradish, and it was so good. Buffalo Foods also carries our marinade in their store if you’re local to them.
We marinaded some baby back ribs in Bare Bones the other day, but unfortunately due to a grill mishap there aren’t any “after” pictures for you to see.
I haven’t been posting on workouts, because I haven’t been doing any. Like anyone, (even with my being a certified personal trainer, I have motivational issues just like everyone else. I don’t know if you remember, but I was actually working for a while and then took a break. I was exhausted. Personal trainers are not just great at motivating for others with their workouts, but I was so thorough that each of my clients (I had 35) had routines that I wrote out for them every week, phone consultations, and food/cooking consultations. So I took a break after I left the 2 gyms I was working at.
It’s time to get back into it. I am really good at monitoring my own weight, even around the holidays, but the thing that I miss the most is the muscle definition. It goes away quickly, but, fortunately, comes back just as fast due to muscle memory.
I’m about to get my new blog up and running. It’s name is Fit and Stronger, and will be devoted entirely to personal training. It will actually coincide with a new business that I am starting in January…boot camps! I’m really excited about this, because I really, really, really miss personal training. I will let you all know when the blog and boot camps start.
Hope your Sunday is as great as mine. Happy early Monday, lol
Happy Wednesday to all of you!
It’s been a few weeks since I’ve blogged, but I am slowly getting back into it. I’ve certainly been busy this season…Christmas shopping (online only, I hate stores and the mall), Thanksgiving, and deciding on my business plan for the beginning of the year.
So I thought I would start with Thanksgiving today. This year Sean had a Thanksgiving lunch at his elementary school and was super happy when I decided to attend. I prefer to keep a low profile at the schools…the elementary school they were at a couple of years ago before we moved was inundated with parents. More so then the kids. So I keep a low profile and try to help from home with donations and such.
 Thanksgiving luncheon Let’s chat about the school food for a second. It wasn’t terrible, but was definitely not very attractive (or delicious).
 Hmmmm. School lunches. Turkey breast meat (healthy), cinnamon apples, a square of stuffing (awful tasting), brown gravy, cranberry jelly and milk. All I can say is, ugh.
Sean supplemented with an apple, which they had for free!
 Free lunchtime extras = healthy! One thing about my boys, they try to choose healthy, which is fantastic. They can probably tell you how much protein is in an egg.
We had turkey on Thanksgiving. I love Williams-Sonoma dry brine and we coated the turkey with it before roasting. Unfortunately, there aren’t any “after” pictures.
 Mmmmmmmm! Rest assured, that the turkey was as moist as it would have been had we used a wet brine.
We’ve been having a lot of fun playing cards and bored games with the kids recently…which is really great for family time at night.
 Time for Monopoly! As I’m writing this I’m wondering if you all have heard about our marinade business, Bare Bones Marinade.
 Bare Bones Marinade I’m going to start a new blog solely concerning our marinade business. We are in 7 retail markets in the Charlotte, NC area, 2 in the Canton, GA area, and are running radio spots continuously. It’s becoming extremely popular! We also have a website if you would like to place orders: click here for the site.
Thanks to my close high school friends for posting on their FaceBook pages about our marinade:
Vicki James, Monique Johnson, Matt Beck, and Chris McDonald! Hope you all enjoy your packages!
Later this week I will have pictures of some of the food that we’ve made with the marinade. You can use it every type of meat and seafood…and I even drizzle it on veggies.
Using some large brine bags, I am currently marinading some baby back ribs.
 Baby Back Ribs marinading in Bare Bones Marinade Warning: No one has ever tried it and not LOVED it. Just throwing it out there!
Have a wonderful Wednesday and I will be back soon with more stories and pictures!
Yes, I know it’s a Christmas song. We keep singing it because this is the coldest weather that we have seen in GA in years. We had out first frost today already! It’s CRAZY!!
