Day 15

It was a lazy Saturday so I skipped breakfast and had the last of the tuna and some soup for lunch/brunch.

I made macaroni and cheese with ham and peas for dinner (using penne instead of macaroni because I failed at shopping). The penne was Montebello brand, an organic pasta imported from Italy. The peas were from Cascadian Farms and the ham was from Applegate Farms. The cheese only bore a generic deli label so I'm not sure where it came from, but it was Wheatsville co-op so I'm pretty sure it was well-sourced.

At about 10:30 I had a late-night snack consisting of another serving of penne and cheese with ham and peas.

I probably had a couple fudge bars too but I don't remember.

Day 11

I decided to change things up a bit and have eggs "over easy" today with two pieces of Alvarado Multigrain toast (dry). All the eggs this week are from Vital Farms because my work connection is incubating eggs in hopes of birthing more breeders.

For lunch I had tuna again (same batch as yesterday) but I put some Peppadews on it this time. They're pretty far from local (they come from South Africa) but they taste lovely. I also had some Healthy Choice Chicken Tortilla soup that I bought before Christmas when I was starting to get lazy about natural foods.

I had to work late so I grabbed a carnitas (pork) burrito from Chipotle. It's not great for my waistline* but it's natural, humane and ridiculously delicious. I usually get chips too but skipped this time for caloric reasons.

I had two mini Clif bars during the day and a fudge bar when I got home. Incidentally I'm not like a Clif bar freak, I just bought a big box of these mini Clif bars for my train ride back to Michigan at Christmas and now I'm trying to go through them all.

*Not only is the giant wrap and rice high in carbs, but I like to get sour cream, cheese and guacamole on it. Granted I tell them to go easy on those things, but that doesn't usually slow them down much.

Day 9

I did my first big grocery shopping of the new year today. I bought some stuff at H.E.B. last week, but today I went to the co-op and dumped a pile of money on them. It ain't cheap to eat well, but I believe healthy, sustainable food is a worthwhile investment. I actually like that natural, humanely raised meat is so expensive because it forces me to limit my meat intake and to be conscious of the life that was taken for my meal.

For breakfast I had a bowl of Kashi GoLean Crunch cereal with organic skim milk.

For lunch a PB&J sammich, some Kettle Fully Loaded Baked Potato chips and my roommate's homemade lentil soup again. The roomie's stepmom made the raspberry preserves used on my sammich from her garden - it's an annual gift he gets.

This time I asked the roomie what's in the soup and he said it has carrots, onion, celery, red lentils, garbanzo beans and cannellini beans. Like I said before it's a bit weird tasting but good. I'm re-using the picture because I didn't see any point in taking another one.

I bought a new wok today so I made Chinese beef and broccoli for dinner. Unfortunately the wok broke while I was cleaning it (don't ask, it was cheap) so I used my flat-bottom, non-stick poseur wok by Joyce Chen. The beef was from Niman Ranch and pre-sliced for stir fry, but I would've sliced it thinner. I marinated it for 30 minutes using the first recipe I found in an online search basically soy sauce, water, sugar, rice vinegar, corn starch, and for the seasoning sauce I used a recipe from a YouTube video. Basically oyster sauce, sherry, soy sauce, sesame oil, sugar, pepper, corn starch. I served it on brown rice.

I came up with a dinner menu for the week:

Monday: Chili w/ Rice, salad
Tuesday: Salmon w/ Pilaf, spinach
Wednesday: Chicken Cutlets w/ Mashed potatoes, green beans
Thursday: Mac & Cheese w/ Ham & Peas
Friday: Stir-fried Veggies w/ Soba noodles

Day 6

I used the last of my farm-fresh eggs for another eggwich this morning.

Since I was working from home I made a salad and had some of my roommate's homemade "Moroccan Red Lentil" soup from the freezer. It has an odd taste but I like it. I'll probably get and post the recipe eventually. The salad is romaine, tomatoes, cucumber, feta and Kalamata olives with "g/s" dressing. g/s stands for garlic/shallot, and consists of a clove of garlic minced with equal part shallot, 1/4 cup evoo, 1 Tb white wine vinegar, 1 tsp balsamic vinegar, s&p. It's a great quick and easy dressing to make.

For dinner I ate hot dogs, rice pilaf and broccoli. The hot dogs are all natural, uncured beef dogs from Applegate Farms. The rice pilaf is a recipe I make fairly often so I'll post it later, and the broccoli was blanched then sauteed in olive oil with a sprinkle of red pepper flakes.

It occurs to me now that Day 6 is the first day of the year when everything I ate came from my kitchen.