The Skeptic’s Whole30: Day 11
Thursday, March 1, 2018
This post is part of a series. For the previous post, click here. For the whole series, click here.
Finished my batch of banana chia pudding for breakfast, and in the late morning, made it to the health food store to pick up the stuff I needed, mainly more of that compliant bacon. It was funny how my interaction with the health food store had changed over the past few weeks: I now had an eye out for certain items that I totally hadn’t noticed when I did my initial shopping there.
Like cashews. Today I had finally exhausted my supply of snack cashews, so at the health food store, I planned to get some more. They have a really nice, affordable bulk food area, including lots of varieties of nuts, but I had never needed nuts so much before, so I never looked carefully at them. It turns out that not only do they have cashews, but they have so many different varieties of cashews that it boggles the mind. I settled on some curried cashews, since that sounded like a tasty combination. Each bulk bin lists the exact ingredients of what’s inside, and there was nothing added to these curried cashews that I wasn’t permitted to have.
I also got some cacao nibs, which I had heard were permissible, and which smell chocolatey, although I don’t really know what I’m going to do with them. Eating them raw is, it turns out, not at all yummy, even though smelling them is lovely.
And I got some dried mango slices that have nothing in them except mango.
Lunch was last night’s leftover salmon and latkes. I was concerned they wouldn’t reheat well, but I needn’t have worried. The toaster oven did a fine job. I wouldn’t put fish in the microwave, and am glad I didn’t.
Now, dinner — this is another puzzle, the type I’ve come to resent solving. Big Kid has tae kwon do tonight, and we have to leave at 5. We get home at about 6:15. That’s basically my prime dinner-preparation hour. Plus, lately I haven’t been having such great luck getting the kids to eat what I make. I was going to make the breaded pork piccata with zucchini noodles tonight, which would only be doable if I prep all of the vegetables before we go to tae kwon do. Then all I’ll need to do is deal with the pork, cook the noodles, and add the pre-chopped vegetables to the broth. Ugh. I’ll feel shitty if my kids won’t eat it, but I guess I can make them mac and cheese if they won’t.
I’ve also been thinking about completely divorcing my dinners from the kids’. They have such a hard time with a lot of the things I make, and honestly, the things I make would last longer if fewer people were eating them. So maybe I’ll just make these recipes for myself from now on, make something else (I know, more work, but their stuff is usually simpler) for them, and each batch of my stuff will last longer, making it less necessary for me to cook every night.
So we ended up not going to tae kwon do or making the pork piccata. We started watching “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” and Little Kid fell asleep in my lap, and Big Kid’s tae kwon do uniform was still in the dryer, and nobody felt like leaving the house. I also didn’t feel like cooking a big meal that the kids wouldn’t eat, and I was having a craving for the bacon I had bought earlier in the day. So I made a baked sweet potato with bacon for myself, and mac and cheese for the kids.
It’s nice to know I can be a slacker occasionally and still adhere to the Whole30.
Tomorrow: What happens when you lose power in a storm and can’t cook?
