Greek Pizza

When I was younger, my mom and dad worked really hard to give me the best life possible and sometimes they needed a break. Especially my mom (from the kitchen) – I think she dropped the ball completely by going to SUNY Oneonta and majoring in Economics. She should have opened a restaurant and gone to culinary school!

To take a break from the kitchen, my mom would order Pizza Hut every Friday night. I remember her ordering two or three large pepperoni pizzas because I used to eat three slices in one sitting – EEK!

Now that I know I never have to give up my favorite foods, I started trying different kinds of pizza. Recently, I ordered a Greek pizza and I cannot describe how AWESOMELY DELECTABLE it was! It was a white pizza with Feta, roasted red peppers tomatoes and olives… MMM MMM! Since I don’t want to order out every other night, I came up with this recipe I can make at home whenever I crave some pizza.

Greek Pizza

Ingredients:

• Feta cheese

• Red peppers

• Shredded cheese

• Pizza dough

• Thinly sliced tomatoes

• Spinach

Directions:

1. Cut the feta cheese into medium sized blocks

2. Cut the red pepper into medium sized strips

3. Flatten pizza dough an place on pan lightly greased with cooking spray

4. Place shredded cheese, feta cheese, red peppers, spinach and tomatoes on pizza dough

5. Bake pizza at 275°F for 30-45 minutes

When I was younger, my mom and dad worked really hard to give me the best life possible and sometimes they needed a break. Especially my mom (from the kitchen) – I think she dropped the ball completely by going to SUNY Oneonta and majoring in Economics. She should have opened a restaurant and gone to culinary school!

To take a break from the kitchen, my mom would order Pizza Hut every Friday night. I remember her ordering two or three large pepperoni pizzas because I used to eat three slices in one sitting – EEK!

Now that I know I never have to give up my favorite foods, I started trying different kinds of pizza. Recently, I ordered a Greek pizza and I cannot describe how AWESOMELY DELECTABLE it was! It was a white pizza with Feta, roasted red peppers tomatoes and olives… MMM MMM! Since I don’t want to order out every other night, I came up with this recipe I can make at home whenever I crave some pizza.

Greek Pizza

Ingredients:

• Feta cheese

• Red peppers

• Shredded cheese

• Pizza dough

• Thinly sliced tomatoes

• Spinach

Directions:

1. Cut the feta cheese into medium sized blocks

2. Cut the red pepper into medium sized strips

3. Flatten pizza dough an place on pan lightly greased with cooking spray

4. Place shredded cheese, feta cheese, red peppers, spinach and tomatoes on pizza dough

5. Bake pizza at 275°F for 30-45 minutes

Daily Clensing Gel from Adonia

This cleansing gel is incredibly unique because you don’t need to use any water to get it to lather like other cleansers. The gel is actually an incredible blend of 13 or 14 different organic oils. When I first started using the gel, I made the mistake of trying to mix it with water (I swear sometimes the bleach from my blond highlights in high school scrubbed part of my brain!). The best results come from splashing water on your face and then drying your hands BEFORE you put two or three drops of the cleanser in the palm of your hand. Then, you gently massage the cleanser into your skin in a circular motion for 45 to 60 seconds and rinse off.

After the first use, it felt like I had dipped my face in cashmere! I couldn’t believe how soft and supple and soothed this cleanser left my skin… Now I can’t imagine using ANYTHING ELSE!!

A bottle of the cleansing gel is about $25 and depending on how much you use, it can last 30 to 60 days.

Healthy French Toast

French toast is one of my all-time favorite breakfast recipes. I remember waking up early on Sunday mornings to help my mother make a big batch that would last two or three days. At first my mother used white bread, eggs and whole milk. Slowly, but surely, I noticed that my mom started using healthier options like whole wheat bread and skim milk.

As I moved through mt adolescence and early 20s, I had come to “accept” the fact that French toast was a “forbidden” food because of the carbohydrate content. Then I had an epiphany: carbohydrates exist because we need them! How carbohydrates affect your health revolves around your willingness to educate yourself about the different kinds of carbohydrates and your willingness to experiment with them.

Here’s a basic French toast recipe I use regularly that is under 300 calories (which includes ¼ cup of syrup!) and keeps me full for about 3 hours.

