You came back! You Like me, you really like me!. Great. I appre­ci­ate your loy­alty. Now leave some com­ments it’s the only adult inter­ac­tion I get!

I love com­ing up with new recipes and new ways to try some old-time favorites with a new twist. If you have been fol­low­ing my weight loss jour­ney you know that I have a seri­ous prob­lem get­ting enough pro­tein in my diet.  So, I decided to add a lit­tle ground beef to my menu. The prob­lem is that I really don’t like the taste of meat. It makes me gag to think that I have to eat beef.

So tonight I tried to cre­ate a burger that was more like a Sal­is­bury steak and paired with some of my favorite veg­gies: mush­rooms, onions, and green peppers.

Burger Recipe

Mush­room Sauce:

• 1 pint Baby Bella Mushrooms
• 1 large onion
• 1 large bell pepper

Saute this mix­ture start­ing with the onions and then adding the green pep­pers and then the mush­rooms. Cook on medium until the green pep­pers and mush­rooms have released all of their liq­uids. ( I learned this tech­niques from the Iron Chef com­pe­ti­tions). Remove from pan.

Burger Sea­son­ings (I cook by smell so the mea­sure­ments are all palm –sized)

• Black pep­per
• Ground Thyme
• Paprika
• Gar­lic Powder
• Red Pep­per
• Cumin

In a bowl com­bine all of the dry ingre­di­ents and mix well. Mix half of the dry mix­ture into the ground beef. Form your burg­ers (4) and “flour” each burger patty with the remain­ing dry sea­son­ing  mix. Cook burg­ers in pan (8 min­utes on each side if you like yours well done).

For Sauce

• Mush­room, Onion, Pep­per mixture
• 1 cups of hot water with a beef bouil­lon cube dissolved
• .5 cup of Bal­samic Vinegar

Remove the burg­ers from the pan and add vine­gar and water/broth. With fire on medium scrap bot­tom of pan and mix well. Add MOP mix­ture and bring to a slight boil. Add burg­ers back to pan and cover. Turn fire to low and cook until the mid­dles of the burg­ers are as pink as you want (I like them well-done so it took about 13 min­utes to cook thor­oughly. This will dif­fer based on the thick­ness of your burger)

Serve with mashed pota­toes (I used instant mashed pota­toes and made them with Soy Milk) and a side salad (my salad had baby car­rots, 2 kinds of let­tuce, pep­pers, mush­rooms, and onions). Cover mashed pota­toes and burg­ers with sauce/MOP mixture.

The burger is about 215 calo­ries alone.

*The pic­ture fea­tures a very large burger that I cut in thirds.

Like many web design­ers and social media addicts, I spend a exu­ber­ant amount of time on my com­puter. I usu­ally tell peo­ple “if you want to get in touch with me– skip the phone and email me instead.” After all, talk­ing on the phone requires that I stop doing what­ever it is that I am doing and focus on the phone. Even if I can put a per­son on speaker, it is some­times too cum­ber­some to use and you often lose sound quality.

Now, unlike most peo­ple, I don’t have a cell-phone. Actu­ally, my hus­band and I share a cell-phone. I work from home so spend­ing a lot of money on a mobile phone seems silly when my home phone is cheap, contract-free, and has the best qual­ity ser­vice around. The thing is that I need a busi­ness line– a way of allow­ing clients to get in touch with me with­out giv­ing out my home num­ber on busi­ness cards or on the net.  {read more}

“You did it again? I swear you are so fickle.”

“I’m not fickle. I’m a Virgo! you wouldn’t understand.”

“How do you know…”

“I’m  con­stantly chang­ing and mov­ing and I can’t help it. I know-  I said I would leave the other design up for a while, but I changed my mind. It’s my right. Right?”

“Well then, why the black? Why the change?”

” I was lis­ten­ing to “Back to Black” you know, Amy Whine­house? And I started think­ing that if I had to describe where I am in my life using col­ors, I wouldn’t be able to. All I see are shards of bro­ken crayons melted together from the heat of of my tears.”

“Who talks like this? I can’t fol­low you when you get like this”

“The con­fu­sion is too much for me and I decided that I needed to deal with things in stages. And for me that meant going “back to black”.

“But black is despair. It’s void. It’s empty.”

“For you. For many. But for me, for me, black is  soothing.”

“It would be.”

“Lis­ten, OK. Just lis­ten. When I was a child I would sit in the dark and try to fig­ure out what my next move would be when life got hec­tic and harsh. And as I sorted through the mucky mess that one often gets when too many col­ors mix, my black would be filled with very spe­cific hues. I would see blues, and yel­lows, and greens, almost like they were flood­ing me with clarity.

As I sat today I saw RED. Not angry red. It was more of a fiery amber of pas­sion. And it sud­denly occurred to me that what I’m  miss­ing more than any­thing is pas­sion– that spark that urged me to “do” rather than “stew” and as I looked at my pre­vi­ous blog design I real­ized that I was try­ing to force myself back­wards instead of try­ing to push myself forward.”

“I see. Go on”

“We do that when we get scared about the future, don’t we? We do that because going back is so much safer than going for­ward– we know what’s there already.

I need remind­ing that life moves for­ward but that some­times we have to go back to the basics so that we are grounded before leap­ing. I needed some­thing that would allow me to escape not feel­ing well both phys­i­cally and emotionally.

