Sloppy Joes & Corn Salad

All recipes are part of the Healthy Calendar adventure!.

My first Nutrition class happened! I am very excited about the class, AND it turns out I do have a friend in the class after all! It's a friend I went to SU with, who they apparently screwed over regarding general credits, and this class will complete her degree. We're both excited that we have a friend in the class and that we can safely walk together to the cars, since the class is out at 10PM. This also further proves the fact that I DO in fact know everyone in town, and I really can't go anywhere without seeing someone I know! Maybe I should run for public office...

The teacher seems cool, judging by the fact that he didn't go on a diatribe about what normal human behaviors irk his psychoses (I seriously had a professor once say if we yawned in class we were in trouble), or spend an hour overviewing the syllabus.

We had a basic explanation of the two projects this semester (more on those later) and then had a short lecture about the basic basics of nutrition. Every time he got into any detail he stopped and said, "Well, we'll get into that another day", and I just wanted to shout, "No, NOW, I want to leeeeeearn!".

That's never actually happened to me before, so I'd say that's a good sign of my future. Generally in Previous College, I would leave the first day saying, "*groan* This is going to suck!", even for classes in my major...Of course, to be fair, having only one remedial class instead of juggling four or five upper-level classes is quite a difference. Ah, well, ON TO THE FOOD!

Healthy Calendar kicks off the new year with Sloppy Joes and Corn Salad. I was wary of this because I'm pretty sure I've eaten Sloppy Joes once in my life, and I hated it. I don't remember if it was because it was so 'sloppy' or because of the taste, but I've never been compelled to make or eat these since.

I had one last-ditch strategy to make these palatable, and that was to change the ground beef in the recipe to ground turkey. I'm sure this will come as no surprise to you guys by now, but I loved it! Seriously, ground beef is horrendous, and more expensive and more fatty than turkey.

So I cooked the turkey, added the onions, and the garlic. Then I added tomato sauce, water, diced tomatoes, mustard, Worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper, and simmered for a while.

Meanwhile, I made the corn salad. I thawed some frozen corn and mixed it with some basil, a green bell pepper, and a red bell pepper. There is also supposed to be red onion, but Sean has a weird reaction to raw red onion (oh noes, now the world will know his Kryptonite). I forgot this fact until after I cut the red onion and was too lazy to cut up a different onion, so I omitted onion entirely. The dressing is made of balsamic vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper. I believe I gave it a splash of lemon juice as well.

Serve the "Joe" mix on buns and enjoy! The next day we mixed together the Joe mix and the salad and ate it right out of the bowl. This was good because we cut out the starch of the bun, considering we got enough from the corn.

Here is a picture displaying the awesomeness of my new camera!