Beef and brussel stuffed carnival squash

Well, today certainly had its ups and downs. I woke feeling just a little bit of that "new things!" excitement, took all my before measurements and pictures and moseyed down to make breakfast and lunch. Success.  I roasted come carrots and chicken legs and scrambled a couple eggs with smoked salmon. I took my vitamins, got dressed and headed to work.

That's where the down part came in. I hoped to ride the new things high through the day, at least, before the inevitable bout of cravings and miserableness hit me on day two or three. Unfortunately, the headache I've been suffering at work hit immediately and harder than usual (this is another thing I'm hoping to fix, for sure). The first half of this week was pretty rough, emotionally and I'm still regaining control. I was just enough distracted still to not accomplish much today. On top of that, I realized that I didn't check the ingredients in my vitamins before taking them this morning. Turns out, one of them has rice flour AND soy lecithin. Sigh. So now I have to decide if I am starting day one again tomorrow without the lawbreaking vitamins or if I continue taking them as a daily cheat... Hmm. 

But hey, upside! I made a super tasty and simple dinner tonight! Wanna see it?

Beef and brussel stuffed carnival squash

Ingredients

1 carnival squash

1/2 lb ground beef

2 cups Brussels sprouts

S&P 

Preheat oven to 400, cut squash in half and scrape out seeds (save them for roasting!). Place cut side down in a pan and bake for 30-45 minutes, until soft. 

Remove the hard nobs at the end of the Brussels sprouts and slice in half. 

Crumble and brown the beef in a pan. If using grass fed beef, reserve the fat in the pan and remove the meat to a bowl (if using regular beef though, drain the fat and add your own cooking fat to the pan).

Add the sprouts to the fat and cook until easily pierced with a fork. Add back the browned meat and season with salt and pepper to taste. 

Fill the hollow in the center of each squash half with beef and sprout mixture. 

Scoop out forkfuls of delicious!