The first week of the Clean Program is very deceiving. "I can do this, piece of cake"...that's what you think because you've surrounded yourself with "clean" foods and probably haven't scheduled any restaurant dates or put yourself around 50 Dominoe's pizzas. THEN Week 2 comes around and your guard is down...BAM you have 2 hours to kill and your favorite time to kill spot, Panera, is conveniently located next to your meeting while your house is 30 minutes away. What to do, what to do? I know! I'll just go in and have a nice cup of caffeine-free tea! Oh, darn! They're out of caffeine free tea. Guess I'll just have a hazelnut coffee with half and half, sugar in the raw, and of course, a chocolate chipper cookie to go with it! Tricky, tricky. A few days later, you're at another meeting, only this time, they're running late but don't worry, they've provided 50 Dominoe's pizzas to keep you busy. There is nothing more tempting than the smell of 50 pizzas. That time I narrowly escaped cheating but the Panera trip had already scarred my week! Learn from my mistakes, dear reader, keep your guard up and your snacks handy.
(Clean tuna salad)
Day 8
Breakfast: Smoothie (frozen fruit, chia, flax meal, psyllium husks, almond milk, usually some sort of nut or seed. They are starting to run together at this point)
Lunch: A delightful concoction, my take on "Clean" tuna salad! 1 can of sustainably caught tuna from Whole Foods (I say this to make you aware of it's existence, not to be snooty), 1 can of chickpeas, dill, freshly squeezed lemon juice, some lemon zest because I can, 1 chopped apple, 1 thinly sliced celery stalk, 1 chopped carrot, 1 chopped zucchini, sea salt. Delicious :)
Snacks: Energy balls (dates, nuts, seeds, chocolate chips and water in the food processor. Roll into balls and coat with unsweetened coconut. Healthy, easy, delicious), carrot sticks, nectarine.
Dinner: Carrot, celery and apple juice
Day 9
Breakfast: Smoothie
Lunch: Broccoli, tahini, brown rice, chickpeas, and dark red kidney beans (I added that because we didn't have 2 cans of chickpeas). I also doubled the tahini lemon sauce. See original recipe
here from Chefuality.blogspot.com
Snacks: Energy balls, nectarine, carrots
Dinner: Smoothie
Day 10
Breakfast: Carrot, celery, spinach and apple juice
Lunch: Same as yesterday
Snacks: Same as yesterday, oh and the cheating at Panera :) Coffee and cookie!
Dinner: Smoothie
Day 11
Breakfast: Smoothie
Lunch: Same as yesterday, this stuff make 3 lunches for me and Ryan!
Snacks: Energy balls, carrot, kiwi
Dinner: Smoothie
Day 12
Breakfast: Smoothie
Lunch: Tuna, black beans, zucchini, sea salt and red pepper powder...wasn't so sure about this, but it turned out okay
Snacks: Energy ball, kiwi
Dinner: Smoothie
(Scones before being cooked)
Day 13
Breakfast: Smoothie
Lunch: The best fish tacos EVER! Used the flounder that Ryan caught, again, probably not supposed to eat this type of fish but it was free so it won (See last week for recipe)
Snack: Chocolate and almond scones, the closest thing to chocolate chip cookies...so delicious! They turned out a little different this year because I used brown rice flour instead of gluten free all purpose flour...still good but the all purpose was better! You can find
recipe hereDinner: Smoothie
Day 14
Breakfast: Smoothie
Snack: Vegan pancakes with frozen peaches and an apple cider vinegar reduction. Recipe for
pancakes here. Made vinegar reduction by boiling apple cider vinegar with peaches, vanilla and cinnamon until syrupy. VERY tangy and "pungent"....will make your nose run but it's pretty good. The pancakes were delicious.......once we figured out how to get them to NOT stick to the pan. Just got stainless steel pans and they were not working...oiled up an already seasoned cast iron pan and it finally worked. Failure pictured above, success pictured at the beginning of this post.
Lunch: Baked fish with lemon juice and dill served with asparagus sauteed with gluten-free tamari.
