Recipe Thursday: Sonoma Chicken Salad

I made this recipe the other day and it was freaking awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thank Whole Foods for their awesomeness and their willingness to share. I like serving it on croissants. YUM YUM!!!!

http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/recipes/526

Ingredients

Dressing
1 cup mayonnaise
4 teaspoons apple cider vinegar
5 teaspoons honey
2 teaspoons poppy seeds
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Salad
2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken breasts
3/4 cup pecan pieces, toasted
2 cups red seedless grapes
3 stalks celery, thinly sliced
Method

In a bowl, combine mayonnaise, vinegar, honey, poppy seeds, salt and pepper. Refrigerate until ready to dress the salad. This can be prepared up to 2 days ahead.

Preheat oven to 375°F. Place the chicken breasts in one layer in a baking dish with 1/2 cup water. Cover with foil and bake 25 minutes until completely cooked through. Remove cooked chicken breasts from pan, cool at room temperature for 10 minutes, then cover and refrigerate.

When the chicken is cold, dice into bite-size chunks and transfer to a large bowl. Stir in pecans, grapes, celery and dressing.

Our Baby Story (April 30th)

So our baby story continues...Den always reminds me that the first time we got pregnant I was 7 weeks before the home test came out positive. He always wants me to be reminded that this has happened for us before and it will happen again. I am all ready 6 weeks late so I took a pregnancy test the other morning because I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Unfortunately I had been low that morning and somehow had all ready gone pee twice. So I wanted to kick myself for not doing it as the very first thing. The test said “No.”

I told him that how I feel now is how I felt then. If I’m hungry I can’t sleep. I feel super hungry for no real reason. My body feels odd. There is one difference from the first time....I literally feel nauseated all of the time. When we went to the doctor Monday he gave us his plan of getting my cycle figured out so that we could get pregnant.

Step 1 – take a hormone to start my period.
Step 2 – get an ultrasound to make sure there are no ovarian cysts that will be amplified by the drug that makes a woman ovulate. If there isn’t...
Step 3 – take ovulation medicine.

So since the home tests said no, I decided to take the hormones. The fact that the home test said no made me worry that something else is wrong. I worried that I’ve been wanting this so badly that somehow I tricked my body into behaving this way. I don’t want that to be the case. Taking the hormones should make my period come so I can start taking the medication to make me ovulate. I have been trying my hardest not to worry about all of this and that's very hard. I mainly want to focus on just being healthy, working out, keeping my blood sugars low and eating right. I figured with changing those things, a baby would happen at some point.

Recently I saw the movie, Did You Hear About the Morgan’s, starring Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant. And I hate that movies make me think about random crazy things. If you haven’t seen it, I won’t spoil it but I decided then that I didn’t want trying to get pregnant to ruin our marriage. That’s not a big part of the movie but it is an underlying cause of some of the things that happen. But here I am again wanting a baby so much, hoping that it happens but deep down inside, worrying that it will never happen for us. It would be so nice for someone to just randomly give me their child...I would gladly find the money for court fees to pay for an adoption. I just can't imagine trying to find the amount of money it costs to have a surrogate or to do an adoption through an agency.

I swear sex education in school is officially worthless. The whole class makes it sound like it's an easy process to get pregnant. If that were the case IVF, and surrogates wouldn't exist.

I should have warned you readers out there, I was overly neurotic the week all of this happened. I’m sure I drove my husband insane.

Our Baby Story (which began March 25th)

Our baby story....So the main obstacle that is keeping us from getting pregnant is the Poly-cystic WHOOZIE WHATS IT. It's actual called Poly-cystic Ovarian Syndrome. To explain what this is.....It’s basically that my ovaries have a scaring over them that makes timing my ovulation harder. I found out recently that this used to be a death sentence for a woman's reproductive system. Today with modern medicine, it's not so much. I can take medication that will regulate my ovulation. We debated the side effects of the medication. One would having more than one baby at the same time. Yea that might be a problem but would take care of our kid needing someone to play with also. The doctor said the scaring would improve with time and really low blood sugars (60-70s) and I’m usually around 130-140, which is normal but not in the lowest range. So we’re trying to keep my blood sugars pretty low, which is sucking. I have had some really low blood sugar mornings which have been bad but I’m trying to get the scaring to improve. So in a couple of weeks I’ll have another ultra sound to see if the scaring is getting better. We’ll see. I’m not stressing about it and I know we will get pregnant when the time is right.