Meal Prep

Three weeks ago, I started a diet based on the book, The Mood Cure. The very basic premise is that many processed foods that we eat are causing hormonal and neurotransmitter imbalances in our bodies that lead to things like anxiety, depression, low energy, etc. We're not just talking hanger anymore, people. Dips and spikes in blood sugar, inflammation, low stores of serotonin - this is all going on under the surface when we say yes to that second doughnut. Now, if this were just about losing weight or being intangibly healthier, I wouldn't do it. But the fact is, eating by following the rules in this book has given me energy that I haven't seen in years and is effectively managing those moods that seem to come from nowhere. My baseline is happier. It doesn't take away life's stress, but it does help me deal with it better.

Now, as soon as I noticed a difference with this diet, I immediately worried that I wouldn't be able to keep it up. Not because I thought I would cheat, but because there is a fair amount of preparation that goes into following it without traditional breads and pastas, and with the addition of lots of protein. Coming from years of a more vegetarian diet, I'm not used to preparing food or eating in that way. So I wondered...

Could I keep up all this prep? Would it make financial sense? Would it work when the school year started again?

I'm going through this post to try to answer those questions, but mostly to outline things so that my husband can do meal prep without me yelling directions from the living room. You're all welcome. Especially my neighbors. Also, making lists soothe me.

Step 1: Decide on the menu of options for the week.
What will your main proteins be? How will you get your greens? How will you do quick breakfasts and lunches for work days?

Breakfast options:
eggs and corn tortillas (optional onions, salsa, cheese)
cottage cheese and fresh fruit
cottage cheese pancakes and fresh fruit
smoothies and gluten-free toast
previous weeks: oven pancake with fruit, greek yogurt and fruit

Lunch options:
jar salads
smoothies
zoodles
cottage cheese with fruit

Dinner options:
chickpea breaded chicken tenders with broccoli and potatoes
marinated chicken tenders with green beans and potatoes
zoodles and frozen tilapia fillets
jar salads
previous weeks: polenta with marinara and ratatouille, sauteed greens with balsamic, mexican chicken with rice and beans

Snacks:
cream cheese with chopped black olives for jalapeno poppers and turkey roll ups
popcorn
brownies http://www.bitesforfoodies.com/recipes/healthy-date-brownies/
fresh fruit
popcorn chips

Step 2: Grocery shopping for the best prices and produce.

eggs (lots of them): Millport road farm stands ($1.50/carton)
organic produce and meats: Aldi, Weis, farm stands
canned goods, produce, bulk baking needs,nuts, frozen fruit: Sharp Shopper (frozen fruit $1/bag)
hard to find bulk ingredients: Miller's Natural Foods

For this week, I was also stocking up and getting ingredients that would last for a while, so it was a little more than it would normally be.

Millport road: 3 cartons of eggs
$4.50
Sharp Shopper: produce, chicken, dairy, fruit
$70
Martin's: unusual baking ingredients and jalapenos
$20

Step 3: Preppin'


No, not that kind.

So shortly after getting home from shopping, don't even bother putting most things away. Just dairy, meat, and frozen stuff mostly.

1. Start smoothies. Peel and cut up bananas, put on silicone mats, and put in standing freezer for about 2 hours. If there are already frozen bananas, you can skip this step. Depending on how large your slices are, about 2 big bunches fit on 2 silicone mats. Get a big ole trash bowl going for all of your scraps.

2. Move on to snack and salad prep.
Cut up a whole can of black olives and a whole block of cream cheese. Mash together with a fork. Stuff jalapenos and top with chickpea crumbs. Put in container to be ready to bake.

Pull out the quart size mason jars (enough for eat least work and school day lunches). The book has a chart of options and amounts to put in, but here's the basic rundown for this week. Put a mixture of proteins (feta, beans, chickpeas, walnuts, etc.) in the bottom that equals about a cup.

 Chop up carrots, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, etc., mix it all up, and put a cup in each jar.

Put a half cup of broccoli, cauliflower, etc. in each. Top with roughly 2 cups of romaine and/or spinach or other greens. Prep small containers of dressing if desired. 

                                    They fit neatly in a drawer. Satisfying.

3. Get the dinner veggies and proteins going. Zoodles can be put away raw to be sauteed later.

I used 2 packages of chicken tenders to do chicken two ways (both sauteed, but can bake). One big bag of green beans (steamed and covered with lemon juice, butter, salt, and pepper). Leftover broccoli from salads done in the same way as the green beans. Sliced up red potatoes, boiled, then seasoned with butter, salt, and pepper. Could also saute with butter and rosemary. Can also use rice or polenta, corn or peas as a starch. Divide up into prep containers and put some in the fridge and some in the freezer.

4. Back to the smoothies. 

Get pint sized mason jars out (at least enough for work day mornings). I used nine here. Put about 8 slices of banana in each (this equals about one small banana). Put about a half cup of other frozen fruit in. Nine jars used about 1.5 bags of fruit. Put in a small handful of spinach. Do powders: scoop of protein, 1 t. nutritional yeast, 1 T. ground flax. Use white plastic lids and put in freezer.

