Here We Go Again

I'm starting a new week on the Whole30. I went to the store today AFTER I ate breakfast to prevent hunger purchases.  In case you're curious, the menu this week will include: 

Hamburger Steaks and Asparagus

Salmon and Asparagus or Green Beans and a Sweet Potato

Hibachi Chicken Stir fry

Sheet Pan Chicken Fajitas  with homemade Taco Seasoning 

Leftovers for lunch or tuna salad in an orange bell pepper.  

Last week's meals were all delicious.  I didn't love, love, love the cabbage rolls, but I still liked them enough that I'll be eating them again for dinner tonight.  The sheet pan gumbo and the bell pepper tacos were both keepers that I will definitely make again.  So if you're looking for something fun, those recipes are from my previous post.   

It's nice that I didn't have any tears last week when I realized what I would be eating for a lunch or dinner.  I didn't throw anything away in disgust.  Did I still want some cake and ice cream after my healthy meal? You can bet your sweet @ss I did, but it's impossible to have cake and ice cream when you don't have cake and ice cream in your house.  That's going to be my new bestselling diet book.  It will be called the "Throw That Unhealthy Stuff Away" diet.  You go through your house and either donate or throw away all the unhealthy things in your house.  Brownie mix? Bye.  An entire cake you ordered in a moment of weakness because you love cake? It's gotta go.  Instead, you are left with some vegetables and some proteins and maybe some fruit.  Eat it or starve.  What's that, you say? That's already a step in most diet books? Foiled again! 

The Whole30 tells you not to weigh yourself for the whole 30 days.  Right.  Like that's happening.  I still weigh myself a few times a week, and while my weight hasn't really changed, oddly enough I do feel somewhat better.  I have less general aches and pains.  I feel clearer mentally.  I feel tough when I really want to order something out for dinner and instead I cook the meal I had planned.  So, those are good accomplishments so far.

I have no amazing blog magic today, but I did want to update things after the week.  If there are things you want to ask or want me to touch on in future posts, let me know! 

New Week, A New Cast of Characters on the Menu

 Hello Sunday! Today was my shopping day to stock up for the week.  I cleaned out my freezer yesterday, which was cathartic.  However, I also learned I have quite a bit of ground beef in there I should use.  The ground beef backlog is a result of me buying ground beef with the intentions of cooking a dinner.  Then, the date approaches that I either have to cook it or else suffer disastrous ground beef poisoning.  If I don't feel like cooking, and I don't feel like holding out for food poisoning later in the week, I just freeze it.  Apparently, I've not felt like cooking quite a bit over the last several months judging by the ground beef of empty promises sitting in my freezer.  

I did some searching yesterday for meals that need ground beef, and I added a couple to the menu this week.  I also have a pack of chicken sausages I need to use up, and a steak thawing in the fridge.  So, that leads me to this week's menu: 

Tonight: Steak and asparagus. 

Monday/Tuesday: Taco Stuffed Bell Peppers. I'm pretty excited about this one.   This will also create leftovers for lunch and probably dinner tomorrow.  

Wednesday: Cajun Bake with the chicken sausage and shrimp.  

Thursday: Depending on leftovers from the week, I will either cook Unstuffed Cabbage Rolls this night or Friday.  

It's not my best planning because I have two bell pepper heavy meals and two ground beef meals. So I had to try and juggle between having too much bell pepper in a row or too much beef in a row. Oh well.  It is what it is.  When I post a blog on Thursday complaining that I don't have enough diversity in my diet, remind me of this moment. 

There was something else I was reminded of today at the store that I feel like I've learned before.  I like to go shopping early in the morning to avoid crowds and the accumulated COVID-19 cloud that builds up throughout the day in the store.  This morning, after walking Taz, I faced a crossroads.  Stay home a little longer to cook and eat breakfast or just hightail it to the store.  

"Allison, just go to the store. Get there and get home.  You aren't hungry now.  You won't be hungry when you're there and make irrational purchases. You need to get in and out before COVID Family of 10 shows up to go shopping together, breathing and licking all the things you want to purchase." 

