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What I ate: January 16, 2012

Breakfast: Eggs, toast and bacon . With a half slice of Barowski's wheat bread toast with Earth Balance spread.

Lunch: Tuna salad sandwich with Kettle Chips barbecue potato chips.

I make a roasted chicken and pan gravy , made the "old fashioned way," which is to say, in the oven.

Here it is partially broken down. I removed the wings before cooking and froze them for future use in Buffalo chicken wings. This made: 2 servings for roasted chicken and gravy dinner (6.0 oz. each) and 1 serving of chicken for stir-fry or chicken salad (3.2 oz.). The chicken carcass I made into stock and 3 servings of chicken soup with chicken (16 oz. stock and 2.7 oz. chicken each). So that's 2 dinners and 4 lunches from one 4.29 lb. chicken for $ 6.82.

Normally I vacuum seal my soup in plastic pouches but this time I thought I'd try using wide-mouthed canning jars. We'll see how it goes.

I also made an eye of round roast beef , which is a misnomer because it's not roasted at all, but cooked in the sous vide for 1:30 at 132°F so it's perfectly medium rare. This was 3.11 lbs. and was originally $ 13.34, but had an instant $ 3.00 off coupon so it was $ 10.34. This made a huge bounty including 2 dinner servings for roast beef and gravy (6.0 oz. each), 4 servings for roast beef sandwich (3.2 oz.) and 4 servings for beef-stir fry (3.2 oz.). And some for Roscoe. So that's 2 dinners and 8 lunches for $ 10.34, a pretty good deal!

Snack: 3 Kashi roasted garlic crackers with Cabot habanero cheddar cheese. And a half glass of Monkey Bay sauvignon blanc.

Dinner: Roasted chicken , asparagus, rice and gravy. And 2 glasses of Aguaribay malbec.

And after about 7 hours, everything is completely done, vacuum sealed and frozen and cleaned up. Chicken stock days are amongst the longest in total time, though most of the time things are roasting, simmering or cooling on their own.

And there was a new Absolut vodka at the liquor store to add to my collection! Absolut Gräpevine: white grape, dragon fruit and papaya. It's supposed to be served with lemon-lime soda, according to the label.

I'm not a huge fan of the version with Diet 7-Up, possibly because it tastes like Diet 7-Up. The real 7-Up/Sprite/Slice is too sweet and the last thing I need to do is add another 100 calories of HFCS to the liquor. If you don't mind Diet 7-Up it would be very dangerous because you can barely taste the alcohol.

The second one I made with seltzer and that was delicious, however.

Weight at beginning of the day: 116.6 lbs.

Weight at the beginning of the next day: 115.8 lbs.

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