Friday, June 7, 2013

Day 1 of our "10-Days of Real Food" Pledge

Day 1, which was Monday, of our "Real Food" pledge really wasn't that difficult.  Well, let me qualify that statement.....it wasn't that difficult aside from one thing:  at the end of the day, Drew and I had a major dark chocolate craving.  We had to eliminate that from our pledge challenge due to the many grams of sugar that is added to our favorite snack.  Drew picked up a 100% dark chocolate baking unsweetened baking chocolate from the store, thinking we could sweeten it up a bit naturally.  We both took a tiny bite of that stuff by itself.  Oh. My. Goodness.  It was awful.....so bitter.

So, part of my mission for next week is to figure out how to make some yummy, healthful, dark chocolate.  I will let you know how that goes.

Aside from the major chocolate craving at the end of the day, day one of the challenge was pretty easy.  We had prepared well, which was key.  We had our homemade granola for breakfast and plenty of fruit for snacktime.

Because I realized how nice it was to be so prepared on Monday morning, I used Abbey's morning nap to prepare for day 2 of the pledge.  Luke and I made some whole wheat tortillas for Tuesday night's fajitas.

My little helper...making homemade whole wheat tortillas.

Then, for lunch we all had sandwiches made from the honey whole wheat bread that we purchased from Great Harvest Bread.  Here's the scoop on the bread.  It costs $5.50 per loaf (which seems pricey, I know), but it weighs (literally) 2 lbs!  Also, I didn't know this until after we purchased the bread, but they always have a buy one loaf get one free coupon on the local website of the Great Harvest Bread company. This makes each loaf only $2.75, which is pretty equivalent to the bread we always purchased at the grocery store.  Of course, I definitely want to try to make my own whole grain bread as well.   But I knew I would already be making a lot of essentials in the kitchen this week (like pizza dough, tortillas, etc.), so I wanted one of my "packaged" items to be bread this first week.  The trip to the bakery was a fun adventure in and of itself.  The employee there let us sample any of the fresh baked breads we desired (and they had some delicious sweet ones as well.) The samples she gave us were whole slices (that felt like they weighed a quarter of a pound.)  We found out that they actually grind their grains into flour for the breads every morning---talk about fresh!  Needless to say, we are really loving the bread...and the sandwiches.  I had to pick up some new peanut butter (our previous peanut butter had sugar listed just after peanuts in the ingredients list.)  We are all LOVING the new peanut butter as well!

For snacks, we devoured a LOT of fresh fruit.  But, that is nothing out of the ordinary around our house.

After Drew arrived home from work, he played with the kids while I started dinner.  I made sure to cook the long grain brown rice during Abbey's afternoon nap (since the rice took 50 minutes to cook).  This gave me one less thing to do during dinner preparation time.  I finished our first "real-food" dinner:  farmer's market stir fry.  It. was. delicious!  I modified the recipe slightly though.   I added some garlic to the sauce,which I feel provided a great balance for the ginger.  Click here for the stir-fry recipe.

Farmer's market stir-fry with a side of long grain brown rice and freshly cut pineapple.
 The best part is that there were leftovers, which had the privilege to consume for lunch the following day.  Day 1-success!

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