VS

"Allison, stay here a little while longer and eat a sensible breakfast.  You don't know how you'll feel once you're in the store.  You have to be strong to resist temptation, and you do that by eating before you shop. What's half an hour? There are donuts in that store, and they will be calling your name while you're shopping if you go there without eating."

As I drove home from the store eating a donut, I thought to myself, "I should have stayed home and eaten breakfast first."  Lesson learned...again.   

Woody Chicken Strikes Again. Hamburger Saves The Day

Today marks the end of day 4 of this Whole30, and I'm a little peeved that I'm not miraculously over craving carbs and also 53 pounds lighter.  Grrr.  Are my hopes so unreasonable after so many excruciating hours? I think not. 

Let's jump into the long, tedious part where I talk about the meals I've made.  Last night I made some pretty good chicken burgers.  I mixed ground chicken with mayo, lemon juice, and lots of Penzy's Fox Point seasoning mix.  It was pretty good wrapped in lettuce and with a piece of bacon on top.  The chicken burger made a repeat appearance at lunch today, but this time I tried a sweet potato "bun." I won't be making that mistake again.  

Tomorrow for lunch I'm trying the portabello bun, and here's a weird thing I learned.  The recipe for making the portabello cap more bun-like says, "remove the gills from the portabello cap." I never in my life thought of those things on the underside of a mushroom cap as "gills," but I will never unthink it now.  I just hope I don't start thinking my mushroom buns taste fishy because of the whole gill thing.  While I still have two chicken burgers left, they will be relegated to lunches for the rest of this weekend.  

For dinner, I wanted something different.  I was craving something savory and more like something a real adult would cook. I told myself when I started this that I was going to commit to making at least one new recipe a week that consisted of more than just cooking a piece of protein and some vegetables on the side.  For this week I decided on chicken marsala, and I have a Whole30 compliant recipe from Unbound Wellness. A friend turned me on to that website, and she has tons and tons of great recipes.  I really like her chicken lettuce wraps as well.  

The reason I told myself that I had to make at least one recipe a week that was a tad more involved is because it's a delicate balance between being bored with the foods I make and my intense dislike of cooking.  I really, truly, absolutely Dislike cooking with a capital D.  I hate the chopping and the ingredients and the prep.  Please don't make me measure and mix.  I don't want to julienne.  That's why I make a lot of basic protein with side of vegetable style meals.  Ingredients? forget it. Taking out the cutting board? Lord, no. 

I planned ahead and took out the frozen chicken I had so it would thaw in time for dinner tonight.  I got out the cutting board and knife and prepped my baby bella mushrooms.  There was so much chopping, but I finally got through the carton of mushrooms so they were ready to pop into the skillet after I made the chicken.  I was really on a roll, and then I opened the chicken.  Uh oh.  What are those thick white lines on my chicken? What is that weird white film? Why is my chicken already like rubber?  NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.  

If you guessed that half of the chicken breasts were clearly woody chicken, you guess right.  I immediately knew I wouldn't be able to eat any of the chicken I opened because it was all guilty by association.  I purchased this chicken from an online meat purveyor in the early days of the COVID pandemic when people panic-purchased all the food and toilet paper.  I won't be using that company ever again because that's the second time I've had woody chicken from them.  Ah, Fudgecicle! Now what do I eat? 

Time to pop over to my neighborhood market to get some non-woody chicken, which they were out of.  I looked around and saw that they had a bunch of their ready-made meals in the meat case.  Ooooo, chicken fettuchini! That has dairy and carbs! Salmon with rice! Steak with buttery, creamy, dairy-rich mashed potatoes.  I thought, "Well, shucks, I've been dealt the woody chicken blow.  Maybe I just get a ready-made meal even though none of them are Whole30."  I picked up the steak and buttery mashed potato meal.  I was ready to say to hell with it, I'm eating mashed potatoes, and then I thought, "If you're so willing to give up so easily now, how far will you really get with all this?"  So, I walked the meal back to the meat case, and then I bought some ground beef to make real, beefy, delicious bunless burgers.  I also cooked the mushrooms and sliced half an avocado. All in all, it was a decent meal.  It was no chicken marsala but it was good.  And that's how things went for Days 3 and 4.  

