Apps for Techies and Leftovers Reinvented!

Today was a hard day, friends.  Since December 13, I have been sleeping in until 8:00 or later.  It’s been nice.  Sleep, get up, drink coffee, catch up on the DVR episodes… but today it was back to reality!  Yes, school started back again and it was hard to drag myself out of bed at 5:45 a.m.  Did any of you start back to work today after a holiday vacation?  How was your day?

One thing that kept me going was knowing that I had leftovers and a way to reinvent them tonight, PLUS a free afternoon/evening to do whatever I wanted!

I have two apps to tell you about today that I think are awesome.  If you are currently exercising or trying to lose weight, I thought these might be helpful to you!

Now, I am an iPhone user, after many years of owning a Blackberry.  As a BB user, I would always get frustrated when the cool apps weren’t available to me.  So I am going to apologize in advance to any of you who can’t access these apps.  I don’t know if they are available on the Android or Blackberry (or other) Markets.  These are definitely available to you iPhone users, though!

1. iMapMyFITNESS

I am absolutely loving this app!  This is great to have if you are a runner or a walker.  My favorite thing is the “record workout” feature.  When I go out for a walk, I tell it to record my workout.  It finds my location via GPS and then tracks my walk.  I can see a map of the streets and it records my route, how fast I am going, how much time has elapsed, and more!

At the end, you can view a summary of your workout and save it for another time.  This is helpful when you are walking different routes in your neighborhood and you get home and you think, “Wonder how far I went?”

By the way, it also allows you to pause and resume a workout.  Today, I walked about 1 1/4 miles, and then needed to make a stop at the grocery store.  I paused my workout when I entered the store and resumed it when I left!

It was a little awkward to walk with this bag, but it was a great afternoon for a walk/run!

2.  Weight Watchers Bar Code Scanner

This is for any of you out there who are WW members.  If you are a paying member of WW (pay for monthly pass, online membership, or e-tools) then you can download this app and use it for free.  You can scan the bar codes of the foods you have at home (or while you are grocery shopping).  Within seconds, you get the product information with the points values! 

Plus, everything you scan is saved in your history, so if you need to record that food option more than once, you’ve got it!  Almost everything in my pantry (with the exception of private brands—such as Harris Teeter brands) was in the database!  So cool and convenient!

Now, on to the leftovers. (If you are just joining me, I am participating in Eat-In Month during January, so you’ll be seeing a lot more cooking and cost-effective meals this month!)

You may remember my pork shoulder roast from yesterday that I slow-cooked all day.  Well, seeing as how we are only a family of 3, we didn’t finish all of it yesterday!  But… I have found that we (i.e. the husband) are not great at eating our leftovers.  So I started thinking about a way to reinvent the leftover pork into a new meal.  Suddenly, it came to me: barbecue on rolls! 

The only problem?  We had no BBQ sauce in the house.  I started wondering… I bet it wouldn’t be difficult to make my own BBQ Sauce.  After a little searching, I came across this recipe on www.allrecipes.com.  It had great reviews, and we had almost all the ingredients on hand, so I gave it a whirl.

The verdict?  Delicious!  Hubby and I both agree completely that this was better than any store-bought sauce we could have bought!  I threw the leftover pork+sauce in the crock pot, turned it to HIGH, and in just a few hours, we had sweet and tangy BBQ Pork!

We served it up on hot dog buns.  Somehow we always have extra because Sadie always opts to have hers sans bun, so this was an easy way to use up the buns and not spend extra money.

I ate mine open-faced with peas and leftover collards.  :)

YUM!  If you’ve never made your own BBQ Sauce, you should give this one a try!

I like to think about cost effectiveness.  This pork roast cost $9 (on sale—score!).  We still have leftovers, so I figure there were 3 meals from that meat.  That’s $3 a meal.  The steamed peas were under $1 (also on sale) and the BBQ Sauce cost about $0.75 for the amount I made.  The buns and collards were leftover, so I count them as free.  That’s a meal for a family of 3 for under $5.  Sweet!

If you want to read more about how I grocery shop, click here to view my post on how to spend less on groceries.