Why I Write This Stuff Down

Right now we work full-time, send our kids to school, play soccer, and do all the things "normal" people do, but we want more. We want to show our kids the world and learn along the way. This blog is me trying to figure out how.

Thursday, March 1, 2018

Sigh . . . Whole30

As you can see by the title, I'm trying a month of Whole30. Or do I say I'm trying "a Whole30"? Still working on the lingo.

My understanding of Whole30 is that it is a temporary program where one stops eating certain foods that can cause irritation/inflammation, and at the end of 30 days one can add those things back in slowly to see how they make you feel after this cleansing period. Things like dairy, sugar, grains, legumes, happiness, and shelter.

I'm mostly concerned about sauces. I love creamy dressing and BBQ sauce and honey mustard, and I think I'm going to end up making a lot of sauces. I can get behind that, but I will need to plan my Sundays better. I also think this is going to be an expensive month with more trips to the grocery store than normal.

Day 1/2
I officially started August 1, but on July 31 I did almost everything except I ate my daughter's birthday cake. She only turns 11 once, and Publix marble cake is really outstanding. Now 3/4 of it is just sitting in the fridge, taunting me, but I can be strong. I also polished off some Dove dark chocolate I had in my desk. I foresee this being an issue - I like a small piece of dark chocolate after lunch and dinner, and don't come at me with your carob. I don't really need to eat a whole Snickers or ten mini Twix bars, just one little Dove square. Sigh.

Day 1
Coffee.
Black coffee sucks. I enjoy coffee in the morning with organic sugar and half and half. I tried coconut cream, and it just made my coffee kind of greasy. I tried coconut milk today, and bleh. I guess my next step down will be almond milk, but really? It's like four almonds and a gallon of water. I had an epiphany that Starbucks has almond milk! But after much furious online research, I discovered their almond milk also has added sugar, so screw you Starbucks.

Anyway, for breakfast I sauteed some zoodles (hate that stupid word) in ghee (which is mostly butter - how is it allowed?), and then scrambled two eggs in the pan with them. Dee-lish. Lunch was some tuna I made with mayo, chopped onions and yellow peppers, salt and pepper, and a ton of spinach and arugula with homemade vinaigrette. I also have an apple and some almonds and pomegranate seeds for snacks.

Dinner was a salad at MOD Pizza - they have lots of toppings, and the nutritional info on their website is really great. I had so many toppings, and they had olive oil and vinegar as an option. I didn't ask if the vinegar was sulfite-free, because shut up. It was delicious. I can see I will get tired of salads sooner than later, but my kids love to go to MOD, so it's a good option for me.

My kids and I went to a boxing class at the gym, and I was starving afterward, but I just didn't have any convenience food. I ate some almonds and a bit of sunflower seed butter (meh), but I really wanted to get a little bowl of some kind of finger food and chow down. I need to do more prep of some kind. Before Whole30 I would have had a cheese stick or chocolate milk after a workout, so I'll have to do some research.

Day 2
Coffee.
Today I felt a little hung over when I woke up - just kind of foggy and tired. Last night's boxing class sort of kicks my butt, so that may be it. I also didn't eat as many calories as I could have, so I don't know.

Breakfast and lunch were the same as yesterday. I think I can handle these being the same, at least the same for a week at a time. I'll make some egg muffins this weekend and figure out a different lunch thing for next week. My office had a lunch and learn today catered by Moe's, and I was really hoping to swipe some guacamole, but there wasn't any. Just as well, because those chips are my kryptonite. For dinner we had boiled shrimp, cabbage, roasted potatoes, grape tomatoes, and maybe something else. I made this BBQ sauce recipe because I NEED CONDIMENTS, and it was pretty good. We just dipped our shrimp in it like ketchup.

Day 3
Coffee wasn't as bad - I had some black coffee at home (awful stuff) and I had a little more at work with coconut milk, which is just OK. Still not working for me - I might have to try almond milk creamer, which is a sentence I never thought I'd say. The coconut milk is just kind of greasy.

For breakfast I made the same scrambled eggs and zucchini I've had all week, but this time Drew ate it with me, and that helped somehow. For lunch I went to a restaurant for the first time on Whole30, and it wasn't so bad. I was worried about being THAT customer who asks a million questions and makes the server crazy, but I just asked for a few things left out of my salad, just grill my salmon with salt and pepper and please bring oil and vinegar. And it was spectacular! I'm concerned about missing all kinds of foods, but I hadn't given much thought to getting tired of making every single thing I have to eat. It was nice to go out with friends and just enjoy lunch. Plus one of the other diners is doing some other kind of weird diet for a month, so we had a lot to talk about. Food weirdos unite!

UPDATE:
I quit, obviously. I made it 14 days. Two weeks. 42 boring, crappy meals. I just never really felt like I had the hang of it. I would prep what felt like a ton of food on Sunday, and then Sunday night at dinner I would still feel like I had nothing to eat. I really wanted to eat with my family.

I did have a rally on day 13 where I posted a photo of my meal prep on Instagram and FB and felt really good about life in general and my ability to maintain a version of Whole30 (I added beans back in over that weekend because I just got so sick of eating meat). Then when I woke up on Day 15, I wanted avocado toast. And we had good french bread and a perfectly ripe avocado. And with that, Whole30 was done.