Whole30 Day 2. Sweet Lord, I Hate Pressure Cooked Chicken

Let's all take a moment to rejoice because I made it to the end of Day 2 of my Whole30.  Day 1 didn't go so well due to some dietary indiscretions mid-morning.  I had to drive to Tucson for an appointment, and on my way home, I might have driven through Dunkin Donuts for a coffee but really a donut or two.  Every other meal on Tuesday was fine, though, so I'm moving on.  

Today I was hungry.  I ate enough, and all my meals were Whole30 meals. However, my soul was still hungry because at this stage of the game, my soul still likes carbs apparently. Bonus points with my soul if the carb is also served with ice cream.  

I powered through today and made a bunch of vegetables tonight to have for the next couple of evenings.  Roasted brussel sprouts, and sautéed zucchini. Now I just need to work on a protein option because I learned an important thing about myself tonight.  I despise pressure cooked or boiled chicken.  I miss the taste of it being kind of caramelized in the skillet or on the grill.  Instead, boiled or steamed or pressure cooked chicken tastes like a limp hand, and there's no good way to eat limp hand.  

I make chicken in the pressure cooker all the time for Taz, but apparently Taz likes limp hand. It also eliminates the fat that he can't have.  So, Taz will have his chicken, and I will have to do something different.  

The other problem with chicken is that you have to be careful that you don't end up with "woody chicken," a phenomenon affecting the chicken world.  Woody chicken exists because the chicken breeders have created some weird frankenstein chickens that grow too fast and end up with some muscle issues in the breasts causing it to be hard and rubbery.  Imagine what it's like biting into a tire.  Feel your teeth going through the rubber.  Feel the awful taste on your tongue.  That's woody chicken.  It's truly gag-worthy.  

So, I'm having this revelation that chicken and I aren't really getting along that well.  What are some other decent options that are lean and fairly easy to cook?  If you have a favorite recipe for something other than chicken, let me know, as long as it doesn't involve flour, legumes, dairy, cake, cookies, donuts, potato chips, pancakes, waffles, yogurt parfaits, yadda, yadda, yadda.  

Despite my best judgement, I am thawing some chicken breast cutlets I have.  I'm using those to make a Whole30 compliant chicken marsala tomorrow.  If you see me post a sad face tomorrow night, you'll know it's because I ended up with woody chicken, I gagged, and I lost my appetite.  

Taz is telling me it's time for his bedtime snack and some limp hand chicken to disguise his probiotic pill.  Have a lovely Thursday, everyone.  

Who Has Two Thumbs and Starts A Whole30 on a Random Tuesday? This Girl

Happy Labor Day, my people! I hope you all have enjoyed a long weekend or some sort of respite from your labor today.  Tomorrow is Tuesday, and tomorrow is also the day I will be starting another Whole30.  Don't know what the Whole30 is? You can go here to read more about it.  

It's an elimination diet that is designed to remove all kinds of foods that are known to cause sensitivities in people.  Are you likely sensitive to everything on this diet? No, but you eliminate it all and have a controlled reintroduction to see what you might consider eliminating or minimizing forever.  Or you just keep eating this way more or less forever because it makes you feel good.  

While I feel like I just did one of these a year or so ago, it has actually been a lot longer than that.  (no scrolling back in the blog for my last Whole30 entry!).  Why am I revisiting the Whole30 now?  Well, there are a few reasons.  First and foremost, I want my guts to be happier while I also wean myself off my Nexium.  My proton pump is tired of being inhibited.  I also want more energy and to help ease my seasonal allergies, which some people say is possible with a modified diet.  

Also, the underlying reason I do or think about most any eating plan, is that I want to be a healthier weight than I am now.  I gave up aspirations of being Vannah White thin years ago, but I would like to feel better in my body, to be more flexible, to feel less blah, and also to win the lottery, which sadly, an elimination diet won't help me accomplish.  Maybe the lottery gods want to give the lottery to a thinner person, because fat discrimination exists, and if I have to shed some pounds to fit in to the exacting body standards of the lottery gods, I should at least explore the option. 

