And the TWO shall become one - 2 MONTHS left!

I absolutely cannot believe we're officially hitting the 2-month mark until the wedding. I had my first shower yesterday and it was lovely. I always enjoy getting to visit with my extended family including so many aunts and cousins. I'll have to post a more lengthy shower recap once I'm not in STORM PREP MODE.

The current path of #isaac
Note: The worst place to be is the North East quadrant of the spinning storm...

I'm trying not to be a drama queen about how this threat of Tropical Storm/Hurricane Isaac affects me. But honestly, I really don't want to deal with a storm while I'm 2 months from our wedding. My invitations are due to be shipped any day and I've got a list of tasks a mile long that I've got designated for everyday.One plus is I'm about to have two days of being trapped inside, so I can go ahead and start tackling some invitation addressing.

Anyway, we're battening down the hatches and Mr. Groom is 4-hours away at a training workshop for work. Can you believe it? He's lived here 3-weeks and we're having a hurricane and he's not even here!

Project Dinner Night 2: Eggplant Casserole

While the name of this dish may be casserole, as I was making it, I have to say it looks and seems a lot like a lasagna, minus the pasta, of course. I used a classic #momzilla trick and prepped all of my ingredients last night. So today when I got to the house, my casserole was ready to go in the oven. I did actually remember to snap a few photos of layering the goodies.

Bottom layer of eggplant with the meaty goodness spread on top.

This was the second layer of cheese. Mmmm...

Construction complete, ready for fridge!

Once again, your struggling cooking blogger has failed you! I forgot to take a picture of my beautifully finished baking casserole. I remembered after Mr. Groom and I had already gotten our servings out, so I did snap a pic, but I tried to hide the gaping hole in the horizon of the melted cheesy eggplant goodness.

Mmmm... Behold the cheesy eggplant goodness!

Speaking of which. My goodness, was this good!? For a cheese-loving-girl like me, low carb dieting isn't TOO bad. I can still have cheese! Well lasagna is one of my favorite dishes and pasta is a big NO-NO on low carb diets. So my expectations for how yummy this dish would be were met and exceeded! It had the meat, tomato sauce, and cheese of lasagna and the eggplant makes a wonderful substitution for pasta.

We WILL be keeping this recipe for future use. I did decide that for my next time making it, I would not use my lovely Pampered Chef stone baking dish. While it's awesome for a lot of dishes because it holds in the moisture of whatever you're cooking, we did not like that it kept all the excess juice from the eggplant and it left our casserole kind of watery


Up next tomorrow night: Hamburger Steak!

Project Dinner Night 1: Chicken Piccata

This isn't our plate, but I'm goofy and forgot to take a pic of ours.
Source: http://riverwalkaussies.wordpress.com/2012/05/

Well tonight proved to me that I have a bleak future in writing a foodie/cooking blog. I arrived at the house to find Mr. Groom finishing up cooking our first emeals dinner, I watched him cook, milled around the house, and ate our wonderful dinner... ALL while forgetting to take a picture so I could blog about it. Thankfully, my friend Google helped me find a decent picture of someone else's version of the dinner.

Other than my sweet fiance' forgetting that the whole object of the plan is to buy ingredients that will make more than one meal (he used the whole package of chicken rather than reserving half for a meal later this week, same with the mushrooms), the dinner was great. The upside to his accidental use of more ingredients is that we had leftovers for his lunch today. 

While my lovely photo source shows green beans accompanying the lemon and white wine flavored chicken, we had asparagus. I love mushrooms and capers and both were in this yummy sauce with our chicken.

Like I said before, eating a low-carb diet you get used to lots of monotonous dinners of chicken and vegetables, but I was glad for our first night we kind of stuck to that, but made the chicken a little more interesting!

Tomorrow night's dinner: Eggplant Casserole!

Our first week with eMeals

I'm taking a momentary break from filling your screen with tales from my wedding planning adventures to tell you about eMeals. During Mr. Groom's first week of coastal living, I went over the house every night for dinner which consisted of some meat and vegetables. Now I've done some pretty neat things low-carb, like the zucchini pizzas you've seen on Pinterest or Kevin makes some killer lettuce wraps. But eating low-carb can be pretty uninteresting most days, so we were thinking it could use a little spicing up.

The usual Sheila-style dinner.

Since we both listen to advice from the fabulous Dave Ramsey, we'd both heard of eMeals, but it's never really seemed practical since we've both either lived alone or with roommates (ahem, who may just happen to be of the parental variety). While we're now nearly 2 months from the big day, we're both trying to stick tough to our low-carb diets to get down to our goal weights.

While we're both capable of creative meals, during the week time is precious and we're not really willing to give up the time it would take to mull over recipes and get the ingredients from the grocery store. Mr. Groom and I are neither one particularly domestic, so subscribing to eMeals for a dummy-proof weekly meal seemed like a no-brainer.

eMeals is an online menu service, I guess. You pay for either 3, 6 or 12 months and each week you're delivered a 7-day menu of your liking (regular, low-carb, low-fat, vegetarian, gluten-free, etc.). The best part is that it includes the shopping list you need to buy these items. You can even customize your list based on which store (if national) you shop.

We start with our first meal tomorrow night (Monday), so I plan to show our meal from each night and if anyone is interested in seeing a sample menu, I can email the pdf to you. If you think you'd like to try eMeals for yourself, click the link here on my blog to do it and I'll get some referral points! :)

I hope you'll enjoy the break from wedding details to, instead, see what Mr. Groom and I have for dinner each night! 

Running around like a Project Chick-en

So my negligence in posting in the last week is because, oh, let's see, my FIANCE MOVED HERE! I pretty much came back from my work trip to New Orleans and had to hit the ground running to find a house for us to rent for our first year of marriage. Kevin needed to be able to have a place to move to when he drove down, so I've been a wee bit crazy doing that, to now that he's here I'm adjusting to having him here all the time AND we're trying to move furniture and get settled. It's safe to say I've been running around like a chicken with its head cut off.

Wedding plans are rolling on along, we had a second cake tasting last week and I'm meeting with my Wedding Decor team on Thursday. I had my first fitting of my dress last weekend, so I can't wait to see how it's looking! I promise I'll make up for lost time soon!

Oh and the envelopes for invitations came in last week, so the time for those to go out is getting closer and closer as well!