The Skeptic’s Whole30: Day 10
Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2018
This post is part of a series. For the previous post, click here. For the whole series, click here.
I put some frozen waffles into the toaster oven for the kids for breakfast, and was standing at the sink doing dishes (right next to the toaster oven) while they cooked. I began to smell them, but instead of smelling waffles, the distinct odor that hit my nose was that of raw dough. Like, of yeast. It smelled good, but just different. And then I remembered that the same thing had happened to me yesterday. While Little Kid and I were at the bagel shop, he had to go to the bathroom, and there isn’t a bathroom in the bagel shop, so we had to go into the pizza place across the street. And when we were in there, the smell was of dough. I thought nothing of it at the time, since after all, there’s plenty of raw dough in a pizzeria. But I’m wondering if my sense of smell has been tweaked. Don’t I usually smell pizza in a pizzeria? Not dough?
I also feel thinner, but time will tell if this is just psychosomatic.
I had chia pudding for breakfast, leftover meatballs and spaghetti squash for lunch. It went okay. I’m starting to feel myself get into a rhythm. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Figure out what you’re making and make it. This makes me wonder if by day 30 I’ll be so used to this rhythm that it’ll be hard to go back to the way things were before. I suppose that’s the intention, but will it work? What I HOPE happens is that after the Whole30 I can maintain the basic rhythm but bring back the flexibility and the banned ingredients.
I was thinking today about all the times I’ve eaten something unhealthy that I wasn’t even really in the mood for. That seems foreign to me now, but that doesn’t mean it won’t just snap right back to the way it always was after I’m done with this plan. I really hate when people say things like “That seems foreign to me now” about their bad eating habits that they stopped practicing when they started a new diet, as if the change is automatically permanent. How do you know it’s permanent? Most change isn’t permanent.
It was nice out today so the kids asked to go to the park after school. Leaving the park, they asked if we could go to Dunkin Donuts, and I said no. When they inevitably asked why not, I said it was because they were going to eat dinner soon, which was true, but god knew how long it would take me to prepare tonight’s dinner, salmon with sweet potato latkes. The real reason I said no about Dunkin Donuts was that I really didn’t want to have that stuff in the car without being allowed to eat any of it.
It was okay, they each had an ice pop when we got home, and they were happy. I started preparing dinner around 4:45, when we got home from the park, and it was ready at 6.
The recipe in the book was for salmon with sweet-potato fries, but after last night’s fiasco with the soup in which Big Kid proclaimed that sweet potatoes were “disgusting,” and the other night with the celery-root fries that the kids didn’t like, I wasn’t sure if sweet potato fries would work. Latkes seemed like a better bet. I had an old recipe for them, which used flour, but I figured a small amount of tapioca flour wouldn’t hurt.
I made the first batch of latkes with no flour at all, and it all fell apart in the pan. There was no way the kids would eat this mushy mess, I thought as I scooped it out onto a plate. I figured I would eat that part and try to make some more-latke-looking latkes with the tapioca flour. The next batch did turn out better, but the kids complained that they didn’t like the browned parts (those are the best parts!) on the outside. Honestly.
The salmon, however, was awesome. And easy! If I had known all this time how easy salmon was, I would have made it long ago. It was rubbed with a spice mixture that included the zest of clementines, and then drizzled with the juice from the clementines, which was delicious. Big Kid loved it, ate a whole piece of salmon, and then asked for another piece, which he unfortunately didn’t finish, but that was a success. I happen to know his best friend has salmon for dinner sometimes, so for that reason Big Kid was primed to try it and like it.
Little Kid, not so much. He tried it, I think. I thought at first he was into it. Maybe he ate a few bites. And a few bites of latke. After dinner he had a banana.
But there is one piece of salmon and a few latkes left over for me to have for lunch tomorrow.
And with that, I’m a third of the way through.
