The Skeptic’s Whole30: Day 1
Monday, Feb. 19, 2018
This post is part of a series. For the previous post, click here. For the whole series, click here.
A weekday, but a holiday. President’s Day. The whole family is home. I wake up feeling trepidatious but ready. Also, hungry. I’m usually hungry when I wake up and really want something to eat. I weighed myself, to get a pre-Whole30 benchmark, and set to work making my first of 90 recipes, hash browns.
I got this recipe for homemade hash browns from the Serious Eats website, and it uses only potatoes, oil, salt, and pepper. I peeled two small potatoes and grated them, which was easy. I couldn’t believe how much grated potato came from just those two little potatoes. Then I cooked them, and voila, a delicious, filling plate of hash brown potatoes. That was so easy! And so good! I paired the potatoes with a banana and some black coffee. One meal down, 89 to go!
I am aware of the irony that my first Whole30 meal was all carbs. But you know, start slow, right? Also, I probably could have done with one potato, not two, but by 2:30pm I was still not hungry for lunch, so maybe this would be a two-meal day.
In the afternoon I took the boys shopping in town and when we got home it was already 4pm. By then I was hungry — I had let myself get a little too hungry — and started working on the second recipe of the day, Chicken Zoodle Pho from the cookbook. This was what I had planned to have for lunch, with something else for dinner, but it would end up being an early dinner. My husband was having an eating day, and he wanted to go get a pizza roll from the pizzeria in town. The Pho made 2 servings, and I offered the second serving to each of my kids, but they both said they didn’t want it. The Big Kid had a veggie burger on a roll and the Little Kid had PB& J.
The prior week, I had ordered a Spiralizer from Amazon, knowing that on the Whole30 I would have to make lots of “noodles” out of vegetables. It was sitting on my kitchen counter, still in its box, unopened, because I’m a slacker that way. I hoped setting it up wouldn’t be too complicated, because I was hungry.
I was glad to find out the Spiralizer is not electric, it’s just mechanical, which means all the parts are washable in the sink. It comes with 5 different blades that you can use for different thicknesses of shredded vegetables. I hand washed all the parts and set to work Spiralizing a zucchini into noodles. It was easy, and kind of neat-o. My husband walked by and said, “That thing looks like a Medieval torture device.”
The other thing that scared me about the Whole30, which I had to confront now, was all the raw meat I would have to use. Most of the meat-centric recipes involve cooking raw meat, which gives me anxiety. I hate opening the packages and touching the slimy meat, knowing that if their juices touch anything else in my kitchen, whatever they touch is now poisoned with foodborne bacteria. I hate how you have to put anything in the freezer that you’re not going to use within 2 days or else it’ll spoil and then you’re serving your kids spoiled meat. I hate how it takes forever to defrost after it’s been frozen, but you feel funny about taking it out TOO soon because then it might spoil. I hate how there’s a risk of undercooking it and thereby getting food poisoning. I hate how you have to disinfect your kitchen with poisonous chemicals after you cook with raw meat just to get rid of the bacteria. I hate how you can’t just throw it in the freezer in its original packaging, because the packaging comes with that ABSORBENT PAD that gets stuck to the meat in the freezer and then you can’t get it off without ripping the pad and getting the toxic stuff inside the pad all over your meat.
At the store on Saturday, I had bought boneless chicken breasts, ground beef, ground pork, ground turkey, pork chops, and pork tenderloin. I put most of it in the freezer, taking care to transfer most of it into freezer bags first, though I was happy to find some ground beef and pork that could be frozen in its original packaging. I left the chicken breasts in the fridge, knowing I would need them today.
This recipe was less anxiety-producing than most, since all you had to do with the chicken was place one breast directly into hot oil, straight from the package. I did that, and stuck the remaining two breasts in a freezer bag in the freezer, and then I was finished touching raw meat with my bare hands and washing my hands over and over again like a maniac, always taking care to turn on the faucet with my forearm and not my fingers.
The rest of it was more familiar ground: vegetables, broth, spices. And the fish sauce. It was ready at 5pm, which meant it had taken me about an hour, and the recipe said half an hour. So my estimate was accurate, although I’m not sure how much time it took me to prepare the spiralizer for use, before I did any actual food prep.
The soup was delicious. Very nice Vietnamese flavoring. Filling and warming. I ate half of it and put the other half in the fridge, which will save me one cooking session tomorrow or whenever.
The recipe asks you to cook the chicken “until its internal temperature reaches 165 degrees,” and I don’t have a meat thermometer, but thankfully the recipe also involves shredding the chicken with two forks after you cook it and before you put it back into the soup, so at that point you can see if it’s fully cooked. However, I might have to invest in a decent meat thermometer. I used to have a cheap one from the supermarket, but I put it inside the oven and closed the oven door, which melted it. I had no idea if you could put it in the oven, and I guess not.
Last Memorial Day we went to a barbecue where the host had this great meat thermometer called a ThermaPen. I started coveting the ThermaPen then and there, but didn’t feel entitled to buy one, because it was expensive and I liked to avoid cooking with meat (even though having the ThermaPen might make me feel less scared of it). Now, I thought maybe I’d invest in one.
So I was finished eating the soup at about 5:30 and then I was awake for 6 more hours. I didn’t really feel hungry, but I did have a headache and was worried it might be from not eating. But when I woke up the next morning, it was gone.
