Recipe Recap! {And The First Month}

Hey friends! So this post is all about Recipes! YAY!!

After about a month of transitioning to a Real Food Lifestyle, it was time to crack down and start getting stricter with my Real Food/Processed Food Ratio so my metabolism can heal and I can start to lose weight!

I have talked about the 80/20 rule here on my blog, check out this post for more info, but after more research into Real Food and weight loss, I began to realize that I probably need to aim more for a 95/5 or 90/10 rule in the beginning in order to see weight loss results.

The reason?

My body and metabolism are totally jacked up from decades of processed foods, following crazy diet myths, low fat foods, chemicals, and just overall mistreatment. During the first month of my Real Food Revolution, most of the month (with the exception of the first crazy weekend where I went a bit nuts) was spent slowly transitioning healthy real food in and unhealthy food out of our home. It was also a month of learning what to buy, where to find it, and how to afford it. It was a time of pantry restocking, learning how to properly prepare grains, beans, and nuts, and researching where to buy part of a cow.

Oh, and detoxing. Yes, you heard me correctly. Detoxing. Like in rehab. Only my body was detoxing from processed chemicals and it wasn’t pretty. Diarrhea and relentless headaches, anyone? But I will say it did confirm to me that something was really wrong with the way I was eating if that’s what happened when the junk was on the way out.

Needless to say, I wasn’t able to hit the 80/20 rule as much as I would have liked. And as a result, the scale wasn’t moving in the direction I was hoping for. This is not uncommon, as I’m learning from my research, so I’m trying not to get discouraged. I know my body is working hard to repair the damage it has endured so I’m going to not stress about the scale and concentrate on healing. I’m working hard to repair my metabolism, listen to my body, and stick tight to a 95/5 rule for the time being.

My Real Foods guru, DaNelle at Weed ’em and Reap advocates that the 80/20 rule is great for maintaining a healthy weight, and a stricter 95/5 rule can be more successful for weight loss.

So that’s where I’ve been living for the last week. And you know what?? It’s been awesome, satisfying, and (most importantly) delicious!

And to get me there? I am following DaNelle’s weekly meal plans from her e-book, Have Your Cake and Lose Weight, too! (Why do the work when someone else was awesome enough to do it for me?? “Not I” said the cat.)

One week down and for the next three weeks, I’ll be making delicious meals from her book and following her meal plans, complete with prep instructions and shopping lists. It really couldn’t be easier. Thanks DaNelle!

So here’s what we’ve made so far this past week:

Roasted Chicken with Roasted Root Vegetables (I called this Magazine Chicken because this bird deserves her own photo shoot!)

Chicken Enchiladas
(These got eaten so fast, there was no time for a picture. They were AMAZING! I will definitely double the recipe next time.)

Beef Chili and Soaked Corn Bread.

And Butter. Lots of Butter. (Mostly because I love butter, but also because I may have over mixed the batter despite the explicit instructions not to, and because I may have also forgotten to add the salt and may have tried to mix it in at the end when the batter was already in the pan which resulted in some very bland and some very salty bites of cornbread. Lessons learned.)

Asian Marinated Pork Chops and Asian Stir Fry Vegetables with Jasmine Rice. The pork chops were not part of the original meal plan but I subbed them in because, as open minded about food as Husband is, he just couldn’t get on board for the Asian Lettuce Wraps (plus we didn’t have any chicken and we had pork, so you know…) A quick note about this marinade recipe: I replaced the brown sugar with organic Sucanat, the soy sauce can be replaced with coconut aminos, and I didn’t have red chili paste so I used Red Cayenne Pepper. It was awesome.

Leftovers on Thursday night because I had cupcakes to make for a going away party at work on Friday. I made DaNelle’s INCREDIBLE cupcakes from her e-book. When she said to “frost and devour,” she was NOT kidding. (No picture for those either, I got too distracted trying to make sure I made a successful real food dessert for work…unlike the last attempt with the infamous baby shower cookies.)

