Hi blog buds!

Is the holiday weekend really over?  It FLEW by for me!  Did it for you as well?  I hope that you all had an amazing weekend.  Ours was great!

Thank you for posting comments about what you chose to free yourselves of for Independence Day!  I really enjoyed reading them!  They were all great!  There were two that especially resonated with me:  the one from Joan about weighing words more carefully (that is DEFINITELY something I should work on) and Kalli wanting to break free from the all or nothing mentality (another one I could add to my own list!)  Thank you so much for sharing.

One thing MSP and I decided to free ourselves of is the HIGH COST of satellite TV.  :)   I know, it’s not ‘really’ related to fit living per se but it can be when you factor in how many hours are wasted on the couch in front of the TV!  We decided we spend too much time AND money on it, so we thought we’d give it a try without it at all, and hopefully spend more time doing other things like eating at our actual dinner table instead of the coffee table.  Or walking the dogs after dinner.  So far I think it’s just translated into watching more PBS. :D

Something else I’ve been freed of and NOT BY CHOICE is my beloved BUBBLY (kombucha tea).  In June, Whole Foods first removed all brands of kombucha from their shelves.  Have you guys read about this?  At the time I noticed our local Vitamin Cottage and Safeway still had them on the shelves.  So I bought 5 then and didn’t think much of it.  Yesterday we drove all over town and it is gone from EVERY store that we tried.  I’m so bummed.  :(   I hope it comes back soon.  I wish that I’d kept just one bottle so that I’d have some mother to start a batch of my own.

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I’ve been having some fun in the kitchen again recently.  Below is my recent “pasta” dish and while you may not think of spaghetti as 4th of July fare, there are two things at play here.  One is that it was a chilly 4th for us this year (weather in the 60s and a lot of rain) as evidenced by this pic from our attempts to watch fireworks:

And two is that this is a combo of hot and cold, as you know I am prone to do with my food often.

Here is my RED, WHITE, and GREEN PASTA:

This one was a keeper in my book.  I’d been craving something that tasted a little like sausage (without the actual sausage of course).  So I picked up some Gimme Lean ground ‘sausage style’ veggie protein:

And some Bertolli tomato sauce:

I ground up some mushrooms and broccoli slaw in the food processor (in hopes of hiding some extra veggies from MSP):

I lightly sauteed the veggies in a pan before adding in the “soysage”:

Add the Gimme Lean to brown and heat.  Once heated through, add the spaghetti sauce and simmer (covered) until you are ready to serve:

In the meantime cook up your pasta of choice.  This time I wanted to try BROWN RICE pasta which is wheat-free/gluten-free.  After this I will definitely be using more brown rice ‘pasta’ products.  It was really good!

My other favorite “pasta” of choice (spiralized raw zucchini):

Top the cold zucchini with the hot pasta and sauce, sprinkle on a little Daiya vegan mozzarella and garnish with some basil.  Voila!

This is one I’ll be making again for sure – works great on cool OR warm evenings!  And you wouldn’t even know that the mushrooms and broccoli were there.  MSP actually ate this AND the leftovers!   It’s one to try if you are aiming to get your veggie-phobic family to eat them more often!

Have a TERRIFIC Tuesday friends!

– Shari B. =)

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