spaghetti, tomatoes, basil

Update on My Second Week of Meal Planning

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Below are the meals I’ve planned last week. Second week of meal planning went well. Getting better at sticking to our grocery list. 

Green salad with Stir Fried Pork.

This time, I marinated the pork in Chinese wine, a little soy sauce, salt, pepper and a little vinegar and sugar. I also put sesame oil while frying the pork strips. If you want to add ginger while frying, it will taste good too as I had tried it before.

Beef Asado. 

This is marinated beef in tomato sauce and a little soy sauce. I also put carrots and potatoes. This can be for toppings in either green salads or noodles. I also packed some for my hubby’s lunch on one of the days.

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Taiwanese Noodles with Beef.

I missed the beef noodle in Singapore and lately I noticed I’ve been craving Chinese food and so we bought a box of instant Taiwanese dry noodle in Costco. The noodle is quite good with sesame taste. Noodles are cooked in just two minutes. Then I just add the beef asado as toppings since I cooked almost 2 kilos of beef. 

Grilled Red Tilapia.

This is also from Costco. Four big Tilapia. I have put the two pieces for the recipe, fish Sarshado. The other one we ate for dinner and the last piece of fish, I also put in the freezer I usually prepare the grilled tilapia during dinner. I really like the grilled tilapia because it’s so easy to prepare (salt, pepper and lemongrass) and in just 20 minutes it’s cooked. We just grill it in the oven. If you want to try it, make sure to turn the tilapia after 10minutes so that both sides are evenly cooked.

Pork Humba (Bisaya version).

My hubby cooked it J and it lasted for a couple of days. This has salted black beans and banana blossom. It was our first time to try Pork Humba (Bisaya version) and we didn’t quite like it though and so unlikely we will cook it again.

Elbow Macaroni with Shrimps.

Shrimps are my savior specially when I don’t have time to cook at night and I’m so hungry already. This is so easy to prepare and cook. The elbow macaroni can be cooked in just 5 minutes. Stir fry garlic and onion in olive oil and a little butter and fry with the shrimps. Just put the cooked macaroni in the mix and stir. Add a little tomato sauce, salt and pepper and stir for another few minutes and voila, done!

Fruits (Banana, Strawberries, Apple, Blueberries).

I like to add strawberries and blueberries in green salad. Sometimes, I just add apple and a little honey. However, after a couple of days, the fruits are finished. Either we had to wait for grocery time again or we will buy fruits again on the weekend. Usually, we just wait for “grocery day”.

You may have noticed that my weekly meal plan is far from perfect. My goal is to have enough delicious and healthy food specially for lunch as I don’t really have time to cook. Also, both my daughter and hubby pack lunch and so it really needs to be prepared in advance. 

What about you? Love to know how you do your meal planning. 

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My Thoughts on Weekly Meal Planning

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Here’s an update of last week’s weekly meal plan. I said to myself that I will prepare a meal plan for the week so that I will not have to rush preparing them after done with work. The meal plan I am talking about is mainly for our lunch and dinner. I still prefer to prepare breakfast on a daily basis.

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So here’s what really happened last week. 

Saturday morning we went for grocery shopping because we didn’t have anything left in the fridge to cook. I prepared 3 meals in the afternoon. I was thinking what meals is great for lunch that’s not so tough to prepare or cook but also considered healthy. After careful thought on the ingredients in front of me, I decided to go for the following meals:

Spaghetti in red sauce. This was good for 2.5 meals of 3 persons (myself, hubby and a growing kid).

Pork menudo. This was also good for 2 meals of 3 persons.

Garden salad with Pork Tapa as toppings. We ate this for the first 3 nights and hubby and my girl loved it! I prepared pre-marinated pork strip Tapa (Taal version)The best tapa in the world (in my opinion haha). If you want to know more about the recipe. Let me know in the comments and I’d be happy to share it. 

After doing all the grocery, prepping and cooking I finished the whole thing exactly at 6pm. Super tired but ended feeling very fulfilled and happy.

My thoughts on the whole weekly meal plan is that it can absolutely help ease the load during weekdays. You’ll have more time to relax after work like doing exercise, spending time with your kids or spouse. Last week, I had time with my hubby and daughter to play basketball and we played for 2 times last week! So really, planning ahead helps a lot. I am so looking forward to improve on this over time. 🙂

Do you have a systematic meal plan that’s already working for you? I’d love to read your story. 🙂

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Working Full-Time Mom Routine

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Ok, so now that I’ve started working full time again, my daily routine suddenly changed from organising mostly on daily house chores and learning more on how to  build this website to now more focus on building and planning on how I can execute my job responsibilities and KPI’s associated with it.

