The Skeptic’s Whole30: Day 14
Sunday, March 4, 2018
This post is part of a series. For the previous post, click here. For the whole series, click here.
Little Kid woke me at 6:45 a.m., which was way too early for either one of us, and we wound up napping, together for part of the time, before I had anything to eat. I think he had breakfast, prepared by my husband, while I was sleeping. When I got up I had some black coffee and heated up a bowlful of the Bolognese. Throughout the afternoon I have been munching on curried cashews and unsweetened banana chips (from the bulk section of the health food store). The store also sells sweetened banana chips in an adjacent bin. So I feel pretty confident that these are indeed unsweetened. Plus, they don’t really taste sweet. Just starchy.
I hope this level of snacking is OK. I haven’t really been paying much attention to “portion control” through this, except to the extent that a recipe is supposed to make “4 servings” so I try to stick to one-fourth of however much it makes, for any given meal.
Today I have to freeze most of the raw meat I bought yesterday. Yuck. I’m not looking forward to this. But I have to do it by the end of the day. I can’t just throw it in the freezer, because of the absorbent pad. I have to unwrap it, handle it, and place it in a freezer bag. I have to end up touching the edges of the freezer bags with my hands that have just touched the raw meat. I don’t know how not to do it.
I still am not really sure how long you need to defrost a given type of meat, or how long you can safely leave frozen meat out on the counter, but so far all my recipes that use raw meat have worked out OK. I haven’t bought a Therma Pen and am still considering doing so.
Some of the recipes really don’t require you to touch the raw meat a whole lot. The best ones are the ones where you throw the meat directly into a skillet, or the oven, without having to do anything else to it prior, like shaping it into patties, coating it with egg, pounding it flat, etc. Or cutting it up. Especially cutting it up. I haaaate cutting up raw meat. I hate it so much. Thankfully, a lot of these raw-meat recipes don’t entail cutting it up until after it’s cooked. This is a distinction I had always failed to make, pre-Whole30.
For dinner I had another bowl of the Bolognese, which I was starting to tire of. I would definitely have to make something else soon so I could vary things a little, but after two helpings of leftovers, there were still probably four servings in the fridge. If I portioned them out gradually, I could finish them without getting totally sick of the Bolognese.
