Day 18, Thursday: In Which I Offer an Assortment of Recipes

It's Recipe Day! Let's get the business out of the way.

Brunch: Drumroll please...hardboiled eggs with pesto!!! The best.
Snack 4:15: Bernadette's Nutella and an apple
Dinner 8:45: Fajita-less fajitas

(Picture at left is from my pre-Sugar Detox days. So ignore the melon and prosciuto.)

Here's a few little secrets nobody tells you about pesto.
1. It is insanely easy to make.
2. YOU MUST toast the pine nuts.
3. YOU DON'T NEED THE CHEESE. Most pesto recipes call for a lot of grated parmesan cheese. What's cheese for, anyway? It adds fat, salt, and a yummy "umami" flavor. (What's umami? It's one of the five flavors of your tastebuds. It's a Japanese word, and it basically means "salty fatty protein-y goodness". I find it completely unnecessary in pesto. There's a ton of fat and flavor in the other ingredients and you can add as much salt as you like.

Here's what you do to make it:
1. Put a fourthish cup of pine nuts into a frying pan on medium heat. DO NOT LEAVE THE KITCHEN. They will be done in probably 1.5 to 3 minutes, and if you are FIVE SECONDS late to take them out of the frying pan, they are black and that's 3 dollars down the drain.
2. Get out the food processor. Wash an entire package of Trader Joe's basil. Separate the leaves from the stems and put the leaves in the food processor.
3. Add your pine nuts. Turn on the food processor and stream in about a quarter cup of olive oil. You can add more if you like it oilier. Add salt to taste. You're done!

Cook up two or three hardboiled eggs, peel 'em, cut 'em half, arrange them nicely on a plate. Then put great hunks of pesto on them. Such yumminess! It's incredibly rich and decadent.

Bernadette's Nutella is a name I've given to an incredible concoction devised by my pal Bernadette. I sometimes also think of it as "Paleo Fondue". It involves nut butter, coconut oil, and cocoa powder. It is INSANELY rich. I'd be curious to hear what non-Sugar Detoxers think of the recipe. To me, it is way sweet with the apple, but maybe that's because of my sugar-free taste buds. Here's the link: http://bernadettebirney.com/2013/08/choco-almond-butter-apples.html. If you think you can't do a Sugar Detox, get your hands on a green apple, make this stuff, and try it out. This will carry you through many a craving!

Finally today, on our recipe hit parade: the cashew cheese.

Get a bunch of cashews. Put them in a bowl and cover them with water. Let them sit all day or overnight. Drain them, put them in a food processor. Add just enough water to make the texture "ricotta-y". This makes a very bland ricotta-like substance that you can doctor in whatever way you want. If you were to add tahini, you'd have Paleo hummus. If you add garlic, you have something that goes well rolled in cooked eggplant with prosciutto, covered with tomato sauce, and baked: Paleo eggplant rollatini, like I made. (Remember: I later found out that cashews are not on the Sugar Detox. But they are paleo-friendly!)

Getting near the finish line now. I have one more dietary indiscretion up my sleeve before I end!

Day 15, Monday: In Which Our Heroine Actually Reads the Directions

I felt fantastic on this day.

Breakfast: Two hardboiled eggs. Shockeroo.
Lunch: remains of my Parkview Diner salad from the day before.
Dinner: pork chops with Diane's awesome cabbage dish. Can take the girl outta Poland but you can't take the Polish out of the girl. Other Eastern European foods I love: potatoes. Kielbasa. Mustard. Yum! This photo does not do the cabbage dish justice. It is cabbage, onion, and green apple cut up thin and sauteed in bacon fat.

Today I had a serious ruh-roh moment when I actually re-read the 21 Day Sugar Detox manual and discovered that I've been doing a ton of things wrong. Well, four things to be specific. I shall reveal them to you in ascending order of my shock.

1. Turns out sweet potatoes are not on the sugar detox. I had a sneaking suspicion about this, and embarrassingly my husband even checked in with me about it before we ate them. "Are you sure these are on the Detox?" I blew him off. "YES, I'm sure!" I had convinced myself they were on the "occasionally" list. They're not.

2. Turns out CASHEWS are not on the sugar detox. WTF? Are they a legume? Too much sugar? High glycemic index? This is a big blow to my snacking habits, because I am a big fan of cashews. This means that my cashew cheese eggplant rollatini is a big wash, Detox-wise.

3. Now this next revelation blew my hair back, I was so stunned: a half cup of rice IS allowed on the Detox!!! Occasionally. I am shocked by this. I do pretty well with white rice myself but nothing, I mean nothing shows me the danger of simple carbs like what happens when my husband eats white rice. I LITERALLY SEE HIM BLOW UP IN FRONT OF MY EYES. Like we start eating at 6:15 and at 6:20 I look at his face and he has another chin. Seriously--that stuff must be poison. I told Chris, against my better judgement, about the half cup of rice thing, and his eyes started sparkling and he asked me a bunch of questions about it in a pushy voice. "Really? Are you sure? How much? When did you find this out? How often can I have it? Can I have it with condiments? If I don't eat a half cup each day can I save up each day's allotment and have seven cups at once at the end of two weeks?" (Answers: Yes. Yes. Half cup occasionally. Today. Occasionally. Only if they are free of sugar. No.) I strongly advised him not to go down that road.

