Homemade Jam and Chicken Lettuce Wraps

Session has ended and I finally have my life back! Yay! It's great to have time to do things with friends and family... you almost forget what it's like to be able to relax or socialize whenever you'd like! It's also amazing to have all this time to cook and focus on myself. I realize more and more how important that is to me...I try and remind myself of that every time I lose motivation to be active or accomplish something during the day.

With all this free time I made a list of goals or things I'd like to accomplish... and first on the list... JAM MAKING! Nate and I have been talking about wanting to do this for awhile now so Saturday morning we set out to do some strawberry picking... we headed out to a local farm near us in Scotia (Horstman Farms) to pick our berries. It was so much fun... and such a perfect day! I couldn't have asked for better weather.

I wanted to find a recipe that didn't use sugar or any other processed ingredients, so I spent a little time scouring the internet and came across this website. It's a blog about a normal family of 4 with 2 small kids and a traveling husband who took on the challenge to eat clean unprocessed food for 100 days. I really like reading her stories and it proves that anyone can take on this new lifestyle, even with small children and less time to prepare. So anyway, on her site she has a recipe for strawberry jam using just fresh fruit and honey...and let me tell you it came out delicious!! You should definitely give it a try... here's the recipe.

We made 4 pints of strawberry jam, and 4 pints of strawberry peach jam (we bought peaches from the same farm... I've been going there for a couple years now for the peaches, it's the best peach I've ever had!!)

As she mentions in the blog, the jam isn't as thick as the store bought brand is, but the consistency really isn't that bad and the flavor more than makes up for it.



We didn't really have many plans for the rest of the weekend either (except for soccer watching... GO USA!!!! - Nate would be so proud haha) so I thought I'd do a bit of cooking. It's been awhile since I had any real kitchen time and I was excited to jump back into it. We had some lettuce left from our CSA and I wanted to use it before it went bad, so I decided to make some chicken lettuce wraps and a cold black bean salad for dinner and some homemade ice cream for dessert!

Both dishes were pretty easy, and I think you could be creative with the ingredients, but I think the key ingredient that pulled them both together was the homemade dressings that I found on the Gracious Pantry.

For the chicken lettuce wraps I marinated the chicken in a honey lime vinaigrette dressing for about thirty minutes, seared both sides and than put it in the oven for about 40 minutes at 375 degrees. We had a little brown rice left from the week so I heated that up and tossed in some more of the vinaigrette and then chopped up some radishes and carrots as well. I set it up kind of like a buffet with the chopped chicken, rice, veggies and dressing separate so everyone could help themselves and stuff as much or as little as they wanted. I think they were a big success!

On the side I served a cold black bean salad. I don't really buy canned beans anymore so this recipe took a bit longer since I had to soak and cook the beans, but I always think it's worth it. (If you're buying uncooked beans here's a "quick" easy way to cook them. First dump the beans out on a flat surface and search for any rocks or spoiled beans, then rinse them off. Place them in a pot and fill it up with water. Bring the water to a boil for one minute and then turn off the heat and let the beans soak for an hour. Rinse off the beans and put them them back in the pot with fresh water and let them boil/simmer for an hour... then they're done!) I took my black beans (after cooling them off) and mixed that with red onions, carrots, red bell peppers, feta cheese, parsley, radishes and a homemade italian dressing. I also think this was a really big success! Yay! It always feels good to have people enjoy your food.

Now onto dessert...homemade vanilla ice cream!! I love this recipe, it's my second time making it and I think it tastes better than store bought. Now the website I got the recipe from uses sugar, so I just replaced the sugar with honey. As I mentioned previously, the Gracious Pantry has a good measuring chart for using alternatives to sugar. I used this ice cream recipe and substituted the sugar for 3/8 cup honey. I don't have an ice cream machine so I've tried two different ways to make it... one was putting it in the freezer and stirring every thirty minutes for three hours... the other was using a mixer and an ice bath. I think both work fine... it's whatever you have the time and space for. Both of those techniques can be found on the same page as the ice cream recipe.


One last thought... the last time I blogged I had said I was deciding whether to follow the Science of Skinny's two week transition and I've decided I'm not going to... I'm sure I'll refer to the book for recipes and portions but I don't want to feel like I'm back on some diet...I'd rather just do this on my own. Until next time... healthy travels!!