Things are really overwhelming. Time seems to fly fast and now I wish to have more personal relaxation or self care time. But it’s not going to be for a while. At this point, I should say I am figuring out still how to effectively use my time beyond my office hours duty. 

So, after days of working remotely full time, my mind is taking consciously and mapping the best possible schedule or routine that will work best for me being a working mom, a wife and a mother.

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Below are the top two things I am considering to have a scheduled routine or plan:

  1. Work on the weekly meal plan. Although, i feel this is really going to be very challenging. For one, this entails that I need to have at least a half day to prepare the meals and another 1.5 hours perhaps to do all the grocery shopping. So if I do this, i will have at least full day and this leaves me on finding more hours for other house chores and of course time with my husband and my daughter.
  2. Consider on waking up earlier than I usually wake up. Perhaps one hour earlier. The extra hour would be for my “personal” time – 15mins prayer/adoration and 15mins motivation, 15mins exercise and 15mins professional dose of inspiration

If you have a smart scheduled already designed that’s working well for you, pls comment below, I’d love to know more!

And yah, I am going to share what happened the week after. If those two were successful or not. Wish me luck!

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How to Embrace the Imperfection of Your Past

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One thing I learned today is that the best way to liberate myself is to allow myself to accept who I am…and who I am not. It is ironic to think that the very thing that makes me “imperfect” as a person, is also the very thing that will make me feel complete and whole. Nothing more, nothing less. 

The very thing that holds me back from the pains of my past, are actually the keys to my liberation and eventually to have that feeling again of “Yes, I am moving forward. Yes, I have accepted the imperfection of my past and I’ve forgiven the people who have hurt me and the people I have hurt.  And now I am permitting myself to just look back and just let go.

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A lot of times we bury ourselves to quickly let go of the imperfections of our past only to circle back and hurt ourselves again. Because we did not allow ourselves to really look back, mourn from the imperfection for a little while and have that renewed strength. And so really the first step to move forward and completely let go is to embrace the imperfection of our past.

Here are some suggestions on how you can embrace the imperfection of your past:

  1. Seek to strengthen your spiritual being. It doesn’t matter who you call “up”. The important thing here is that you are aligning your present moment by recognising that there is someone or something up there higher and greater than you. For me I call it “God”. I seek Him by listening to songs of praises, reading bible passages in my bible mobile app, and by talking to Him silently.
  2. Paint the picture of the past for the last time. By doing this, you are giving your body and mind the power to move past the judgement of your past. You recognise that the past is something you can’t control and therefore it is something you can’t hold on. There is no advantage on dwelling on the past except to recollect and yearn for learning.
  3. Ask yourself, “What have I learned from that experience? What was in there that I can learn from that can improve my situation now? Is it serving me well now? Answers to these prompts will guide you intentionally to let go of your past in a meaningful way.

How did you overcome and embrace the imperfection of your past? Leave a comment below. I’d love to hear your story.

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Time Heals All Wounds

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Do you believe in this saying, time heals all wounds? Those words seem to carry more weight but it is definitely so much easier to just read them as they are and just let it flow and drift to where it’s supposed to be or mean.

But I linger on those words again. What do those words really mean? The more I try to absorb what it means, the harder it is to understand. Then, after much contemplation in my brain, it starts to ring a bell. I hope it really does. I hope that time really heals all wounds.

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As i ponder on the thought, I am realising how time seems to move so slow when one is trying to heal a wound. The brain cells move fast as the heart tries to catch up. Yes, I’d like to think that time heals all wounds.

Come to think of it, when you were heartbroken, beaten and crashed, you would probably say your greatest friend is time. It doesn’t matter what happened in the past. “Learn to leak your own wounds”. Let God renew your spirit and strength.

Why do humans fail and get wounded? The simple answer is that…so we will all learn how to pick ourselves up.

Here are some of the things you can do in the process of healing:

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  • Own your space. As you are figuring out the best way to pick yourself up, this is also the best time to take your space and really own it. More often, people want to quickly want to forget what happened in the past by associating themselves to their friends or family, talking and hanging out with them in the hope to fill the time. This time, do yourself a favour to just be in the moment. Grieve if you must. Cry louder if it makes you feel better. Write in your journal if it suits you. Listen to a song or simply pray if you feel you needed it. But during this time, allow yourself to feel the emotions flow in your entire body.