So. lets talk about the exercising that I haven’t been doing. After I worked as a personal trainer I took some time off as you know and just never went back. Before I left my first job I injured my arm (I was pressing 100# and my arm gave out) and thought I had pulled my tricep muscle. Well, 4 months have gone by, and it’s getting worse. I fear that it’s my rotator cuff and that scares the you-know-what out of me. (We don’t have health insurance).
I figure that I’ll cancel the gym membership I haven’t been using (classes are at 8:30 am and that is just a bit early for me, anyway.) I have a full gym in my basement, so I think I’m going to turn into a basement worker-outer, lol. Guess it doesn’t matter as long as I get it in. There’s a reason I want to get fit, because we’re trying for baby #4! Glad I’m still semi in shape because the road to fitness will be cut by 3/4.
 My “babies” a few years ago… Yep. They like to make “funny” faces. This picture was taken probably 3 or 4 years ago!
Recently I started taking pictures of my food again and I will share some of the recipes as soon as I tweak the blog.
As we all know, I’m big on green juice. Are you wondering what is in it? Kale, spinach, celery, apples, lemon, cucumber, sometimes romaine lettuce, carrots and ginger. Trust me, it is good. I don’t eat anything that isn’t palatable.
 Green Juice for health We always have a ton of people at the house that like to eat so I am constantly cooking something and thinking of new things. I try for healthy and preservative free which is my whole shtick. I’ve been eating this way for years and I do believe that it will increase life expectancy. What I’m not happy about is GMO’s, but that’s an important story for another day.
Last night for dinner I made Grandma’s chicken. Not my Grandma, but I doctored the recipe enough to make it my own.
 Grandma’s Chicken This chicken is baked in the oven uncovered and turns out perfect every time…and is so easy to make!
I’ve decided to mostly cut out my carbs because when I was eating Paleo it seemed to really work for me. The carbs that I am referring to are refined; I am able to get fibrous carbs from green vegetables.
 I LOVE Brussel Sprouts The perfect meal.
 Perfecto! Of course I made dessert. Homemade Carrot Cake! It turned out fantastic and had a hint of cinnamon and spice. The kids liked it, so I guess I would label it “kid friendly”.
 Eat Dessert First Aren’t those plates adorable? I picked up a bunch of them at a garage sale last year that I just happened upon.
 Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting A bit ago my cat had kittens. (We didn’t even know she was pregnant, so surprise! Two of the kittens met their demise (um, our neighbor mistakenly drove over one) but this one has survived and his name is Fatty thanks to Sophia. We keep our animals outside, we have 2 dogs and a huge area for them to run and a large dog house, 24 chickens and 3 cats.
 Fatty the Kitten I would love to bring him inside, but can’t stand the destruction that pets cause (and their messes!)
It’s supposed to be a beautiful day in Georgia today, even though we got a frost last night.
Coming soon: pictures of my winter garden (you have to love Georgia!!) and today Sean has a “Thanksgiving Lunch” at school so I will be sure to post pictures of the chaos.
Enjoy your Friday! Baby, It’s Cold Outside!
Contact me on the Fit and Clean Facebook Page, or by Twitter @fitandclean, or my regular Facebook page Jessica Lauzon.
xx~Jess
Hi all! Fit and Clean is back on track.
I know it’s been a loooong time. We have been so busy this past year!
Events of 2012:
- We moved! We finally moved out of the subdivision and got some acreage about 15 minutes north and it’s beautiful here
 Fall in Cherokee County, GA
- The kids are all at their new schools and much happier.
 First day of middle school – 7th grade  First day of school 2nd and 5th grade
- I became a Certified Personal Trainer and started working
 Crossfit Class
- I lost 20lbs!
- Personal training is awesome (I had 35 clients, and most had great success training with me) but I left that job because it took all of the fun out of my own workouts (never turn what is fun into a job)
- I became a juicer and make a mean green juice
 It looks ugly, but tastes good
- The Fit and Clean Cookbook is in the food testing phase
Even though that isn’t all of the events, I have to say it’s been a very eventful year so far and the year is far from over…
Last night I made homemade lasagna and it turned out great so I dusted off my camera and took a couple of pictures. It’s not the healthiest, but I make sure everything in my food is still preservative free.