5. If you are baking, now's the time! When I prepped this week, I also made dry mixes of the bread and brownies to have on hand so it would be faster next time. Takeaway from this week - just buy the GF bread. It's too hard and takes too long to make. Always make the brownies. Delicious.

Excluding baking, the bulk of this, from bringing the groceries in the door to finishing prep (without cleanup) was about 3 hours. While that may seem like a lot, consider the time it actually saves through the week as a whole. Also, making all of these meals while the produce is still fresh and you still remember what you wanted to do with it...yeah. So all in all, I think writing this post will help me keep up the diet since I now have an easy, personalized reference, and more importantly, so does my husband :)

I Wanna Take You To Bermuda

Alex and I just got back from six days in Bermuda. After last year's honeymoon, we wanted something a little closer to home, with great snorkeling, and hopefully some tropical drinks melting in our hands. This fit the bill. Although, speaking of the bill, Bermuda is expensive. We attempted a budget Bermuda approach, using Airbnb, taking the extensive bus lines, and grocery shopping. This meant that we would often come across a cast of interesting locals who taught us more about the island than we would have gotten in a resort or on the absolutely enormous cruise ship somehow floating in Dockside. We volleyed with the weather a bit, never really figured out how to relax, and ran ourselves silly all over this beautiful, friendly island.

The flight was an easy 2 hours out of Philly, and we arrived to rain. We waited with a local woman at the bus stop, our packs adorning us front and back, and looking much like pregnant turtles, we chatted with her about onion rings. Onions were once an export of Bermuda, and so they were quickly on our list of 'must-do' items. We grabbed the bus into Hamilton, the main center of the island where there are great shops, restaurants, and lots of activity (except on Sundays when it is a ghost town).

Out of here, we headed to Warwick, which happily is home to under-populated beaches and excellent snorkeling*.
*I cannot confirm since I did not get to snorkel here - choppy water, nighttime, and an impending plane to catch did not allow. Alex did, though, while I paced on the shore and tried to wave him back in.

We were too tired to grocery shop and cook, so we walked to the famed Swizzle Inn. Did you know that there aren't a whole lot of sidewalks in Bermuda? By the end of the week, it felt downright luxurious to have a sidewalk instead of tall grass. The Rum Swizzles here are very nice indeed. We got our onion rings, and respective burgers (mine a lentil curry patty with caramelized onions). Yes please. For several reasons, we took a cab back to the Airbnb.


The next day we careened all around the island from bus line to bus line, getting confused and walking through lots of neighborhoods to get where we wanted to go. The locals were unfailingly friendly and we never felt at all unsafe. In fact, anyone who spotted us would check to see that we were doing ok and knew where we were headed. We squeezed every last dime out of our multi-day bus passes as we went grocery shopping (hello $7 bread), crept around Sea Glass Beach, visited Dockside for a hot minute, took the ferry to Hamilton to sprint through the weekly street party, and headed over to Admirality House Park for swimming.

Let's talk about Sea Glass Beach. When I looked online, I saw pictures from tripadvisor like this:

Wow, what a chance to be a mermaid lady in a coastal expanse of jewels! But, do you know what sea glass is before it is sea glass? It's shards of broken glass. And there are no Keebler Elves of sea glass, tossing it ashore when it's ready. So what you have is a mixture of sea glass, broken glass, car parts, and decapitated mosaic monkey heads. But! The unexpected reality aside, it was an exceptionally cool place. The sea glass made tinkling sounds when the water lapped at the shore, and it was really full of the stuff. I had never found a piece of sea glass prior to this trip, and here you could walk on it without touching the sand if you so desired. The area was dilapidated and creepy and neat. I made a cairn out of sea glass on a piece of driftwood. It was fun.

Dockside had lots of shopping and water sports rentals and a big cruise ship.

Admirality House Park was a definite highlight. A large protected cove in a public park, it offers easy swimming, a small sandy beach, cliff jumping if you dare (I thought I would but didn't want to after hearing Alex's uncontrolled screaming on the way down), and good snorkeling. This place, especially when we went back again on a sunny day, was straight up off of a postcard. Lots of locals there, convincing me that barracudas were in the water, but also offering tips on cliff jumping. You know, as much as it's sensible to take safety advice from eight-year-old boys (not the ones peddling barracuda lies, of course). This was where we easily burned 3 hours when we had anticipated spending one, where I saw some kind of big red, yellow, and black crab on the rocks, swam over a sea turtle, went through underwater forests of coral, and felt surrounded by the lush environment of Jurassic Park.

 
We may or may not have finally eaten dinner at 10pm this day.

