Fall Festivites & Week 12 Update

The "Fall" crock pot dinner was a success last night! We had a delicious beef Brisket with a tomatillo sauce. After roasting 12 hours in the crock pot, the meat was pratically falling apart. We served it on top of either a toasted onion roll or cornbred (wheat free for my sister) with a great spicy sauce to pour over top. So good.
Keeping with the fall theme I served a pre-dinner "festive fall cocktail" a cranberry mojito! (warning this is not low calorie- but it's kind of amazing)
1 Bunch mint leaves
1/4 cup sugar
1 1/4 cup lime juice (buy this don't try to squeeze that many limes!)
3/4 cup cranberry juice concentrate thawed
1/1/4 cup light rum
20 oz sparkling water
Basically you muddle (mash with a wooden spoon in bottom of pitcher) the sugar & mint together and then pour in the rest of the ingredients. It's tart & refreshingly delicious.
For dessert I had two options, but everyone ended up trying a small portion of each.
One was a berry lemon bar- that was actually low fat & calorie. Recipe at www.recipegirl.com which is a new website I stumbled across & where the cranberry mojito came from too. It's not exclusively healthy foods- but some simple & good recipes. Check out their weight watchers section, she has a TON of dinner ideas.
The other dessert was a scoop of Dryer's slow churned Pumpkin Ice Cream with Lite whipped cream on top. It is heavenly! Tastes like pumkin pie without all the calories & fat of the crust.
And I almost forgot the most important part! Other than celebrating fall (everyone wore sweaters & we listened to Frank Sinatra) we were also celebrating mine & Julia's completion of our 12 week bootcamp! I had my final weigh in yesterday and am SO excited to say that I've lost 15.8 pounds, 13.5 inches & 7.6% body fat! Julia has lost 20 pounds & looks AMAZING. It feels so good to see our hard work paying off! Almost even more exciting than that, I tried on my "skinny skinny" jeans this morning (not to be confused with my "skinny" jeans which I fit into about a month ago) and I could zip them! Still too tight to wear in public but I didn't used to be able to pull them past my thighs. So much fun! Happy Thursday... it's almost the weekend!
Chel