Day 8 / 25% done! / Roasted Italian Sausage and Root Vegetables

Today I'd like to take a break from my usual self-indulgent chatter about what I'm eating and not eating and how said eating/not eating is affecting my psyche and physique. Those two words, I've just realized, should never be placed so close to one another in a sentence. Egads. 

Day 8 is not so different from Days 1 through 7, other than that today was my most delicious day, fine dining at The Kenwood notwithstanding. Accordingly, I want to focus on the food. Today, Day 8 of my Whole30 Challenge, included a favorite dinner of mine that I did not have to alter one bit to make W30 compliant.

This recipe was emailed to me by my friend Alicia about a decade ago, give or take a couple years. I have no idea where it came from but I love it because it's easy and reliable and it ends up delicious no matter what vegetables I use, or what herbs I use, or whether the herbs are dried or fresh. It's just perfect comfort food and the whole family ate it - huge bonus during these days of endless food preparation. (It's also, according to the W30 ideology, perfect post-workout food, especially if you opt for chicken sausage over pork, as chicken is a leaner protein and the perfect post-workout food is meant to have a full serving of lean protein + loads of starchy vegetables.) I think you'll love it as much as my nearly-four-year-old!

Dear Alicia,

Thank you for the gift that keeps on giving.

Love, protein, and healthy fats,

Edith

Why yes, I do eat a lot! (Maybe I also had a second helping. You need quite a plateful to keep you satiated for 4 to 14 hours.)

Before I get to the recipe, for those of you who care, here's what I ate today:

Breakfast at 7:30 am - 2 eggs + kale scramble, sauerkraut (who am I?!), coconut oil

Lunch at 12:45 pm - leftover carrot-ginger soup; leftover shrimp, kelp noodles, and veggies

Dinner - salad with avocado, sprouts, carrots, and herbed-white wine vinaigrette; roasted root vegetables + chicken sausage

It was by far my best food day since March 8th. Yesterday wasn't bad either.

Here's the recipe. Enjoy! xx e-nc

Root Vegetables Roasted with Sausage

Serves 4

About 1 lb potatoes (e.g. red, Yukon gold, Fingerling - I used 2 Yukons + 1 red)*

About 2 lb assorted root vegetables (sweet potatoes, rutabaga, turnips, parsnips — a good healthy mix)**

4-5 fresh sausages (I used 3 Sweet Italian + 2 Hot Italian)

1/2 teaspoon dried rosemary leaves, crumbled

A few sprigs of thyme (if you have some) or a spoonful of a good dried herb blend you have

Handful baby tomatoes (optional)

About 3 tablespoons olive oil

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon black pepper

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cut vegetables down to about 1/2" pieces of equal size. Toss all your root vegetables except for potatoes with 2 tablespoons olive oil and 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon pepper. Bake in a roasting pan, covered with aluminum foil or a lid for about 15 minutes. Remove from oven and uncover. Add potatoes, along with the rest of the salt, herbs, another tablespoon of olive oil, and bake again for about 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, brown sausages on all sides in a pan or grill. Slice sausages crosswise into about 1/4" to 1/2" pieces. Remove casserole from oven, toss vegetables, and arrange sausages and tomatoes, if using, in the dish and return to the oven for another 10-15 minutes (uncovered).

Add a salad and you've got a delicious (incidentally paleo/W30-compliant) dinner.

* You could use winter squash in place of or in addition to potatoes. They, like the potatoes, will cook more quickly than the other root vegetables if they are cut into a 1/2" dice. Add them to the pan at the same time you'd add potatoes. 

** Stay clear of beets. They super dominate, in a bad way (and I love beets). Tonight I used 1 enormous sweet potato + 1 rutabaga + 1 parsnip. I peeled the latter two but not the sweet potato, nor the potatoes.