This last week has been kind of messed with my mind.  Since late August, I've been trying to eat up my non-Whole30 foods, like crackers, yogurts, granola, and a host of other things that I had stocked up on since the pandemic hit.  September 1 hit, and I still had things in the house that didn't jive with the plan, like M&Ms, frozen pancakes, yogurt covered pretzels, and pasta.  Temptation was here!!!! But I had already purchased several meals for the week that were healthy. So I would eat a bunless burger for dinner followed by M&M's for dessert.  One week in, and there are no more options for foods I am eliminating. I finished my M&Ms yesterday, and I had the frozen waffles for lunch today.  So long reasons for living.  Uhm, i mean, so long foods that make me feel bad and that don't help my health or my waistline.  

Today I made a pot roast to have for the next few meals.  I roasted some carrots and cooked some sweet potatoes.  I also have ground chicken to make a ground chicken, vegetable stir fry thing.  There are some vegetables in the fridge to cook this week, and I have strawberries and blackberries for fruits. So here we go.  Old me wants to say, "This is going to be so hard at first, everyone. UGH!," but I'm going to try some cognitive behavior therapy on myself and keep telling myself this is easy! All you have to do is buy the right foods and eat them. No problem.  Here we go!  (I already want some cake....and ice cream.) 

The Four Week Challenge

I don't know about everyone, but the COVID-19 pandemic has caused me to think about the food in my house and my use of the food items I already own. The whole "stocking up" notion, the infrequent trips to the store, the need to best organize how and when we eat the foods we buy, and making sure to use the foods we already own have me looking at what I waste and what I'm not using. 

For example, when this stay home stuff all started, I ordered some frozen items from a meat supplier.  As a result, I have easily 30 pieces of chicken in the freezer, frozen tuna, and some hamburger.  This is on top of the things I had already stored in the freezer.  Some of that chicken is for Taz, but some was ordered with the thought of me making my own meals. 

I have cans of soup and broth, oatmeal, frozen vegetables, and all sorts of other things, much like I image most average kitchens in the U.S.  Yet, when I go to the store, I'm often buying fresh chicken, cookies that I shouldn't be eating, or adding in another jar of pasta sauce just in case even though I have enough pasta sauce to give myself a tomato sauce bath. (that thought makes me gag by the way because something about washing pans with tomato sauce in them and the smell of wet tomato sauce embedding itself on my hands is really not ok with me. Why do I buy and force myself to eat pasta sauce when the idea of washing pans full of pasta sauce makes me gag? It's time to free myself from the tyranny of pasta sauce.)

Here's another interesting tidbit.  I also get a general feeling of panic and dread when I have too much clutter in my house.  Having full cabinets with things shoved in there without being able to segregate and properly order them makes me a little anxious like I'm suffocating under all my things.  I have friends and family members that have so much stuff in their fridge and freezer that it makes me panic just to open the door and look around.  How on earth do you even know what's in the back of that shelf because there's so much piled up? What's good? What's bad?  My god, how do people live that way? I like everything in my fridge to have it's own space with several inches of clearance around it.  Kind of like social distancing in the fridge.  When I stock up at the store now and have to stack things and put some stuff at the back of the shelf, behind other things that are stacked, it's hard to take. I never claimed I was normal, folks.   

I was cleaning and sanitizing all my groceries and seeing my shelves fill up again, when I thought, "I wonder how long I could really go with all the food I currently have in the house." I have two choices when faced with the food in my house and wanting to use it the best way possible: 1.  Feed myself for the next month or 2. Hold a block party for 100 of my closest friends and neighbors.  Since we are social distancing, I can't cook well enough to satisfy the taste buds of people that want food to taste good, and I hate hosting parties, that leaves me with feeding myself for a month on my existing stores of food. 

Four weeks seemed like a manageable yet somewhat challenging amount of time.  I'm pushing myself, but I won't be eating nothing but oatmeal and rice for two weeks. I'll still be able to have vegetables everyday, and fruit for at least part of the time.  I won't be eating canned tuna each day, especially because I only have three cans of tuna. 

I decided to make this next month into a game.  I will eat what I have at my house for the next four week.  I can go to the store once in those four weeks, and I have to spend $50 or less.  I imagine that will be to stock up again on things like eggs and fresh produce.  I can order food out 5 times in the four weeks.  That's one meal out a week and an extra meal out to use whichever week I choose. 