French Toast

Ingredients:

• 2 eggs (Egg Beaters)
• ¼ cup of soy milk (optional)
• 2 tsp of cinnamon & 1 tsp of ginger
• 2-4 slices of you favorite bread (I use whole wheat or multi-grain bread)

Directions:

1. Mix egg, milk, ginger and cinnamon in a bowl
2. Dip 1 slice of bread in mixture until covered
3. Place bread in a pan burning on medium heat and let it brown to taste

Adonia Organics’ Brow Revive and Lash Alive

Brow Revive and Lash Alive are two UNBELIEVABLE serums that undo the all-too common faux-pas of waxing your eyebrows way too thin and wearing mascaras that dry out your eyelashes and cause them to fall out.

About two years ago, I regularly went to my favorite nail salon to get my eyebrows waxed and I thought they looked amazing. Then I couldn’t get them done as often and I realized that I had totally jacked my face up by making my eyebrows pencil thin. Here’s what my eyebrows looked like in January 2013:

And this is what they look like as of January 22, 2014 (I’ll post an updated picture when I get my brows properly shaped ☺):

When it comes to mascara, I’ve never been one to wear it too often because I had barely any eyelashes. New reports that traditional mascaras can actually impede your efforts to regrow your eyelashes make me not want to mascara ever! But, I digress. Here’s how few eyelashes I had, again, back in January 2013:

These are my eyelashes one year later:

You can see how much thicker and and fuller they are! Whenever, I look at the before shot, I flash back to how often I’d get all sorts of crap in my eyes. Now, the only issue I have is whenever my eyelashes are at the end of their natural growth cycle and start to fall out randomly.

I have to warn you that your eyebrows and eyelashes may not respond as well to the serums as mine did, but since they are 100% ORGANIC, I highly recommend that you give them a try!!

Let me know what you think about my results and fill me in on what kind of results you get when you start using Brow Revive and Lash Alive.

My Weight Loss Journey

Like many women I’ve struggled with my weight my entire life and now I’m realizing that weight loss is a journey similar to the story of the tortoise and the hare: slow and steady wins the race.

I’ve tried so many diets, it’s borderline disgusting. Our bodies are temples and we should pamper them every chance we get. However, with the plethora of diet manuals available today it can be very difficult to distill what you feel most comfortable with. Here’s a glimpse into how I developed my Aphrodite Attitude about weight loss.

Last year, I truly committed to changing the way I look at how I nourish my body and my epiphany came about in the most unexpected way. Last spring I was walking to the library and I wasn’t paying attention to the sidewalk in my neighborhood; the people in the community planted trees on the curb and while the theory is awesome, the reality is a total nightmare, but I digress. As I was walking to the library, my sneaker got caught in one of the cracks from a tree that made the sidewalk uneven and I landed really hard on my knees. Not only were my knees swollen, the fall had taken off a good 2 or 3 layers of skin from my right knee. I managed to see a doctor and get a brace to help control the swelling and it took about three weeks for my knees to feel better. Little did I know that my struggle was just beginning…

After I recovered from the fall I started getting back into my old routine of walking around the neighborhood to go to the library or grocery store and get some exercise. One day as I walked home from Rite Aid, my lower back completely gave out. Thank God my dad was already coming to watch football with me and was able to get me to the emergency room. The doctor told me I had a back spasm and sent me home with a prescription for ibuprofen and told me to get at least three days’ bed rest.

I’m the type of person that hates sitting still so after I finished the required bed rest and took the ibuprofen to ease the pain and went back to my normal routine. The first couple of days were great, but when I had to accompany my dad at the hospital for a procedure to prep him for dialysis all hell broke loose! We got to the hospital an hour early and the procedure took about 2½ hours. After the procedure, I met my dad in the recovery room and sat with him for a little while. Don’t get me wrong, I love my dad to death and I would do anything for him, but after looking after him in the recovery room for about 45 minutes, by back started to feel like it was on FIRE!! I tried to brush it off, but the pain just kept getting worse and started spreading to my hips. My dad saw how much pain I was in and told me to go back to the car and lay down. You know that kind of pain where you can barely move and you look like you are 90 years old because you’re moving an inch per minute? That’s an understatement about how severe that back injury was. A specialist told me that when I fell on my knees, my body responded with, “WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?!?!” and my lower back and hips locked up to protect me.

