I tried to be a good convert and cleaned out all the cabinets, fridge and freezer. Everything is bagged up on the floor of the kitchen ready to be delivered to a friend of mine who can use all our expensive gluten free foods (that contain rice and soy which we will no longer eat). I need to haul those on out of here.
So here is our bare cabinet after I trashed or donated everything from inside. (By the way! It is amazing to see how many canned goods you owe which are actually expired. lol) Reminds me of Old Mother Hubbard ... that poor dog wouldn't get a bone out of our cabinet either. HA!
So the family and head headed off to the grocery store in search of lots of goodies to fill our cabinet, fridge and freezer with. We are trying to buy as much organic as possible, trying to get uncured meats and grass-fed beef, etc. We are still in the balancing stages of determining which things we really should not compromise on and which things we can work with. Between the expense and availability of some items, we are still tweaking what to get, where and when.
Here is a picture of a few of the goodies from our hunting and gathering expedition. I spent the evening washing, bagging and prepping what food items I could. We didn't go shopping until late sunday afternoon/evening so I didn't get to pre-cook meals like I had hoped, but we were in this together so I knew we could make it work.
We are also still in the process of determining how much food 3 people will eat throughout the course of a week. We don't want to over buy and have fruits/veggies go bad before we're able to eat them but we are also finding that it's only Wednesday and we already need to restock most everything! HA! Guess it will be a process that we will figure out as we go. Right now I'm thinking... More is more! (instead of less is more).
So we also decided to break down and get a Sam's club membership. I'd heard that they had good deals on nuts, olive oil frozen organic veggies and even meat sometimes. We spent yesterday afternoon roaming about the store and did get some almonds, a big ole jug of extra virgin olive oil, some avocados, some larabars, some liters of water and I think that might be it. I discovered that our now empty pantry might just be a good place to store veggies that don't have to be refrigerated... as long as I don't forget they are in there and let them go to waste. So here's what the cabinet looks like now.
I've got some green beans which I saved from the initial cleaning out of the cabinets. We might try them after our 30 days is up since I hear they can be controversial and we are doing our best to stay true to our 30 day commitment.
I've attempted a few things that I've seen or read about... I think I got a little overly ambitious our very first night, we got home a little later than planned but I already had my menu in mind so instead of realizing that it was late and my family was hungry, I just jumped right in and got to cookin. So I saw this recipe posted by CaveMomma http://cavemomma.com/2011/07/31/sarah-jane-fried-chicken/ and thought oh that sounds pretty good and simple enough. So I put some coconut oil in the pan and got to work on my chicken, walnuts and egg. Unfortunately about half way through the process I think I realized the family was hungry and I believe I might have been rushing things along cooking over to high a flame since some of the goodness got a bit burnt.
I honestly felt like our first paleo dinner was a complete and total failure, but then again I have huge expectations for myself almost all the time. The family ate, no one hit a drive thru and now that is has been a couple of days I realize that in and of itself means we had a successful first day.
Last night we had a much more successful experiment, I took our longhorn grass-fed beef and made meatloaf in the muffin tin. I was trying to figure out what to use instead of crackers. I knew I could use egg and seasoning, I've had meat loaf without tomato sauce so I wasn't worried about that. We had some carrots so I thought I'd make 1/2 the batch with shredded carrots and the other 1/2 just meat, eggs and seasoning. To my surprise, both were very good and the whole family seemed to enjoy the carrot ones so we have claimed those as a WIN!
I actually ended up making another batch tonight for easy grab and go lunches or in a hurry dinners. YAY! I felt redeemed!
Our daughter was trying to help me come up with a side item since all we really had was lettuce and spinach and we just had that the night before. We knew we also had apples so she sat down with our Everyday Paleo book http://everydaypaleo.com/ and started looking up every recipe that had apple. She came across a lovely little apple flower type thing that we decided would make a beautiful dessert. So here is her creation thanks to the recipe in the book. The recipe called for almond butter, blueberries and a raspberry, we had cashew butter, blackberries and a strawberry... it came out super yummy! We all enjoyed it very much! My favorite part was getting our daughter involved, we've been in such a hurry that I haven't had as much time as I would like to include her in the making of meals, hopefully we can spend more time on the weekends doing that soon.
That gets you started on where we are so far this week. I definitely have alot more to say and need to blog a few things off my chest about tonight's meal, but alas it is almost 11pm and with our 6am wake-up I don't want to cut my sleep time short since I have read and know how important that is too. So I will say... more to come :)
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