Seafood and dessert!

Today what I had for lunch was steamed snow crabs and fried shrimp.  According to www.mypyramidtracker.gov, I was able to put in what kind of snow crabs and the amount of quantity I consumed.  They did have steamed, hard shelled crab and I put the option of one snow crab leg, but for the number of servings, I put four, so that is a total of four snow crab legs.  There were a variety of shrimp options from their list but I chose the one that was breaded or battered and fried.  The size of the shrimp were medium shrimps (shelled) and the number of servings that I had consumed were four servings, so a total of four shrimps.

So according to www.mypyramidtracker.gov, this meal was a total of 148 calories, which in my opinion is not that bad.  This meal was very low in calories.  Some tips that I would suggest to make this meal a little healthier, even though I think it is already low in calories, I would eat the snow crab legs with a mixture of lime, salt, and pepper as a dipping sauce and instead of breaded and fried shrimp, I would eat it broiled so that would eliminate all the extra oils.  The way I made the snow crabs legs was simply boil them in hot water until it became fully cooked.  As for the fried shrimp, it was store bought and I just friend them in a frying pan with oil.  If I had the choice to cook the shrimp the other way, I would have boiled it.  Another thing, is that I could have added some vegetables as a side dish, I noticed that I did not technically have a side dish so I would have included some vegetables or rice for a little more carbohydrates.  Overall, this meal was low in calories so it was not that bad.

For this post and so on, I will post up what I had for dessert and today I had cream puffs.  I actually made my own cream puffs and cream puffs are popular among Asian cultures and can be found at many Asian bakeries.  What cream puffs are is that they are actually what they are called, cream filled puffs.  Below is a picture of my own cream puffs that I had made.

I would say that making cream puffs is a very tedious process and takes a while to do but in the end they are deliciously addictive.  My cream puffs were about a teaspoon in size and usually in Asian bakeries they are about the size of a palm of a hand.  The thing about making my own cream puffs is that I could change what goes in it.  For example, the cream consisted of instant vanilla pudding, heavy cream and milk.  To make this dessert a little more figure friendly I used fat free instant vanilla pudding instead of regular instant vanilla pudding, and low fat milk instead of regular whole milk and the heavy cream I kept the same.  The dough was simple, it just consisted of flour, eggs, butter, water, and salt.  But according to www.mypyramidtracker.gov a palm sized cream puff is about 300 calories and mine were only about a teaspoon in size so I am guessing that four of my cream puffs would equal one palm sized cream puff so four tiny cream puffs would equal 300 calories so since I consumed 6 of my cream puffs, it was about 450 calories, which is more than my lunch that I had earlier in the day! But I guess it made up for it because the calories were so low for my lunch.  So, the thing that I would keep in mind whenever I want to eat cream puffs is to eat less and that would make it a little healthier, psychologically.