Long story short, I spent about 8 months recovering (in total) from that injury and the majority of the time I had to lay in bed to ease the pressure (at least 18 hours for about 5½ months). It turns out that my back injury was a blessing in disguise! During the recovery process, I revamped my diet to accommodate the fact that I couldn’t sit or stand for more than 10 minutes at a time.

Subtle changes to my diet like swapping sweet yogurt for Greek yogurt with granola (when I could get myself out of bed) and drinking protein shakes on my bad days. About three months into my recovery, my friends and family started asking me if I was working out against medical advice because I’d apparently lost a considerable amount of weight. When I told them that I had only tweaked what I ate, they told me to keep it up and suggested that I start writing down the changes I made and what results came of them.

I did just that and the results left me flabbergasted! When I went back to the specialist who diagnosed me, she told me that I had lost 30 pounds in those six months and that my back and hips look like nothing ever happened!

This website is dedicated to dissecting and disseminating the crème de la crème of the goddess-related information out there. I’ll cover things like nutrition, exercise, sex, skin care, makeup and any other topics y’all are interested in.

ENJOY!!

My Makeup Evolution

With so many different brands and types of makeup that are available, it’s very easy to become intimidated and dismiss makeup as a false construct that exists only to help men objectify all of us, but it’s actually one of our best friends in the quest to embrace, develop and maintain our Aphrodite Attitudes! Think about it for a second… Aphrodite would NEVER allow the crazy stuff that’s in our air like car exhaust, pollen and dust near her face, so why should we?! Thankfully, more and more women are adopting that mentality.

I don’t know about you, but I could watch QVC for hours, especially when they are spotlighting Bare Escentuals, Mally Beauty, Josie Maran or Laura Geller. These brands blended my long-time passion for great skin care with my new love of makeup. Josie Maran, for example, is known for having high quality argan oil infused into all of her cosmetics.

Bare Escentuals has been my preferred makeup for about five years now and I thinks it’s a great brand to start with if you are just starting to play with makeup. The minerals are very pigment rich so less is definitely more! A second reason Bare Escentuals is perfect for makeup novice is that many of their kits come with instructional DVDs that will teach you the basics and help you master classic trends like the smoky eye. As much as I am in love with Bare Escentuals, I’m ready to branch out and try other brands.

Seasonal Epiphany

My Aphrodite Attitude may be a little too strong because I expect results from doing the right things at all times. The past month and a half, I’ve been eating very healthy meals with the occasional splurge (I LOVE LOVE LOVE Bethenny’s quip: “I hate the word ‘diet’ has the word ‘die’ in it!”). And I’ve been doing my workouts regularly, but I’ve actually gained weight.

Last night I was whining about this to my mom and she gently reminded me that it is the middle of winter and that my body WILL NOT release any of my excess weight because it wants to protect me from the cold, especially these polar vortexes!

So I’m going to have to put a sign up in my living room from October to April that says: “My extra padding in the winter will melt way and reveal my bikini body in the spring!!” or something to that effect.

Adonia Organics

Organic skin care is my newest obsession! These products feel like silk and they have never turned my skin into sand paper 🙂

My favorite organic skin care line is Adonia Organics. Adonia is on the forefront of using the incredible anti-aging properties of organic essential oils to help women look more like the women in Greek mythology who had impeccable eyebrows, eyelashes, plump/dewy skin, and so on. Not only that, Adonia has several fabulous products that will reverse common beauty faux-pas like over-waxing your eyebrows or help women grow fuller and thicker eyelashes. It’s a little bit more expensive side, but it’s worth its weight in platinum because it has no synthetic ingredients whatsoever!

Aphrodite

The Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite, should be admired by women around the globe because she KNEW that she was a beautiful woman and would never let any man demean her.

This blog is dedicated to dissecting and disseminating the crème de la crème of the goddess-related information out there. I’ll cover things like nutrition, exercise, sex, skin care, makeup and any other topics y’all are interested in.

ENJOY!!