I'm hoping this month helps me think about conserving money, reducing waste, impulse control, making do with what I have, and also eating better.  I didn't think to do this until after I had gone to the store yesterday, and I am sure some of my food choices would have been different if I had considered this before my shopping trip.  I would definitely have purchased way more brown sugar cinnamon pop tarts (don't need) and probably another steak (also don't need but better than pop tarts), but that's part of the challenge. 

So, you know where I'll be for the next four weeks. I'll be here, scratching my head and planning out how to best use my groceries.  As I mentioned, I'm pretty heavy on chicken, so if you have any easy chicken recipes that don't call for lots of ingredients, drop me a line.  My first meal will be steak and roasted root vegetables.  Then, tomorrow, I'll cook a pot roast that will go well with the leftover vegetables. 

Letter to David Sedaris

Update: I started this blog post in November of 2019.  It was going to be my long soliloquy on why I love David Sedaris's writing.  I'm not sure what got in the way of this great and moving masterpiece of a blog post, but something interrupted me, like a bomb went off, and I walked out of the blog post with dinner on the table and the television on.  Scientists would stumble on the blog months later saying, "Where'd she go? What happened at the reading? What else was she going to say? Why didn't she eat this perfectly good macaroni and cheese before she left?"

Like the breeze blowing dust down the road, so went my great ideas of how I was going to capture the spirit of seeing David Sedaris read and talk in person. It was going to be so insightful that it was going to go viral, and we were going to begin a long and interesting friendship and letter writing tradition that would be published posthumously, many, many, many decades from now, and people would look back and reread our letters and wonder at the serendipity that brought us together as friends.  Ours would be a classic in the long history of letter writing classics.  John Adams and Thomas Jefferson would have nothing on our letters.

What is it about people we know through their writing or singing or acting that makes us think we would become such good friends if only we had a reason to meet?

We know how it ends now, folks.  Half-baked blog, no long correspondence with El Señor Sedaris, no unwieldy amounts of social media traffic to deal with when the blog hit the airwaves and spreads across the globe. All you're left with is the fleeting feeling I had after seeing his really good reading in Tucson in November.  If you haven't read any of his books, I highly recommend them.  If you have a chance to see him read in your town, I suggest you go.  It's a really great way to spend an evening.

I had two books signed from him after the reading, and we talked a bit about personal tragedies we both experienced.  Thinking back, it was such a fleeting talk but also weirdly personal and jarring.  On a hilarious note, I told him I was giving one of the signed books to my brother for Christmas.  My brother always gives really thoughtful gifts, and I always get him something really useful like awesome socks.  So, I told him I had to up my game.  David wrote in the book, "You Deserved Better" to my brother.  David's right, and David deserved better from my blog.  Here's what I wrote back in November.  Forgive the schmaltz. or don't.


FROM NOVEMBER 2019
Dear David,

I went with a few friends to see you read in Tucson in November.  This must be the fourth or fifth time I've seen you over the years, and I never get tired of it.  When I tell people I'm going to hear a guy read stories, a lot of people are skeptical.  "Wait. So you've probably read the stories, and now  you're going to hear some guy read them out loud?"  If only they knew...that's almost exactly what it is, but it's also pretty darn amazing.

I love your writing because it's funny but it also makes you think and cry and wonder how in the hell you were able to write such a balancing act of a story.  I've had stories where I laugh so hard my stomach hurts and tears stream down my face, and then this profound, emotionally difficult part comes along, and I am still crying from laughter but now also crying from sadness.  Because I am so emotionally mature, I have many moments where I say, "Damn, dude.  That's some real shit right there. Did you see him drop that real shit?" See.  Emotional maturity.

In the everyday and the mundane and the millions of instances of small life tragedies, we are changed.  We develop workarounds to deal.  We become.  I like how you shine a light on our neuroses and problems and pitfalls and our grace and lack of grace.  Somehow in the parade of the best and the worst of people, there's still this love.  I like how you steep us in the situations of your stories and show how we deal with the happenings of life around us.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? WE WILL NEVER KNOW?  Fin.