Friday night was Date Night (Woo!!) so we went to a movie and made dinner together at home. We had Brinner. Have you ever had Brinner, aka Breakfast for Dinner? It’s a fav in our house, plus I love that the name comes from one of my all time favorite shows, Scrubs. Oh Brinner…sigh. You are so good. Anyways…we made sprouted flour pancakes (DaNelle’s e-book recipe), fried eggs, and oven fried bacon.

(Does anyone else have a smoke detector that goes off relentlessly if you blow out a single birthday candle?? I mean, I’m comforted to know that I will never die in a fire in my house, but it makes cooking bacon almost impossible. Best case scenario: oven fried bacon with the smoke detector unceremoniously ripped off the ceiling. Okay. Rant over.)

I even had left over whipped cream from the cupcakes to top our pancakes. GLORIOUS. (I think I was too hungry to take a picture of our Brinner Night. I’m sorry. I’ll do better next time.)

Pizza and wings NIGHT!! This was our second pizza night and I actually got the crust right this time! I mean, it was freaking delicious! Here’s our pizza with organic tomato and basil sauce, fresh mozzarella, spinach, roasted red peppers, green peppers, and mushrooms.

We also made Grilled Spice Rubbed Chicken Wings! They were soo good. I think Husband would have traded his left pinky for my helping of wings. Scary good.

All in all, it was an amazingly delicious week. If you want the recipes from DaNelle’s e-book, feel free to grab it off her site. It’s totally worth it! Not only does it have meal plans, over 60 recipes, prep and shopping lists, Real Food Printables (those are just the Bonus Materials!), it is chock full of information, research, statistics, and incredible real life implementation on living a Real Food Lifestyle and how it heals our bodies. Grab a copy of your own ASAP. It a gold-mine!

What are you guys cooking this week?

Thanks for reading everyone! Happy recipe-ing this week!

Meal Planning INSANITY! and the app that has taken over my life…

SO MUCH has been going on since my last update, friends! I have so much to tell you! Mostly insane stories of meal planning, shopping, and exhaustedly eating dark chocolate truffles in the grocery store parking lot.

The main reason I haven’t been writing is because I have been farting around with this new INCREDIBLE meal planning app that my amazing co-worker, Simone (shout out, what, what!), found and told me about. It’s called Menu Planner and it has SOOO much potential to be a full blown meal planning wizard genius that it gives me that Christmas Morning excitement in my stomach! BUT, setting it up is super labor intensive if you want to fully utilize all it’s features (and you are super OCD like I am). So I have been working on it since Thursday, inputting recipes from my own collection and favorite online recipes, as well as creating my ‘virtual pantry’ in the app.

Yes, you read that correctly. This app allows you to create your own virtual pantry within the app so it will track what ingredients you have on hand for meal planning and automatically add items to your grocery list when you are running low (and YOU get to decide exactly what ‘running low’ means for each item – for example, if you usually only use something for a recipe, you can set it so the app only adds it to your list when you completely run out and need it for an upcoming recipe. But, if you use something regularly like bread or eggs, you can set it to add to your list when you are down to 3 eggs or 4 slices of bread! It will calculate and take in to account how much to need for the week’s recipes too!) GENIUS.

You can also manually input recipes or import them directly from websites. It literally finds and pulls the recipe info off the site and imports it into the correct format for you. Or if it’s not a traditional recipe site like AllRecipes, you can manually select the recipe info off the webpage and import it just like that. DOUBLE GENIUS.

As if that wasn’t amazing enough, the app can also serve as a food journal if you are into tracking your meals, which I kind of am right now so I have a record of the new foods I’m trying. You can simply add what you ate for each meal as a note for that meal on the day’s calendar. So it’s not necessary to do full blown menu planning for every meal of the day if you want a journal of your meals. I don’t know about you, but planning dinner is enough of a stretch some times. (What am I ever going to do once we have kids??) You can also choose to have the app show your calories and/or point totals for each meal or the entire day if you are tracking your food in that way. (I have selected to have those options turned off because I am trying to steer away from that as I re-learn how to eat real, unprocessed foods.) TRIPLE GENIUS.

