Road trip noms

I remember having a privileged childhood and flying back and forth from JFK to Tampa and Orlando airport at least twice a year to go to Disney, stay on my grandparents condominium on the beach, or get onto cruise ships for a week at sea.  The year my parents told me we were driving to Florida, I had a spoiled brat freak out session.  It wasn’t pretty and I don’t know why my parents didn’t give me away during that horrible pre-teen period of my life. But EIGHTEEN HOURS IN A CAR WITH FAMILY?  I couldn’t handle the idea of it.  My dad had lost his job after the 9/11 attacks and while we could still have family vacations, we had to forgo the $300 round trip per person flights.  Fortunately I lived through it, and many, many more drives after once my parents realized how much easier and cheaper it was to travel at your own pace by car.

What I did come to find that road trips are an awesome excuse to eat fast food since I was never allowed and (from my dad) have a baking extravaganza beforehand for ample snacks to last far longer than 18 hours.

If you think you are here to read a list of healthy alternatives to travelling junk food, you are in the WRONG PLACE MY FRIEND.  It is the holidays and you have been a fantastically hard worker all year and I am proud of you.  So I experimented with this new and different recipe that I think you should try.

this may or may not have been my breakfast plate for this morning.

That, is an EGGNOG LOAF!  Pretty good idea if you ask me.  I like this because it isn’t TOO sweet (you can even omit the glaze, though that would take some of the moisture from the loaf) or TOO eggnoggy.  As Jessica said in her post, even if you don’t like Eggnog, you will probably like this loaf.  It’s a nice alternative to pumpkin bread since you are all pumpkin-ed out from Thanksgiving.  & a PERFECT road trip snack!

You can view the recipe at How Sweet Eats (one of my FAVORITE food blogs).  I didn’t want to buy whole wheat pastry flour so I used unbleached all purpose and it still came out perfect.

Anyone taking a road trip for the holidays?  Love or hate?

Are there components of your childhood you surely took for granted before you knew any better?

I can’t BELIEVE how many vacations we took when I was younger.  My mom would get yelled at from my school teachers and she (as a former teacher herself) would completely disregard absence rules and whisk us away.  We turned out pretty smart anyway.  I’m convinced my childhood is what shaped travelling as my top priority in life.  Fine with me.

My husband, the sous chef

We are all well aware of the hectic stress that comes with the holiday season.  We are scurrying all around cleaning for family, travelling for family, going broke buying presents, getting fat from baking, and et cetera.  While I am scared for my bank account, I’m feeling alright about the scale since I’m making time to keep exercising this holiday.  It’s really not that hard if you force yourself into a routine, I promise.

Because of my commitments, I achieved a very fabulous record I made for myself on Saturday despite all of the odds working against me.  I ran 5 miles (furthest ever) in 56 minutes.  My (very easy, I’ll admit) goal was to keep it under an hour and while I had to have a few walking “intervals” due to the fact that it felt like it was 1,000 degrees outside, I still made it with a pace that was reasonable to me.  The factors going against were a list a mile long, including the unexpected heat and sun beating on my head, having sliders and onion rings with long islands on Friday night and drinking coffee instead of water in the morning before the run.  My favorite part was that I picked a completely absurd route that I had never even driven let alone run before, leading to an adventurous “trail” run due to lack of sidewalks and scary cars driving fast.

With all of that being said, I am reversing all the good that run did to my body by having Buffalo Mac and Cheese.  My husband’s favorite thing is grating cheese from a block, but I wanted to cut things short and made him slice into blocks.  He had such a blast doing this… it’s the little things.

I used all reduced fat of course, since we don’t want to get too crazy up in here.  I really had the hardest time with this recipe.  It pissed me off because it took too long and used too many plates/pots/utensils and I probably should have just used my favorite cheese sauce for mac and cheese and added buffalo chicken to it. If you’d like the original recipe, I got it from the food network website.  I modified it a lot and it still wasn’t my favorite… I think it didn’t taste cheesy enough, it just tasted like saucy wings.  But perhaps that’s the purpose of having buffalo mac and cheese?  Help me out, have you had this before?

These are all of the substitutions I made that may have kept this dish from being REALLY delicious :

• I didn’t bake it because a. I don’t like blue cheese and b. we didn’t want to wait that long to eat it
• I used mustard the condiment instead of dry mustard powder
• Realized my half and half was non-fat, so I did 1 cup of my non-fat half and half and 1.5 cups 1% milk
• Like I said before, I used reduced fat cheese

If you have one, please send me your favorite Buffalo Mac & Cheese recipe!