clean: day 17, i finally feel like i’m on top of my menu plan for the week

breakfast smoothie = coconut water,* fresh mango, frozen raspberries and blackberries

two lunches today, his and hers.  mine was the “roasted delicata with quinoa” recipe from the website (although i didn’t use the raisins.  they’re on the “no” list.  it’s this sort of inconsistency that drives mr. happy stuff up the wall.)

the verdict:  it was pretty tasty.  reminded me of the awesome chicken and everything else salad i had , but with more squash and less greens.  i think i actually preferred the green salad.  i’m finding that recipes with onion and garlic sometimes seem overpowering to me–like i’m only tasting onion and garlic, not the rest of the ingredients–and while i like onion and garlic, i also like other flavors and would enjoy tasting them as well.

mr. happy stuff’s lunch was this fantastic curried chicken recipe from everyday food. 

i made it a “clean” recipe by swapping olive oil for the butter and brown rice syrup for the honey.  this chicken is sooooooo tasty that when i asked mr. happy stuff if he’d mind eating it for lunch three days in a row, he said, “no problem.”  if i were to make it again, i might try reducing the olive oil (there were pools of it floating on top of the sauce by the end of baking).  i also stretched the recipe by adding some of our baked chicken i’d frozen last week and just letting it soak in the extra sauce for a day and a half.  we’ll see how that turns out.  i’m thinking of making it into sort of a “pulled chicken curry.”  mr. happy stuff ate it over baked brown rice and i just nibbled it straight from the pan.  seriously.  i kind of wish i’d made a double batch now.  oh well.  more recipes to try!

i took the time this afternoon to map out meals for the rest of the week and do all the pre-cooking i needed to do to make this week run more smoothly.  it really is so much simpler to plan menus when you only cook one meal a day.

supper was a pink smoothie before church.  although it was nicer to eat before church and not be completely starving by the time we got home (and having to resist the youth group bake sale on an empty stomach) it did make for a long evening with a bit of a hollow belly feeling.

only four more days.

*one of the basic ingredients for a lot of “clean” smoothies is “coconut water” for which they instruct you to soak a cup of shredded unsweetened coconut in water for 15 minutes, then strain out the coconut.  we’ve gotten lazy about it and now i just dump some coconut in a quart jar with some water and leave that in the fridge and we add the coconut water along with the soaked coconut shreds whenever we have a recipe that includes this ingredient.