You can meal plan and generate a shopping list for a day, week, month or more, so you can maximize your shopping, buy in bulk, and save time. It literally works for whatever schedule or needs you have. The Shopping list tells you every item you need for all your upcoming meals, including quantities (so you don’t have to guess how much chicken you meant when you wrote ‘chicken’ on the list), and you can quickly add any other item you need that may not be on a recipe for that week, like breakfast foods, snacks etc. The list will also tell you if each item is included in your upcoming meal plans so you can decide to opt out of buying something unnecessary if you budget dictates. (which mine did this week!)

Speaking of Budgets, you can also specify which stores you shop at and input the price (and location) of each item at different stores so you can try to always find the best price. AND if a price is entered for an item, the app automatically keeps tracks and calculates the total of your shopping list so you can budget before you even get to the store. QUADRUPLE SUPER WIZARD GENIUS.

I don’t even think I have discovered all this app can do but from what I know so far, it’s about to get all Hogwarts up in my kitchen!

Best $2.99 I ever spent, ladies and gentlemen. I realize that this may be way too much for some of you and I’m a super technology dork (times 12) so feel free to stick with your own system. I am just so excited for the future potential to make shopping, budgeting and meal planning so much easier!

I have only inputted about half of my recipes so far but have been able to make a great start at meal planning with those. I also went shopping today using my list and used the receipts to input prices for future shopping, price comparisons, and budgeting. Because let me tell you, this real food shopping on a budget is tricky. But I’m not going to get into that now, as I need some time to emotionally recover before I can discuss it openly. (See earlier where I mentioned stress eating truffles in the grocery store parking lot).

Despite my shopping frustrations, I do really like the meal planning strategy I’m using, in conjunction with the Menu Planner app, which I totally got from Weed ’em and Reap. Again, she’s my hilarious real foods guru. Her take on meal planning is so smart! Read her post in the link above to see what I mean.

Did you read it yet?

Seriously, read it. I want her to get the credit, not me, because I totally stole it from her.

I am using her methods with a few tweaks to fit our family. For example, I am hoping to change this, but we don’t cook a lot of seafood (yet!) so I adapted Thursdays to Seafood and Grilling Day because Adam loves to grill and Thursdays are his day off. Also, Friday is our date nights so I made that an Eat Out, Get Takeout, or Leftovers (for a budget friendly at home date) Day. And then, Saturday became our Quick and Easy/Pizza Day. It totally works! And the app allows me to tag all my recipes into custom categories, so I can tag recipes for each Day and then browse using those categories for meal planning. AWESOME.

If you are totally lost at this point, it’s because you tried to cheat and haven’t read Weed ’em and Reap’s post on meal planning. I swear, it’s short and sweet and totally smart. READ IT.

Here’s my meal plan for this week:

I’m still tweaking it, but you get the idea. WIZARDRY! (okay I’ll stop with all the Harry Potter references now.)

I’m focusing on real food, wholesome, unprocessed ingredients and not much else. I’m not following a specific diet like Whole Foods or Paleo. I include meat, dairy, whole grains, desserts, snacks, and lot of deliciousness! I’m still learning all about the world of unprocessed foods, so if you are a guru yourself, don’t be alarmed if something on my meal plan is not 100% unprocessed-I’m learning!

ANYWAYS,

I will post soon about my real food shopping nightmares and why there is hope for the future despite how I feel about it today.

And ALSO, my surprise that is coming in the mail got delayed by stupid winter storm apocalypse so it won’t be here until tomorrow. BUT I’M SO EXCITED TO SHOW YOU WHAT IT IS WHEN IT GETS HERE. SO EXCITED!

Before I go, I just want to say how much I appreciate all the feedback, support and interest in my blog that I have received! I did NOT expect this response and I’m so grateful! It’s been amazing and it makes me blush on a regular basis. I love you all my silly little readers! Thank you for reading and come back to laugh more about my life!

XOXO
Molly

P.S. I will do my best to respond quickly to anyone who has sent me a personal message or question, but please have patience with me, I’m already bad at responding to calls, texts, messages, emails etc (just ask my mom!) but I’m trying to get better! Keep them coming! I love them even if it doesn’t seem that way right now!