October Food Challenge: Week 1

So I have challenged myself to make something new 5 out of the 7 days of the week for the month of October. I am trying to add some new recipes to my repertoire because I have become very repetitive in what I am eating. This will hopefully introduce me to some new things and help me stay dedicated and excited in continuing to eat healthy. I know this is going to be a challenge with school, CrossFit, and everything else in life, but it is something that I am looking forward to doing. In reference to my last post, I am good at going 15 different ways, so this is just going to keep me busy.

In order to stay on top of "going 15 directions," I have to make lots of lists of everything. I always keep a daily planner of everything that I have to do for the week because other wise I would be completely lost. Before I make any semi-big decision I make a list of the pros and cons. Grocery shopping requires a list or I could spend hours in the store and still forget something on top of that. So of course this new adventure requires me to make a list as well. I have a notebook of all the recipes that I could potentially make, the ingredients in them, and then trying to figure out what ingredients I could use multiple times in the week.

Organizing all of this is taking a lot of thinking and planning, but it is fun. After the first week, although it has been short, I have made 4 pretty great new food things!

October 1st: Pulled pork- in my previous post I talked a little bit about this. It was super easy to make because all I did was make a dry rub, put it on the pork, and then leave it in the crockpot for 6 hours. It was so good I didn't even need BBQ sauce on it.

Pork salad

October 2nd: Since the smallest pork shoulder I could find weighed 3.8 pounds, I needed to make something with some of the left overs. I decided to make something like chicken salad, only with pork instead of chicken. I cut up the pork into small pieces and then threw some grapes, almonds, and guacamole into a bowl. I mixed it all up and then ate it with some plantain chips. I was a little wary about what it would taste like, but it was good as well. And again easy to make.

October 3rd: I decided to make breakfast egg muffins this morning. I knew I would be busy the rest of the day, so in order to make something it needed to be breakfast. Again fairly easy to make. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and while that was warming up, I cut up some ham, red and green peppers, tomatoes, and mushrooms. In a bowl I wisked 8 eggs together with all of the other ingredients and then equally distributed them into the muffin tins. I let them cook for about 30 minutes until they were set up and solid all the way through. Two problems with these... Eight eggs was way too many. I did not need 9 of these for myself. Thankfully the roommates helped me in eating them though! The other problem was cleaning the pan was a pain in the butt. Next time I make these, I will definitely use cupcake liners so they don't get stuck to the pan, making it difficult to not only get them out of the pan but clean it as well.

October 4th: One of my CrossFit friends makes this delicious paleo crunch, so I asked her for the recipe. The recipe calls for a lot of ingredients and some of them aren't the cheapest ingredients either, however, the outcome is pure deliciousness. This recipe definitely calls for a food chopper because otherwise you will be hand cutting a lot of nuts up. Once I had everything cut up and mixed together I just threw it all into a cookie sheet and baked it for 20 minutes of so. It did require me to flip it half way through so that was kind of a pain but overall this recipe is amazing. I doubled the recipe so it made enough to last me for snacks for this week which is wonderful. It does have some honey in it, so that has some sugar but it's less than a Lara bar or some other things that I would want for a snack.

October 5th: This was an off day. After a crazy week, I just needed to take Sunday to relax. I slept until 10:00 a.m.  I never EVER do this! Usually even if I can sleep in I am up before 7:00 because my body doesn't understand sleep apparently. So after this week, I guess my body just decided it needed a lot of sleep to get ready for the upcoming week!

I am currently in the process of creating my grocery and recipe list for the week. I will keep you updated on how this coming week of food goes! I currently have a squash sitting in my fridge and I am going to attempt to make spaghetti out of it. I am skeptical but we will see how it goes...