 Homemade lasagna It was pasta Sunday!
 Pasta Sunday Lasagna Have a great day! Without talking about politics, for election day tomorrow we plan on having a small party so the pictures should be interesting.
Good evening, friends!
I finally have some good news: even though my technological abilities have been tested these past few days:
Please update your bookmarks,readers, and blog rolls:
www.fitandclean.com
Finally! I hope you enjoy the new site! 
Jessica
Good Monday evening to you all! I am happy, happy today! The pool is coming along, the kids were good today, I went to a fantastic BodyPump class (ummm…400 calories….the most I’ve ever burned in BodyPump ever!!) Plus, it’s launch week, where all of the new material is introduced, which makes it fun! If you’re ever in my area, let me know, and you can come to my gym with me…you won’t be disappointed. (Email for details! )
For more information: check out the Les Mills web site!
 BodyPump
I would like to begin this next section with some questions:
Are you tired during the day, especially around mid-afternoon?
Do you feel sluggish and “foggy”?
Do you have health issues such as diabetes, obesity, high cholesterol or high blood pressure?
Then clean eating is for you. It’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle! Please don’t be scared off by that statement. If you are just beginning, here are some things you can do to ease into the clean eating lifestyle:
1. STOP eating fast food. Anything that you make at home, in your own kitchen, is better than this:
Not sure about the story of the 4 year old burger that didn’t mold…you can Google it and make your own determination.
2. Start eating more of these:
 Homemade Eat Clean Wheat Berry Salad Veggies!!!
I think that is the perfect way to ease into the clean eating lifestyle. It’s that simple!!
OK, so let me show you some of what I’ve been eating these last couple of days:
April’s brownies with peanut butter (which were great, by the way!! Thanks, April!)
Amy’s All American Veggie Burger with some organic ketchup, mustard, goat cheese and vinegar green beans on the side.
Ezekial toast with the last of my Artisana coconut butter.  Egg whites (great source of a clean protein!)
 Panoli!! It’s the return of the panoli. For those of you that are new to my blog, I actually invented something delicious! A whole grain pancake, made really, really, thin. Stuffed with protein, and eaten for breakfast. This panoli had a cottage cheese and blueberry blend. It looks interesting, but it was yummy and sweet!
 Thin. The pancake was super thin.
It was soooo good!
Lots of smiles today! I am still working on my dot com, and will let you know when it is up and running. Possibly by tomorrow!
Have a great night!
Hey y’all!
So first of all, I have to say that I’m super excited because I’ve decided to move the blog to a .com, instead of WordPress.com. I’ve actually had all of the domain names for a while, but wanted to see if people were actually interested in what I had to say before I switched. So it’s been about a year, the blog is going strong, and I’m still enjoying myself writing it! I will post and let you know when it happens…(of course!)
So after I post this, that is what I am going to be working on. While watching Man vs. Food, and smelling these fresh out of the oven that I am waiting to cool:
These are April’s Protein Brownies! You can find the recipe here. Can’t wait to try them…they are currently cooling.
This morning I decided I didn’t want eggs (gasp!) so I had two slices of Low Sodium Ezekial Bread (it should be called “no sodium” since there isn’t any in it) with some cinnamon peanut butter and apricot preserves. Well, that sounded like a good idea at the time, but that didn’t really go together. At all. Um, what was I thinking?? LOL
Yesterday for lunch, I had some more Mexican Shredded Chicken on an organic spelt tortilla:
Another lunch the last couple of days also on the same spelt tortilla but included shredded pork and chipotle BBQ sauce:
The BBQ sauce is Williamson Bros. They have restaurants here in the Atlanta area…and there isn’t any HFCS in it, just regular sugar. So given the choice, I’d rather avoid a sauce with HFCS. The “experts” are linking it to cancer now. Have you heard? You can find the article here.