If you ignore the pain, the pain will come to haunt you again. Maybe not soon but perhaps in the future and when that happened, you would realise that the pain was still there. Yes the pain will not go away completely. But it will change you. The pain will only be healed when you allow it to be…naturally…from the inside of you.

  • Build a good foundation. Much like building a house, you want to build a good foundation. This foundation is your “being”. You are starting anew and experience thought you well. This is a good time to remember and revisit the values that you feel are important to you. When people are consumed either by happiness or pain, they may ignore their own values to please people or because the situation calls for it that they allowed a situation contradicting to their values to take over. As you allow yourself to complete healing, it is crucial to recognise your most protected values that makes you as a human being.

It is much harder and costly to renovate a house later on. So why now take this golden opportunity to redesign your life and set a good foundation.

  • Welcome visitors. Towards healing and starting anew, you would soon realise that you are more open to receiving new people into your life. You are more careful in choosing to invite visitors in your house. You are wiser because you have owned your “space” and set a good foundation. Good people will naturally be attracted to you because you radiate to the people that probably holds a similar space and protects the same values as you do.
  • Let go completely and let time heal your wounds. Trust the process. Pray always.

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“Know Thyself.” Your One True Guide to Finding a Meaningful Life…and be a beacon of light to others! 

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I will share with you how knowing yourself first can be your only guide in formulating and composing a meaningful life and how this can lead you to be a beacon of light to others. By it, I mean serving God by being a servant.

You can never be others! You are unique. Therefore, don’t try to be someone else or be somebody else.

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As you go through the journey of knowing yourself, it is easy to get lost in the world of others with social media buzz. You will see the accomplishments of other people whom you follow or even admire in the process of getting to know your true self. You unconsciously copy someone else’s. It is normal. You will experience this as you try to draw inspiration from others.

There is nothing to be ashamed of about trying to be someone else because you wanted to be a better person. Just bear in mind that you are in the process of knowing who you are. You can be mindful of this by writing your daily thoughts and inspiration.

Here are some of the steps you can do to start:

1. Write down the desires of your heart. Start with your personal goals. What is that one thing in life that you wish you could be or have? The more precise your goals are, the better.

2. Next, ask yourself, how would you feel when you already accomplished your goal? Think about how that one personal goal can move and change you as a person.

3. Write down your most important values. Before you get too excited and move on, this next step is the most crucial thing in your journey towards achieving that goal. Whatever your values and principles in life you uphold and treasure, be sure to write them down.

If you treasure family time, then be sure to write it down boldly. If you value integrity, include it in. Your values and principles are your guiding light to where your purpose is.

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4. Continuously be kind to yourself. In the process of knowing yourself, you will experience being overwhelmed by things you feel strongly concerning. It is the same feeling when trying to get to know someone, like a friend or a partner. Being brutally honest in facing yourself is the best thing in the world.

At first, it can be scary. You will come across shame, resistance, awe, and other things you might be experiencing for the first time. You will be very emotional at first. However, it is a beautiful feeling you can ever experience. Relish the moment. You can write them down in your journal.

5. Accept yourself. Admitting that you are someone unique, for the first time in your life. You can dig deeper into finding your true self and drawing from that strength of knowing who you are, is your greatest asset. That is your core being speaking to you. Your authentic you, telling you to use your voice, asking you to be who you are. Be happy knowing who you are and using that to affect others positively. You are unique with true gifts and talents.

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7. Love yourself. Getting to know your true self while you strive to continue to accept who you are and what your actual voice is. You will get passed through that inhibition that you set in yourself for a long time. You will be ready for your “real journey” and purpose. You will welcome life each day in a meaningful way.

8. Lastly, Remember to be a beacon of light. It doesn’t matter how you perceive the meaning of a beacon. It simply means you will have the strength of serving God by serving others.

Know Thyself is the easiest and the most challenging way of creating a meaningful and purposeful life that not only affects your own life but others as well. If you are still in doubt of where you want to be, what career you want to pursue, or you still have that inhibition, I challenge you to begin your journey by knowing yourself first. You can start today. You can start now. I am happy to read your success story, so remember to share it!

“He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened.”

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