Day 7: Featuring a Decision on the Vegetarian Whole30 and Food Prep Aspirations for Week 2

We have reached a verdict. There will be no Vegetarian W30* this go around. (Yes. You heard me right. I said "this go around". I seem to have inadvertently consumed the W30 Kool-aid**. The maltodextrin-free, sugar-free, artificial-sweetener-free, artificial-color-free, preservative-free kind, a/k/a water. There might be ANOTHER go around. But don't worry. Not for a while.) I'm already seven days in - almost 25% done! - so I'm going to complete this purist-style, the Whole30 way, and then after the thirty days are up, I'll probably spend a couple weeks experimenting with legumes and dairy, before returning grains and, if the past is any predictor of the future, some sugar into my diet. Depending on how those reintroduced food experiments go, I might do this again, straight up vegetarian style, to see what changes without all the animal protein. I don't know. I'm just thinking ahead. I've never had such a clean slate to work with, so I feel like I might really jump on the elimination diet bandwagon and take my time putting things back in and contemplating whether and in what ways and how much they affect me.

Things I am proud of/intrigued by:

1. I haven't cheated!
2. I haven't even wanted to cheat that much. Last night's party was challenging - there were a lot of good-looking snacks and I love wine. Feeding my children pizza before we left for the party was almost as challenging. And grocery shopping continues to be a complicated experience. So many smells, so much sugar. But mostly, at home, in between meals, I feel good and satisfied and stable, and v. consciously so. Even at my cooking class today, I wasn't too tempted - and my students made some fine-looking food! They were v. supportive, and I don't want to ruin all the work I've already put into this experiment. Cheesy Colombian arepas be damned!
3. My body composition has already been altered, and I have worked out less this week because of illness. Going up the stairs, I feel leaner and stronger.
4. I have not stepped on a scale since Monday morning or counted calories since Monday night.
5. Yesterday, since it was practically summer here, I treated myself to an iced coffee. A week ago, I tried coffee with coconut milk in it and immediately threw it out. Yesterday, I stirred 2 tablespoons of coconut milk into my iced coffee and it tasted lovely. Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes. My palate is not as set in its ways as I'd assumed on March 8th.
6. Every morning, I wake up less tired. (I do not, however, wake up excited about eggs.)

Anyway, this week, rather than a menu, here are the make-ahead things I plan to tackle, as well as the new recipes I plan to try for the first time or tailor from the Cake and Edith archives to be Whole30-compliant:

Garlicky Noodle Bowl, paleo style

Homemade Mayo (I hate mayonnaise, but if the Whole30 folks are to be believed, this recipe is a game-changer)

Red-and-Slow Cooked Roast (a family favorite - but will it be sans soy sauce and honey?!)

Chicken and Brussels Sprouts (from Rhiannon - thanks dude!)

Prosciutto-Hashbrown-Egg Cups (because I need something new for breakfast; and evidently I haven't learned my lesson re: using muffin tins for things other than muffins)

Here are some goals for the week:

1. Unless I work out hard, avoid fruit/nut/seed snacks (e.g. homemade lara bars, Navitas super power bites, Sunbutter, almonds, almond butter).
2. Have more leftovers available for lunch.
3. Drink less tea.
4. Try two vegetables that I don't usually buy/eat. (I think it will be jicama and rutabaga.)

That's all. Baby steps.

In other news I've decided where I'm going out to dinner the day my experiment with W30 ends: Rincon 38. I. Cannot. Wait. Sometimes I read the menu over and over again, dreaming of fried manchego. What I haven't read as much since starting the W30 is my usual set of food blogs. Until today, which was a good reminder why. (Note: those are all clever links!)

And, finally, here's what I ate today. (Now with pictures!)

Breakfast at 7:30 am: 2 eggs, baked side pork, a few baby tomatoes, 1/2 banana, coconut oil

Lunch at 11 am: 3 sweet potato-tuna cakes, salad with sprouts, avocado, and tomatoes

Snack at 5:30 pm: Navitas Power Bites (barely compliant, but I was starving and knew dinner wasn't going to happen for a while) (no picture)

Dinner at 8 pm: Shrimp, side pork, kelp noodles, green beans, carrots, W30 garlicky-Sunbutter sauce

One week down! Woo-hoo! Look what the W30 people sent me: NPH!

* Rhiannon included the abbreviated "W30" in her email to me recommending the chicken recipe, and I feel like "W30" sounds v. cool and legit and I should use it.

** Kool-aid Ingredients: CITRIC ACID, MALTODEXTRIN, SALT, CONTAINS LESS THAN 2% OF ASCORBIC ACID (VITAMIN C (of sorts)), NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR, ARTIFICIAL COLOR, YELLOW 5, YELLOW 6, RED 40.

Day 6: Saturday Morning Observations

I do not crave sugar as much as I'd imagined, but I do crave something easy. I am v. tired of cooking.

