Challenge 13... cauliflower pizza crust...

Let me just go on the record in saying that I think the whole gluten-free thing is a little overhyped. I have some sweet friends with celiac disease, and I 100% know their reaction to gluten is legit, but gluten, in my humble opinion, isn't causing the decline of Western culture.

That said, around the middle of September last year, I saw a picture of myself and thought... I look old and fat and tired. Ew. I sent a text message to a friend and about a week later I started a journey towards a much healthier life.

I've lost over 70 lbs and am transitioning to a maintenance phase, so that means that I'm looking for great recipes that will give me the most bang for my caloric buck. I found this great recipe for cauliflower pizza crust on Pinterest.

I decided to do a little experiment and just make "homemade" pizza (as far as the kids knew) and have the family try it without telling them the crust was made from cauliflower.  It was a HUGE hit. The Zackster said that it was way better than Pizza Hut, and Zane said it was different, but he really liked it.
Jimmy asked me to put it in the regular rotation of meals.

So yay! New, healthy pizza!!! Click here for the recipe.

Challenge 12... procrastination and summer reading...

OHMYWORD! I am JUST LIKE MY STUDENTS!!!

So I started and forgot and procrastinated and forgot and really-meant-to, and here we are, two days into Part 2 of Summer 2014 and I thought I'd be long-since done with my 20-blog challenge, but no. Bless.

So that's how it happens. I'd call this little experiment a success so far.

Normally I take the first two weeks of summer to recover... sleep, clean, organize, clear off the dining room table, and plot the rest of the summer. Then I go on vacation. This year we skipped vacation. I felt sad about that for Zane, since we went to Disney the summer after Kelsey graduated, but then I realized we sent Jimmy and Zane to Peru for a week when we sent Kelsey nowhere, so I suppose it evens out.

I've read too.

Last summer I read the Harry Potter series and some other books I can't remember. In Part 1 of Summer 2014, I read and reread random books: Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, and Voyage of the Dawn Treader (CS Lewis); Wounded by God's People (Anne Graham Lotz); Disconnected Kids (Robert Melillo); How to Write Short (Roy Peter Clark); and On Writing (Stephen King). I'm currently reading by the pool Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) and in the evenings Raney (Clyde Edgerton). Reading those two last fiction titles at the same time could conceivably make my head explode.

It feels like it's going slowly, but I actually annotated Clark and King and got LOTS of ideas about how to make both my writing and English classes better. "Less is more," I always say. Actually, I usually say "more is more," but I'm trying to write short{er}.

I guess that bring us to this, then: The End. Of Challenge 12. More to come. Later...