There was also some of this BBQ sauce on some homemade BBQ chicken nachos:
Made with agave nectar!
 Nachos The BBQ chicken nachos had low sodium organic blue tortilla chips, shredded chicken breast, Mexican cheese, tomatoes, and Wholly Guacamole. It was fantastic! I didn’t even miss the salt in the chips.
Yesterday, I also made some homemade pesto dip. I had some basil that was on the way out, some pine nuts that I soaked overnight, and Asiago cheese. Oh my! It turned out soooo great. I could sit and eat it by the spoonful!
 Pesto Dip I liked it so much, I put it on one of Amy’s Vegetarian Burgers for lunch today:
and it didn’t exactly look like the picture, LOL.
I didn’t go to the gym today, I normally don’t on Friday. I will be there bright and early for BodyAttack and BodyPump (8:15am!)
Good evening! Hope your hump day has been great!
I want to start by catching you all up on a decision that I’ve made after careful deliberation these last few days. I’ve decided to put Insanity on the back burner because of a couple of reasons:
1. I can’t seem to fit it in with all of my gym classes right now, and
2. I’m decreasing my cardio and increasing my weight lifting (and my weights!) for the next few weeks.
I have, however, decided to bring it with me while I am on vacation in a few weeks, along with my portable DVD player. I know how it is at resorts and they don’t offer any classes or anything like that beyond maybe some machines and some free weights.
SO, with that being said, I took a BodyAttack Express class (45 minutes) and a BodyPump class (60 minutes) and burned 723 calories!
I have been an eating machine lately, because I’ve been taking classes back to back, and burning anywhere from 700 to 900 calories! And just to mention, 1200 calories isn’t sustainable when you burn so many calories. So I’ve increased my calories.
 Parfait That was yesterday’s lunch. A whole peach, Greek yogurt (with 2 packets of Truvia), and granola that was a little “well done”. It was awesome and totally filling for lunch.
I have increased the amount of water that I’ve been drinking lately, and it works out to be about 90 ounces a day (when I’m on my game!) Alas, I’m kind of getting sick of water. I know how good it is for you, and it flushes the toxins and salts out of our system, and our bodies are approximately 70% water. It is sooo important.
I can’t drink diet soda’s anymore, because they have that “chemical” taste to me now. Sometimes I make decaf tea (green or otherwise) and chill and drink that. Today I wanted lemonade, but without the chemicals and/or sugar and artificial unclean whatnots they put in everything:
 Healthy Lemonade In the frozen section in the grocery store, they sell a lemon juice that doesn’t have any preservatives in it (unlike RealLemon, which does!!!) So I took purified water, ice, lemon juice and Truvia and mixed it all together. Well, there you go! Healthy Lemonade!!!
Something else I’ve been craving:
 Yuuuummmmmm!!! Yes, it’s a sweet potato. I tend to eat a lot of them because they are really good for you. They have some great nutrients such as vitamin C, potassium, fiber and carotenoids. It becomes scrumptious when you put a tablespoon of Cinnamon Peanut Butter on it. Mine just happens to be Market Pantry (from Target). OMG. I think I’ve had them at dinner 3 days in a row!!
For example, with green beans and *fresh* sausage (from out local butcher) and:
with cauliflower and chicken.
Today I had a really great lunch, too! Lately I seem to be on an exciting cooking adventure, LOL!
I started with these burgers:
Fried it up in a pan, and added some balsamic vinegar to it which turned into a nice coating on the burger:
Are you wondering what is on the chicken burger?
Here’s a close up:
Yes, more peaches. (I live in Georgia, after all! ) On top of a whole ounce of goat cheese! It was sweet, salty, savory from the vinegar…perfect.
Along with cottage cheese and some more peaches, with a drizzle of balsamic!
My lettuce has been growing:
It’s actually grown quite a bit since my last picture!
Tomorrow I’m going to be making something with these. Can you guess what they are??
Question: Are you a cardio junky, or more into weight lifting? Do you find it hard to tone back the cardio?
|
|
