Cooking: Troy and Abed in the Morning Present Apple Nut Bars

Cristina and I are trying to lose weight slowly and surely. Partially, because we are superficial and want to look good for our wedding, but mainly because we just want to get healthy. We both are using myfitnesspal.com to help track our weight and our calories consumed and burned. I highly recommend the site especially since it is a social site. It helps to have friends and family support you while you do this.

Yesterday was a good diet day. We both had oatmeal for breakfast. She had a light lunch of mostly fruit, while I had the baked fish and salad from our school cafeteria. For supper I grilled some Mahi Mahi in some homemade garlic butter (thanks to my future mother in law for the grill pan and the garlic press). I made some green beans and heated up the risotto from the other day to go with it. I topped the risotto and fish with some freshly grated parmesan. I’ll never buy that already made parmesan ever again.

Again, it was a good diet day. We were both way under our calories. We wanted something sweet. I told Crisitna to look up apple recipes since we had apples. However, my pantry is still kind of bare when it comes to ingredients for baking. She went through a couple, and I had to say no to a couple due to lack of ingredients. Then she came to this recipe for apple nut bars from her Touch of Home: Guilt Free Cooking cookbook. Only two pantry items were missing: vanilla extract and pecans. I couldn’t really do anything about the vanilla, but I did have almonds.

I took two of the apples I had, cored them, and put them in the food processor. I also chopped the almonds in the food processor. My sister did a great job getting that for us as an early wedding present. I mixed all the ingredients sans vanilla and put them in my brand new baking pan also from my future mother-in-law. (Getting married is a wonderful thing). They take twenty-five minutes to bake which is the perfect amount of time to watch a DVRed episode of the only show on television that makes me either smile or laugh the entire time it’s on: Community. When the episode was over, they were ready. They were very good leaving me to wonder how good they would have been if I did have vanilla.

Now, I’m trying to convince Cristina we need to have a no-box month of food.

I know she will sneak some Velveeta and Shells by me though.