The following day was our big boat trip out to the outer reef for some truly excellent guided snorkeling. We had an amazing guide who explained all about what we would see and did a lot to assuage any fears we might have about anything creeping up on us and stinging/biting/stealing our voices in exchange for human legs. The worst that would happen is one of the fish might try to nibble at us with rubbery lips. Feeling calm in the water wound up being key to having a good time. We spent an hour at Blue Hole, drifting over the reefs full of yellowy brain coral and rusty sea rods and purple sea fans. We saw parrot fish, butterfly fish, angel fish, and a bunch of other ones whose names I can't remember. Alex and I brought our own snorkel gear so that we'd have more opportunities to use it outside the guided trip. This was nice because we also had comfort mouth pieces that were more...comfortable. There were underwater "cliffs" where the coral dropped off and we could swim deeper into the aqua water to a sandy bottom. Alex did many times, but I preferred the very buoyant feeling of the salt water, just floating over the fish that were munching away on coral. At one point we followed two tiny transparent squids or cuttlefish or Snorks, as Alex deemed them, scooting along the surface. We got sunburned and caught in a rainstorm on the way back and counted the trip a success.

We hid out in the apartment for the hotter part of the afternoon to baby our reddened skin, and then took a twilight walk on the South Shore beaches before dinner.

The next morning was rainy, but we did manage to sample some comparison Swizzles and onion rings at the Hog Penny and let me tell you, THESE onion rings were the business. We also saw a rainbow! At some point we found our way to Art Mel's Spicy Dicey, home of the unexpectedly delicious fried fish sandwich with coleslaw on raisin bread. We shared one, which was a good four inches high, and then Alex went back for sandwich #2. This was so good that he later made questionable choices about eating the last part he had saved, which had been hanging out in the sun while we swam that afternoon. Somehow he didn't get food poisoning, so win!

Another rainy day took us to Fantasy Cave and Crystal Cave, which were cool and filled with drippy candle-like stalactites, blue water, and stories of their discovery by boys with ropes and gas lanterns.

 The rest of our time was spent chasing the sun and hoping for more snorkeling and relaxation. We got a little bit of each, though I quickly realized that when Alex was getting his snorkeling in (in the open ocean, with waves, and approaching storm clouds), there wasn't much relaxing I could do. Still, we had a great time in a place where tropical fish are more than emojis and the water is the color of gummy sharks. Until next time!

My Newest Obsessions - Chalk Paint and Rollerblading

Some things are new and exciting, like tapping into a love of painting and marrying it with a collection of mismatched furniture. Other things are timeless, like speeding down a hill with wheels strapped to your feet, unsure if you should bail into the neighbor's grass or chance the sprinkling of gravel and twigs on the path ahead.

First of all, I don't know why I stopped rollerblading. Yes, it became passe, but since when have I really cared about being cool? I had spent countless hours scraping myself off the sidewalks and telephone poles of my town, through summer and winter, occasionally attached to a system of leashes and speeding dog. The clack of plastic wheels over smooth concrete was the soundtrack of my '90s. So perhaps it was the new millenium, the mounds of high school homework, or the fact that I lost the inserts to my rollerblades, but I stopped. Years passed. I still biked, ran, swam, but did not skate. Then, enter Slomo.

This video awakened something deep and dormant in me. I went out and got myself new adult skates that same day. And knee pads, elbow pads, and wrist guards, because I'm an adult and can't miss work because I broke myself skating.

Picking up skating again is different in an adult body with a (slightly) higher center of gravity and years of rust. But in a way, it's exactly the same. It comes back in stages. The balance first. The stopping technique. The downhill slowing. The joy. 

My husband got skates too. We are using muscles we had forgotten existed. We are learning our new town the way our hometowns became ingrained in us as kids. Which routes are smooth or scary, have barking dogs or uphill climbs? What is this or that parking lot for, and will people yell at us for skating there? He came of age on the impeccable surface of the roller rink, so navigating gutter dips and bulging sidewalk squares is new. But while I duck and weave as I always have, rarely chancing a glance upward, he has introduced me to the glory of music while skating. This new era is allowing for music on demand and blue tooth earbuds. We skate and sway to the sounds of Lake Street Dive.

What childhood activity would you bring back, with current technology and an adult budget?

The other thing currently filling up my brain in ways oh so good is chalk painting. In the way that the rabbit hole of the internet works, specifically youtube, I came upon Debi's Design Diary. I love this woman. She is funky and doesn't give a rip. She paints beautiful bright furniture with her own brand of chalk/clay paint. She makes chippy textures and drippy textures and talks about her family and her happy and ugly feelings. 

I got some of her paint and went to work transforming a cheapo full length mirror for our bedroom. I'm also painting a dresser to fit the whimsical nature of this paint, creating a misty woodland scene that rolls over the drawers and onto the sides.

Now, living in a craftsman house, I have a deep respect for natural, bare, beautiful wood. But sometimes something comes to you already painted. Or plastered with stickers. Or an oddball to your established motif. Sometimes it just wants a little funk. 

I see more of this in my future.

What have you been obsessing over lately?