Day 9: Recipes

Breakfast
Over-easy egg over a hamburger patty and grilled spinach.
Salty Lemon Water

Lunch
Sugar-free marinara with turkey over spaghetti squash

Dinner
Jolene's Chicken Bake
3 chicken breast fillets
3 slices bacon
1 sweet potato
1 zucchini
Emeril's Original Essence

Directions: Grease a small pan with coconut oil. Add chicken breast fillets. Spice with Emeril's Original Essence to taste. Layer bacon over chicken. Layer sweet potatoes over bacon. Layer zucchini over sweet potato. Bake @ 350 for 25 minutes.

Dessert
Chocolate Chunk Paleo Cookies from Gina with Running to the Kitchen

This is a repeat recipe, and I cannot speak highly enough for it. They are just as good as the real thing, ya'll. Just as good.

Day Five: Recipes

Breakfast
Salty Lemonade again for breakfast. I cannot tell you how amazing this beverage is for breakfast. I crawl from bed bleary eyed and grumpy. I sit at the breakfast table with my salty lemonade, and by the time I'm done I'm awake, alert, and almost chipper. Incredible. I'm also not hungry for about 2 hours after.

Jolene's Salty Lemonade
16oz warm water
1T lemon or lime juice
1t Sea salt or Himalayan salt

Lunch
I ate out with a co-worker today, so I had to improvise. I got a sweet potato, grilled salmon, and grilled green beans. Are green beans really a bean? You can eat them right off the plant! I called it good enough and it was quite a tasty lunch.

Snack
Almonds and a cup of coffee.

Dinner
Paleo Shepherd's Pie from Neely at Paleo Plan.

There are so many variations on shepherd's pie it's a bit of a craps shoot as to whether you'll get what you're expecting. This shepherd's pie is delightful, robust, well spiced, and quite savory.

Modifications:

• recipe calls for onion salt, but I used onion power and then added Sea salt.
• Herbs d'Provence instead of Italian seasoning. I prefer to add my spices separately so I can tailor to my own palate.

I may never get over the noxious smell of cooking parsnips. How can anything so tasty smell so bad? The mushrooms I used weren't optimal (white beech), so I recommend sticking with something more traditional.

Dessert
Holiday grapes from Whole Foods.

The only grape juicer and sweeter than the Scarlotta, this grape has a very short harvesting period. They are shamefully expensive and worth every penny.
I am coming to understand why people on the Paleo diet don't complain about the Paleo diet.

Day Two: Recipes

Breakfast
Fried Eggs and Sweet Potato Hash from Jason at Paleo Plan

To add extra spice I made this recipe with Aidells Cajun Style Andouille. While the recipe says fried eggs, I found over-easy preferable. The recipe also says it feeds two but I found it feeds three. There is still a very large serving leftover after my daughter and I ate.

Also for breakfast is my favorite beverage: Holy Grale juice. There are recipes all over the Internet for this delightful raw juice. I've played with red kale, green kale, and several varieties of grapes. My favorite, and what I made this morning, is green kale and green grapes. Sweet, refreshing, and more of a pick-me-up than a double shot of espresso.

Lunch
Egg-free, Grain-free Pumpkin Zucchini Muffins from Cat at Paleo Plan

The muffins were not ideal. They over-cooked outside and under-cooked inside. The texture was unexpectedly dense and 1t of all-spice is entirely too much for my palate. The recipe has potential and I'll try it again, but not until I've practiced with Paleo baking a bit more. The addition of walnuts will likely help, as will omission of the frozen fruit.

Also for lunch: an Envy apple.

A few years ago I took a tour of the apple section, purchasing a different type of apple every week. I bought Honeycrisp apples last because I thought the $2.99lb price point ridiculous. Now I consider the price worthwhile. I'm a devout Honeycrisp apple fan, eating one every day of their short season. Envy apples are very much like a Honeycrisp in firmness and sweetness, but Envy apples little less sweet and a little more firm. Possibly a perfect apple.

  

Dinner
We ate at a friend's house tonight. They made a pork and green chili stew. I couldn't have asked for a better dinner, and it aligned nicely (if not perfectly) with Paleo restrictions.

Dessert
Chocolate Chunk [Paleo] Cookies from Gina at Running to the Kitchen.

There was a dough consistency failure in this recipe (trend of the day, apparently), but this time the dough was too soft. The cookies mushed into one solid cookie. Aside from that, these cookies are epic. If I hadn't made them I would never have known they contain no dairy, no sugar, and no gluten.

Substitution replacing the chocolate with unsweetened carob chips worked well. I prefer my chocolate bitter, so I will use unsweetened carob or cocoa chips for my chocolate substitutions in all recipes.

A successful second day of Paleo.