I learned so much about what kind of food I want to eat during that two weeks that it was worth it, but I'll never try it again. I really did hate it, but I needed to accept meal prep as a part of the Whole30 lifestyle and be done with it. It really isn't made for vegetarians, which they tell you in the books and website. I thought I could eat some eggs, seafood and a bit of chicken here and there and be OK, but I got sick of everything so quickly. If I don't eat chicken or cauliflower or freaking coconut aminos for six months I'll be fine.

SECOND UPDATE:
Six months later I'm giving this a second thought. Never say never, right? I'm starting to think I can do it, and it bugs me that I didn't finish. I've never gone back to my previous level of cheese consumption, so giving up that isn't an issue. I also didn't have as hard a time cutting bread/carbs as I thought, and I'd love to eat less sugar. Maybe I'll just modify it to something I can more easily follow and go from there. I will say I was never hungry and I ate a TON of food on Whole30. I lost a bunch of weight last year and now I'm trying to figure out how to maintain, so I keep coming back to this. I just have to figure out coffee.

Thursday, February 22, 2018

Instant Pot, We Hardly Knew Ye

I was on the Instant Pot train for a couple of years at least. I was fascinated by them and thought for sure I would love one and use it all the time. Growing up vegetarian in the south in the 80's, I had to cook most of my own food, and I read many recipes and articles telling me that a pressure cooker was integral to my very existence. BUT it was also likely to explode and kill me and my whole family, so I never bought one. Then my mother-in-law saw them on sale before Christmas and decided to give one to each of her three sons, and voila, a pressure cooker entered my kitchen.

It sat in the box on the floor for weeks because it's enormous, and we were a little intimidated by it. I finally unboxed it, washed all the parts, put it together, and made white rice, and it was the best freaking rice I have ever had. All told it wasn't any faster than making it in a pot on the stove because it takes a little time to come up to pressure and then to come back down, but still the rice was amazing.

In the back of my mind I thought "maybe a rice cooker would be just as good" (and my husband thought it, too), but we made a few more things in it to see how versatile it really is. We cooked chicken breasts from frozen, and that was handy because we had forgotten to take them out of the freezer. BUT the pot took a long time to come up to pressure (because we filled it with giant chicken-shaped ice cubes), and we usually plan better, so needing to cook something frozen is unusual for us. They were good, but they were not a revelation.

My husband made a whole chicken in it once, and again the meat tasted good but the skin was yucky, like it would be in a slow cooker. I've read many recipes that say you can just pop it in a pan and under the broiler! But the whole point is supposed to be that this thing is autonomous, so that option annoyed me and we didn't do it. Mostly because a whole chicken is hard to handle and we didn't want to get more dishes dirty.

We made rice again and maybe one other thing that I forgot, but by the time we'd used it for a couple of weeks, my husband and I came to the conclusion that it is not the small appliance for us for several reasons:

  • As I mentioned above, the thing is huge. We don't have space for it to live on the counter, and it's too big for all of our cabinets, so we have it on an open shelf. Even then we have to take the lid off and store it next to the pot, so it takes up the room of two smaller appliances in our tiny kitchen. Maybe if it had a dedicated counter spot it wouldn't seem like so much work to get it out and then clean all the parts and put it away again.
  • The saute function appealed to me because it saves cleaning a pot. However, this function is awkward to use because the pot is so tall, and the insert doesn't have handles, so it kind of wiggles around while you are sauteing. Plus the final product is strictly OK. Yes, it does a lot of things, but it doesn't do most of them all that well in my opinion.
  • It does cook things quickly, but the times are misleadingly short. It takes a few minutes to come up to pressure (sometimes more than a few), and it takes a while for the pressure to release naturally. You can hand-release the pressure, but that scares me a little and I haven't done it enough to know when it's a good idea and when it isn't. My point is that "You can cook frozen chicken breasts in 12 minutes" is technically true, but the whole thing takes longer than that and you can't really walk away.
  • The keypad is not intuitive in any way. 
  • You can't mess around with your food while it's cooking. Drew and I both like to check in with things while they are on the stove or even in the slow cooker. We like to stir them, taste them, adjust seasonings, check for doneness, etc. You can't do any of those things with the Instant Pot, you just lock the lid and hope for the best. This cuts out a lot of what makes cooking worth it for us, and that just isn't the kind of cook we have in our kitchen.
  • We plan out most of our meals each week and post them on the fridge, so it's incredibly rare for us to come home and wonder what is for dinner. This thing seems perfect for people who don't plan well and need something fast at the end of the day. Again, that's not us.
  • We are not comfortable leaving it alone all day and programming it to come on while we are not around, which means every time we use it we have to be in the kitchen or nearby the entire time, and that doesn't work for us. I'm perfectly happy turning on the crock pot in the morning and coming home to something delicious that cooked all day. Plus the Instant Pot is so sealed that you don't really smell anything while it's working - I can see how that would be a plus for some people, but we love to smell dinner cooking all day. 
  • The whole process just seems sort of cold because you're closing everything up in this heavy-duty capsule, and you can't see or smell what's inside. The aesthetics just don't appeal to us.

Again, the rice is fantastic, and we will probably buy a much smaller rice cooker, but the Instant Pot is not for us.

UPDATE: Still not for us. Our dog has had a stomach bug or something for the last few days, and I made some rice for her last night at 8:30 because it seems to calm her digestion. I considered using the Instant Pot for .5 seconds, but the thought of hauling it out on the counter and taking all the parts and pieces out to wash didn't appeal to me at all. I just made it in a pot and that was that.