It is my “Back to Black”. It is my reminder to fly and to RISE. It is where I am right now and what I need to remem­ber. And when I look at it I see my passion.”

“I’ve been wor­ried about you. Some­times this side of you scares me.”

“But I’m good now. I’m back.”

This post is a part of {W}rite-of-passage chal­lenge #7– “Dia­logue”. Here are oth­ers join­ing in this week and you should too.

Back in August of last year I joined ShopRite and Gen­eral Mills in their Partner’s in Car­ing pro­gram. In recog­ni­tion, Gen­eral Mills has included my face, along with the many other blog­gers who also par­tic­i­pated in the pro­gram, on the back of a spe­cial edi­tion of Honey Nut Chee­rios. The box fea­tures the title “Blog­ging Against Hunger” on the front and on the back includes a mosiac of our faces. It went on sale Sun­day, Jan­u­ary 24 and is only avail­able at ShopRite.

The Back­ground

Let me just say for the record that I despise shop­ping. In fact, if I can’t buy it online I will rea­son myself out of need­ing it because the thought of going to a store or a mall freaks me out. When I received an invi­ta­tion to par­tic­i­pate in a Focus Group regard­ing kid’s fash­ion I decided to invite my sister-in-law Renee. She is a new blog­ger over at http://​sah​wannabe​.blogspot​.com (go check her out).

Now my sister-in-law is a shop­per. In fact, she puts the “hop” in “shop­per”. Going shop­ping with her is a prac­tice in insan­ity and patience. She lives for Black Fri­day head­ing out early in the morn­ing and will stay out all day going from store to store. And she likes name brands. I, on the other hand, like budget-friendly. Luck­ily for me her daugh­ter is 5 and my daugh­ter is 3 so I get the ben­e­fits of her love of shop­ping when she passes down clothes to my daugh­ter. For this rea­son I thought that the Focus Group would ben­e­fit from hav­ing such dif­fer­ent shoppers.

Renee and I had the plea­sure of join­ing sev­eral other moms and Maria Bai­ley at the Parigi Group Man­hat­tan offices to dis­cuss high-end children’s fash­ion. I knew noth­ing about the Parigi Group before this event but was excited to learn that the com­pany man­ages the children’s apparel lines Baby Phat, Puma Kids, Aka­demics (Boys), LRG, and Apple Bot­tom brands. In other words, they deter­mine how these prod­ucts are sold, mar­ket­ing, and even designed.

And they wanted our input.

The Clothes

I never heard of LRG before and didn’t real­ize that Apple Bot­tom made clothes for kids. Truth­fully the Apple Bot­tom lined turned me off before I had even seen it because I don’t like what it rep­re­sents. Despite the fact the some of the dresses were cute, to me putting my child in them would be sup­port­ing a brand and a per­son that objec­ti­fies women. The Puma Kids line was my favorite. I am a sporty dress and my daugh­ter (3.5) is far from a girly-girl. The Puma Kids line was cute and com­fort­able. Aka­demics is a great line for boys (unfor­tu­nately the girls line is rep­re­sented by another firm) and there are some shirts that I would def­i­nitely buy for my daughter.

The Dis­cus­sion

What I really enjoyed– apart from see­ing the amaz­ing cloth­ing that these lines offered– was how Sion Betesh, Exec­u­tive Vice Pres­i­dent of Licens­ing and Mar­ket­ing at Parigi, and the sales team really lis­tened to our responses to their ques­tions about fash­ion for chil­dren and social media. We dis­cussed every­thing from how we shop for our chil­dren to where we shopped. We even dis­cussed just how impor­tant social media is in shap­ing our buy­ing deci­sions. It was really inter­est­ing watch­ing the reac­tion from the sales team when they real­ized that social media is as big and impor­tant to us moms as it has become.

For me some of the issues were the embell­ish­ments on the back pock­ets of the girls clothes, the size and place­ment of the logo, func­tion­al­ity of pants for babies in dia­pers (needed snaps down the legs), and not want­ing to see clothes that were actu­ally adult designs scaled down. I think chil­dren need to be chil­dren for as long as pos­si­ble and we as par­ents and fash­ion design­ers should not force them to grow up so fast. Rais­ing girls is so hard and shop­ping for them is so frus­trat­ing when you feel like design­ers look at your child as objects and not as inno­cent kids.

You can go to Twit­ter and get more details about the dis­cus­sion by fol­low­ing the hash­tag #parigifashions

I think it is so impor­tant that we par­ents make our con­cerns heard. So, here are a few of Parigi’s ques­tions. Please feel free to leave your own responses in the com­ment section.

• Who buys the clothes for your children?
• How do you decide what to buy and where to shop?
• Do you like name brands and do you buy them often?
• Do you have brand loy­alty when shop­ping for you chil­dren? How did you “choose” that loyalty?
• Are you more inter­ested in qual­ity or price?
• How does time play into how you shop, where you shop, and what you buy?
• In what ways do you think that Parigi should enter the social networking/media realm? Should it be in a gen­eral kid’s fash­ion capac­ity or one geared more towards spe­cific hap­pen­ings with the brands?

*Dis­clo­sure: We received $100 gift cer­tifi­cates to Macy’s for par­tic­i­pat­ing in the Focus Group. We were not asked to nor required to write about this event and all infor­ma­tion included in my post is from my own notes writ­ten while par­tic­i­pat­ing in the dis­cus­sion. We did not know which Apparel Com­pany we were meet­ing with until we arrived.