Dinner: Broth from the chicken soup I made, recipe below
Brandy's Friday-Sunday Chicken and Rice Soup
Friday evening:
-1 whole chicken, humane certified if possible
-Coconut oil
-Olive oil
-Carrots
-Garlic, onion, and red pepper powder, sea salt and ground black pepper
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Rinse and pat dry whole chicken and set in a large roasting pan (I use glass). Mix together dry seasoning, I like the combination above. I just sort of guesstimate with the seasoning but it's mostly sea salt. Rub chicken completely with this seasoning. Then, I take a few chunks of hardened coconut oil and stuff them under the skin, sometimes with a few cloves of garlic. I use melted coconut oil to rub down the rest of the bird completely. When you've finished, the chicken should be sitting in the roasting pan with the wings on top. I cut up a few carrots and sometimes celery to stuff in the chicken's cavity, this is for moisture and flavor. I usually add about a cup of filtered water to the bottom of the pan as well and keep adding as needed. The oil and chicken fat will mix with the water as it cooks and can be used to baste the chicken if you desire. Sometimes I will use the olive oil in my Misto to spray down the chicken while it's cooking too. I think most of these basting steps are unnecessary but I get bored while I'm cooking chicken and this makes me feel important.
Place the pan, uncovered, into the preheated oven and cook for 45 minutes-1 hour, depending on the size of the chicken and your oven. I check frequently around 30-45 minutes to make sure it is completely cooked. If you do not have a meat thermometer and you don't mind ugly-fying your chicken, you can cut the breast open to see if it is cooked. (My meat thermometer met a tragic end earlier this year and we haven't replaced it yet, so this is what I do!)
After chicken has cooked completely, I let it cool and then cover the entire pan with cling wrap or aluminum foil and let sit overnight in the fridge or, until the coconut oil/fat has hardened in the pan.
Saturday
-Carrots
-Celery
-Garlic
-Onion (optional)
-Bay leaves
The next day, I take out the pan and remove the hardened oil/fat. Sometimes I'll reuse this for cooking something savory but you don't have it, I'm just trying to be thrifty! I remove all of the chicken I'd like to eat like the breasts and white meat. Then I take the entire contents of the pan and put them in a stock pot (thanks MIL for the new stock pot for Christmas, worked great!!) and cover the bird entirely with filtered water. I then add carrots, celery (even the leaves), whole cloves of garlic (I add about 5, we love garlic), 2 bay leaves, ground black pepper, onion. After the veggies have been added, I pour in enough filtered water to nearly fill the stock pot but leave room for boiling.
This mixture should be brought to a boil and then turned to low to simmer for 6-8 hours then let it cool until it can be put into the fridge.
Sunday
-Carrots
-Celery
-Onion
-Garlic
-Zucchini
-Bok Choy
-3 cups prepared brown rice
Take the stock pot out of the fridge and using a large mixing bowl and strainer, strain the contents into the large bowl. If Ryan is not home to help me with this heavy pot, I will usually just ladle the stock into the strainer until I feel it is light enough for me to handle. From the strained contents, pick out any edible chicken and toss them into the stock. Put the remaining contents into the trash or, if you have a compost heap, put the veggies in the compost and the chicken bones in the trash. You could eat the veggies if you'd like, but I prefer to use new ones for the soup since I'm fairly confident the nutrients from the cooked veggies are now in my stock. I may have read this somewhere or I may have completely fabricated it in my mind...either way, I don't feel like fact checking this on Google, so let's run with it.
If you want to make a gigantic pot o' soup, like we did because it is our lunch for the week, you can use all of the stock and add the remaining ingredients. Or, you could just use enough of the stock to make whatever size soup you'd like. The remaining soup can be put in mason jars and used to cook brown rice! Not entirely sure how long it'd last but I'd probably want to use it within the week.
For giganto pot o' soup: add chopped veggies (I used the ones above, you can use whatever sounds good) to stock, bring to a boil and then bring to low to simmer. Add prepared brown rice, any additional chicken from yesterday and sea salt and pepper to taste. Let simmer until veggies are nice and soft and voila, chicken and rice soup!
Lunch: Same as yesterday. Humanely raised chicken sauteed with onion, garlic, sea salt and whatever other spices Ryan decided to add. Mixed greens, carrot, cucumber, and the dressing (pictured) made of 1/4 cup olive oil, 1/8 cup apple cider vinegar, a few shakes of mustard powder, sea salt and black pepper.