My stomach feels thinner and more muscular. My fingers aren't going up and down in size as they tend to do in Minnesota, just like the floor boards.

My head is strangely clear. It's reminiscent of mindfulness, I think, like there's a constant out-of-body-looking-down-into-my-body thing going on. It makes me lose my patience less.

I feel empowered. Like, if I can skip dairy and sugar (and everything else) for five days, then I can totally... X, Y, Z. And X, Y, and Z have nothing to do with food, but to the other areas of life that would benefit greatly from some discipline.

One of the Whole30 objectives is to break the obsession with calorie counting and the misconception that how our body uses food can be simplified into a calories in/calories out calculation. I am a child of the 80s though! So of course I'm obsessed with calories, and in the past I have lost and maintained weight by focusing on calorie counting. Also, I just love data! Accordingly, on Day 1, I did count. And I consumed 2200 calories (900 of them from my mega salad at lunch - all those nuts and seeds add up). I am trying to not cheat (even the aspirational/mental parts (no calorie documentation), not just the food rules (no chips)), so I have not counted since, but of course it is on my mind to some extent, and I can tell that there is a range I'm eating within, 2000-2200 being the likely average. Why do I mention this? Just to point out that I'm by no means starving myself. 

The most significant change has been sleep. A lot of Whole30 recaps include the epiphany that one needs way more sleep than he or she realized, e.g. 9.5-10 hours per night. My experience so far is the opposite. I have never needed a lot of sleep. Pre-children, pre-law school, pre-coffee (with cream) addiction, I got by just fine on five or six hours. Once at a weekend retreat many years ago, during an ice breaker in which we were supposed to share something that helps us add value, I said, "I'm really productive on really little sleep." Since then adult life happened and children arrived and I started relying on coffee in the morning and hourly snacks to give me energy boosts to make it through the day without any serious dips. Pre-Whole30, for the past five years at least, I didn't know how much sleep I needed, I just knew it was never enough. The mornings were always painful, especially since my daughter started kindergarten. (Her school's start time bumped our life up a good hour and a half. We still haven't really adjusted, seven months later.) Since Day 3, I have trouble falling asleep but it's not restlessness. I really don't feel tired at 10 p.m. When I finally fall asleep closer to midnight, I'm anxiously anticipating the brutality of the 6 a.m. alarm, but then it doesn't really feel so brutal. I'm not tired in the morning. According to the emails, I'm still not able to read my body's cues. They are different than before, so discerning between hunger and boredom or not being hungry but actually needing fuel and exhaustion vs. so-over-cooking, etc., isn't simple or natural or clear yet. Time will tell. In twenty-five days, I'll have a better grasp of what my body needs, I guess. But so far, I'm pretty sure that this way of eating is giving me much more stable energy levels. Food, eh? It's for real.

Finally, a word on meat. It's WAY more meat than we cheese-preferrers typically eat. That said, it's not as much as I thought. It is a lot of eggs though, and I can't believe how many vegetables I've consumed this week. Here's the animal protein tally, just what I'm eating, not what I'm also feeding my family:

Monday - 2 eggs, 3-4 oz chicken

Tuesday - 2 eggs, 1 hot dog, 6 oz chicken (split between two meals)

Wednesday - 2 eggs, 3 oz chicken, 4 oz Atlantic cod

Thursday - 4 oz Atlantic cod, 2 oz ground beef

Friday - ~7 oz canned tuna (split between two meals)

Saturday - 2 eggs, so far 

Whole week - 3 lbs chicken wings to make 3.5 quarts chicken stock

No pork. Minimal red meat. Next week will look pretty different as I'm going to try to use up what's in my refrigerator before buying more protein. That includes frozen shrimp, scallops, side pork, prosciutto, and roast beef. I will probably buy some chicken for more stock, some ground beef to bulk up the chile verde stew I made on Thursday, and some more eggs (our CSA share of two dozen every two weeks is not cutting it). I may or may not manage a meal plan this week. I'll keep you posted.

And I'll leave you with...

This morning's breakfast: 2 eggs, 1 teaspoon olive oil, 2 teaspoons coconut oil, kale, tomatoes, mushrooms

Not the most attractive of breakfasts, but pretty tasty. Flickr is being weird so I don't know if the picture is working. Here's the link.