4. And finally, this sentence from the manual, in response to the question "Can I eat as much as I want of the 'Yes' foods?": "If you find yourself eating 1/4c of almond butter in a sitting, you may be eating too much of it."

WHAT.
THE.
F&*%????

I have been eating easily a THIRD to a HALF cup of almond butter every time I have my "apple and almond butter" snack, and you know, Gentle Reader, that I've been snarfing that up with the precision of a Dyson vacuum! AAAACK! This caused me great tsuris for about five minutes. Then I said to myself, "Self, you are feeling good and looking good with this diet, and following it pretty faithfully with the exception of the night at Nina's and the Sweet Potato Pancakes and the Cashew Cheese fiascos. Don't worry about this. Maybe eat a little less next time."

Day 14, Sunday: In Which I Reveal My Not-So-Revolutionary Food Management System

Breakfast: two hardboiled eggs. BO-ring.
Lunch: Fantastic salad at the Parkview Diner: greens, marinated red peppers, sun-dried tomatoes, pine nuts, mozzerella, artichokes, onion, cabbage, chicken gyro.
Snack: the remaining half cup of milkshake.
Dinner: eggplant rollatini with cashew ricotta--amazeballs!

Regarding dinner: The cashew ricotta sounds gross, right? I substituted cashew ricotta for my usual mozzerella in this dish because I am trying to eat less cheese on this round of the Detox. I wasn't crazy about it, but Chris thought it was pretty good. More about this topic, and the unfortunate sweet potato pancakes, tomorrow.

Regarding lunch: I didn't notice the sun-dried tomatoes when I ordered the salad. I probably would have left them off if I had, because dried anything is a huge source of sugar. For example, the dried cranberries that we all love to put on salads, etc. are CHOCK full of sugar. You have to hunt for them. I shop at Trader Joe's a lot and their dried stuff is full of sugar.

I shop at Trader Joe's for economic reasons. I really don't like the store--the produce, though organic, is meh, and there's a very limited selection of organic meats. It has ended up being the least of all evils, so that's where I shop. In the summer, I prefer to shop at our local farmer's markets, but that's expensive too. I probably spend about $140-$180 a week on groceries at TJs. That's a lot for a two-person household. If I were shopping at Whole Foods, I would probably spend $225. What drives it up? Nuts. Meat. High-quality oils. I am happy to say that we generally eat everything I bring home, for one reason: WE DO MEAL PLANNING. (Well, one additional reason--we overeat!)

My sister and I agree that meal planning is the great untaught skill. Do they teach it in Home Ec? I don't know, I never took Home Ec and I don't even know if they still offer it in schools. My parents were of the opinion that you could learn what they were teaching in Home Ec at home. And indeed I did learn how to attach a button, mend a sock, cook dinner, wash dishes, clean a toilet, do laundry, hang a picture, and take care of plants and animals in my parents' house. God bless my parents! Our house had plenty of chaos but I am so grateful that I was taught how to do those fundamental tasks.

What I didn't learn was meal planning, even though I'm almost positive my parents were doing it. Why? Because I DO remember that we went to the grocery store about once a week for a week's worth of groceries, and we always had a hot, multi-component dinner at night. Putting out hot dinner for seven consecutive nights on one trip to the grocery store means that somebody thought ahead. Maybe you're a meal planning pro and have been doing it your whole life; I didn't figure out this fantastic key to managing your diet, and indeed your life as an adult, until I was probably 33. Before then, I would shop at whatever grocery store happened to be close. I'd go anywhere from two to seven times in a week, and only get enough food for one or two meals. We ate out A LOT, which is bad for your waistline and your pocketbook. There was never anything to eat in the house. What food we did have would often rot in the fridge, because I knew that I should be buying lots of vegetables at the grocery store but I never thought ahead about what I'd like to do with them.

Now I manage my food like this: I do all my shopping on Monday, generally. Before I go to the grocery store, Hubby and I sit down and write out the week's meals together. We consider what we want for breakfasts, snacks, and dinners. (Lunches are always a little laissez-faire around my house--we tend to have leftovers or snackish things--it's the weak spot in my system.) Then we put all the components on a list. We go and get it. Then we cook it up and eat it! Simple, right? Should be, but it took me a long time to get it down. It's really the only thing that makes this sugar detox possible, for me or for hubby.

Today I continued to feel kind of shitty. Is it candida die-off? Is it the aftereffect of the meat sweats? Regardless, one foot in front of the other.