Genius Hour Decision--Drumroll Please.....

OK, so for my Genius Hour/Passion Project, I thought about and spent some time deciding on which of my three topics to pursue: 1) design a series of lessons and music materials to publish, 2) refinish the kids' bathroom cabinets, or 3) develop healthy, low-carb, and tasty vegetarian meals with little mess. After really thinking about it, I decided designing a series of music materials to publish was too ambitious for me at this time if I really wanted to try to enjoy some of my summer.  Then I looked into refinishing the bathroom cabinets with the Nuvo cabinet paint. While I am still going to do this project, I decided after researching more that it is not going to take as much time as I thought if I buy the kit. Most of the reviews posted on Home Depot online (which is where I bought the kit), looked like it did not take much time to complete this project. Most people sounded like they completed their projects in about a day or so. There is minimal sanding involved, and the description states that you do not need to remove the cabinet hardware, so it seems like this should be pretty straightforward to accomplish. We will see how long it actually takes me, but if this is the case I don't think it will take enough time for a passion project. I did go ahead and purchase the refinishing kit, so am excited to use it as soon as it gets here! 

That leaves me with my #3, develop healthy, low-carb, tasty meals in one pot or with little mess. Since I had already experimented with modifying some meals that I had previously made, I decided to do more research to see if this was possible. There were a ton of websites that have low-carb, keto, healthy, or vegetarian recipes, but none that I found that were quick, easy, healthy, and little mess. So, I decided that this might be a good possibility. I also LOVE food, and want to find a way for nourishment without gaining a ton of weight or putting extra processed chemicals into my body. As part of my frustration with loving eating and having to really watch my food as middle age creeps in, I decided that I needed to find a way to manage my food choices to stay healthy. Last year I had really high cholesterol for the first time in my life, and was able to reduce it to a healthy level just by controlling my food choices. After this I decided that this was something that I could actually control, and I also realized that what we put into our bodies really does effect us. 

While I LOVE food, I do not always like the length of time it takes to prepare certain meals, and especially NOT the cleanup. During weeknights with school, it is especially difficult and exhausting to cook healthy for my family. I love receiving my Hello Fresh meals, but they take a long time to prep and cook, and there is often a big mess to clean up. So, my plan with my passion project is to modify some of the Hello Fresh meals that I enjoy and are quick, but maybe not as healthy as I would like. Then I am going to try to create them as one pot or little mess meals (which is my goal for this project). I would like to develop at least a week's worth of quick, healthy meals that still taste good that I can use. Maybe this will lead to more recipes and maybe a cookbook? Who knows?

To kick my project off, I started with a recipe that I had already re-created, "Tasty Veggie Pasta." I wrote out the ingredients and steps and am planning on putting together everything in a Google Doc so that I can add pictures, etc. too. In doing this I realized that I also needed the nutrition information to make sure that this was truly a healthy vegetarian recipe. I found a pretty cool website for nutrition calculating to help determine nutrition info per serving size: https://lifehacker.com/how-to-track-calories-and-macros-in-homemade-meals-1809061636. So I am using the spreadsheet created as a model for all of my recipes. I was also able to find additional nutritional values of foods that didn't have nutrition labels at the USDA website: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/index.html to help inputting nutrient information.

While this is already taking quite a long time to input the nutrition information, I am hoping it will become quicker as I add more recipes and input information into the spreadsheet, now that I know where to go for the information. I am finding some interesting information that I did not know about some of the ingredients in some of my foods. For example, in researching balsamic vinegar, I discovered that most balsamic vinegar in stores has added caramel color to it. Only pure balsamic vinegar (which happens to be extremely expensive) does not have it. So what's the big deal? Well, this caramel color is basically a toxin and is not a natural part of the balsamic vinegar. I never knew this, and in trying to remain with healthy, whole ingredients, I am considering revising some of the recipe for alternate ingredients. Who knows what else I will find in some of these everyday foods?