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P.S. The rest of the day's food looked a little something like this.



Lunch: carrot, celery, roast beef, guacamole, kale chips, plantain chips

Snack: lara bar



Dinner: At the Kenwood! They were unbelievably accommodating and custom-made me a (nearly perfectly Whole30-compliant meal) and my dinner was delicious AND I didn't have to make it myself. Sounds like a win-win-win! Except that I feel kind of unwell tonight. Maybe because I ate at weird times? Also hormonal stuff is wacky and I'm still getting over illness. There were fava or lima beans in my meal and MC ate those for me. The menu: olives, mixed greens with sherry vinaigrette (no sugar in it), pan-fried scallops, grilled asparagus, cara cara oranges (my favorite!), and a pesto-ish sauce minus cheese and nuts.

Party food: Grapes (which tasted like candy), prosciutto, carrot, tomato, more water than a person should ever drink in one day. Parties are way less fun without wine, and my stomach hurts even though I didn't eat anything I shouldn't have eaten. I'm a little grumpy.

Day 5: Weekend Worries

This weekend holds my first night "out" since starting my Whole30 challenge. I mean, resisting a stale cookie at a church meeting is one thing, but going to one of my dearest friend's 40th birthday party?... Quite another thing. A thing warranting at least five adult beverages, actually. Fortunately, the birthday girl's not a big drinker so I don't think she'll mind me downing orange sparkling waters all night. I might even go crazy and add some JUICE. You heard me! It is the weekend after all. And 40's a big one. A big splash of juice is definitely in order. Note to self: buy juice and sparkling water.

Today my meals were not only Whole30 compliant but also Lent-observing-Catholic approved. That said, as the justices say, I followed the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law. My meals were weirdly timed and snacky. My heart just wasn't in it. I wanted to eat cheese and chocolate so badly. Accordingly, I am less satiated today than I have been on Days 1 through 4. I'm still really quite proud of my self-discipline, however, especially since I neither (a) ate the delicious bowl of oatmeal that was in the refrigerator left over from my children's breakfast, nor (b) shared my children's after-school smoothie with them, even though it is my favorite smoothie ever. 

Positive note: This morning, whilst enjoying a wonderful phone conversation with one of my cross-country besties (Hi, Alicia! Did you make a list of topics to be covered in our next business meeting?), I made some tuna-sweet potato cakes. They were super good, except they stuck in the muffin tins, which I knew would happen because I have good kitchen intuition and know what's what, especially what's what with my own kitchen equipment. Nevertheless, I will make them again because they were absolutely delicious. Also, as they are a combination of lean protein and starchy vegetable they comprise a pretty perfect post-workout meal according to the Whole30, and I am in need of grab-and-go perfect post-workout options. But next time I'm skipping the muffin tins and will just make them tuna burgers.

Less positive note: I'm pretty hungry today, in the mental way not the stomach way. The chia breakfast bowl did not agree with me. I was full halfway through it and then my stomach hurt 20 minutes later. So maybe it's just going to be eggs every morning, for 25 more mornings. Unless I (a) buy sausage, or (b) go the "vegetarian Whole30" route, which allows pastured yogurt and whey protein powder. 

Here's what I ate today:

Breakfast at 7 a.m. - chia bowl with almonds and banana



Lunch part 1 at 11 a.m. - kale chips, 3 tuna-sweet potato cakes, tea with coconut milk

Lunch part 2 at 1 p.m. - kale chips, tomatoes, a couple slices pear, homemade lara bar

Lunch part 3 at 3 p.m. - 1.5 hard-boiled eggs, 4 olives (Sadie ate one, then the children planted the pits so hopefully next year we'll have an olive grove in our side yard)

Dinner at 5:45 p.m. - green salad, plantain chips with guacamole, 3 tuna-sweet potato cakes

Compared with the plan:

Day 5 (meatless; Lenten Friday)

Breakfast: Eggs, tomatoes, magic green sauce, guacamole, green tea

Lunch: Leftover soup, tuna salad lettuce wraps, olives, homemade lara bar if still hungry

Dinner: Spicy Tomato Sauce with Spaghetti Squash, green salad 

There are serious changes going on physically and mentally but I'm not sure how to share them yet. 

Happy weekend. Enjoy your sparkling water!

xoxo