The Skeptic’s Whole30: Preparation!

Planning, shopping, spreadsheet-ing.

This is the fourth post in a series. For the previous post, click here. For the whole series, click here.

I was pretty nervous about my ability to sustain a much more punishing regime of food preparation than I was used to. I was actually more nervous about this than about having to give up grains, cheese, and chocolate. The recipes I planned to make seemed so delicious that I could get along without those things. But would I really be able to do Real Cooking three times a day for 30 days? All that chopping, all that washing of measuring spoons?

I knew that before Feb. 19, I would have to plan my Whole30 meticulously. I usually eat the same breakfast every day — a whole wheat English muffin, toasted, with peanut butter and jelly — so even though that breakfast wasn’t allowed on the Whole30, the fact that I ate the same thing every day meant that I wouldn’t need more than, say, 7 different breakfast recipes to get through the Whole30 without getting sick of any of them. For lunches and dinners, I figured that if I had to repeat each meal twice over the course of the 30 days, that would be enough variety. So I needed at least 7 breakfast recipes and 30 lunch/dinner recipes.

I went through the Fast & Easy cookbook and listed out all the recipes in there that sounded appealing. There were more than 30 lunch/dinner ones, which was great. There were very few breakfast ones, unless I wanted to eat eggs for breakfast every day, which I did NOT. I don’t mind eggs, but the thought of having them for breakfast every day was sort of nauseating. I’ll put it this way: When I go out for brunch, I’m maybe 75% likely to choose something from the pancakes/French toast/waffles side of the menu and 25% likely to choose an egg dish. And the egg dish I choose almost always involves cheese, which isn’t allowed on the Whole30.

But thankfully, the Whole30 is TRENDY. Which means that there are a TON of websites devoted to it, and plenty of resources online that answer common questions like “What can I eat for breakfast if I don’t want eggs every day?” It only took me a few seconds to find an article online that linked to a whole bunch of easy Whole30-friendly breakfast recipes, and quickly compiled a list of breakfasts, only a few of which were egg-centric. (Egg-centric. Heh.)

Then it was time to plan out which meals I would make on which days. There was a lot to consider. Although there was variety in the recipes, I didn’t want to make two in the same day that were similar to each other — say, two things based around beef and red bell pepper. I had to base my choices on who else I would be eating with/cooking for at that meal. Some recipes were things I could make for the kids as well as myself, and others were better suited to times I was eating alone. My 7-year-old goes to school 5 days a week, and my 3-year-old goes 3 days a week. Both of their schools serve lunch, so when they have school I can make lunch for just myself. On days that I have only the little guy, I can either make myself a Whole30 lunch and give him PB and J, or see if he will eat what I cook.

Some nights I have to take the kids to after-school activities, so on those nights, dinner would have to be extra fast-and-easy. Weekend meals could be more laborious, and I could even potentially cook ahead on the weekend for the coming week.

My husband is a vegetarian, AND practices alternate-day fasting. So basically if I was going to do the Whole30, he would have to be on his own. The Whole30 is VERY meat-oriented, especially since you can’t have legumes. I wasn’t prepared to do a vegetarian Whole30, even though normally a lot of the meals I cook at home are vegetarian. But he is already on his own lots of the time. On “fasting days” he already barely eats anything and looks after himself for what he does eat. On “eating days,” which there would be only 15 of throughout the whole Whole30, he still often gets his own dinner (especially on weeknights, when he’ll pick up a falafel sandwich at the train station before heading home, or something like that). On weekends, if he and the kids want pizza or some other not-allowed kind of takeout, they can get that and I’ll opt out. That might suck but it’ll only happen a couple times, probably.

I also noticed that most of the recipes in the book supposedly served 4 people, which would mean that after my kids and I ate them for dinner, there would be one serving left over. And if there really was a serving left over, I could eat that leftover serving for lunch the next day, which meant I didn’t have to cook a new lunch that day. However, I didn’t know how that would play out, so I budgeted for new lunches every day and decided to wait and see if I really needed them.

So at that point I had a loooong list of recipes, and all these various constraints about what to eat on what day, so I had to figure out how to map them out on the calendar. I got a stack of index cards, and on each card, I wrote the name of a recipe, what page of the book it was on, the main few ingredients in it, how many servings it made, and how many minutes it supposedly took to make. My index cards came in several colors, so I kind of vaguely color coded the recipes, meaty dinners on pink cards, soups on green, etc., but the color coding didn’t mean anything hard-and-fast.

I laid them out on the floor in a calendar-shaped grid and that became my rough draft of a plan for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Then I wrote up a chart for just week 1. I figured that toward the end of week 1 I could write a similar chart for week 2, and so on.

Then it was time to make a shopping list. How would I ever consolidate the ingredients for all 21 of these recipes into a coherent shopping list? The only way I could imagine doing it was with a spreadsheet, so that’s what I did.

In the first column of the spreadsheet, I put the name of the recipe. In the second and third column, I listed all the ingredients, with amounts (“1 tsp,” “4,” “a dash,” etc) in the second column and ingredient names in the third. After listing the ingredients for a given recipe, I highlighted the name of the recipe and auto-filled the first column with repetitions of that name, down to the end of its ingredient list, and then did the same for all the other recipes.

After I was done, I used the fourth column to categorize the ingredients: meat, vegetables, fruit, liquids, spices, etc. Then I used the Sort function to sort the entire list, first by category and then by name. So now my list showed all the instances of, say, avocado, and how much total avocado I would need, while also breaking down all the amounts by which recipe I would need it for.

My grocery shopping routine was already long-entrenched: I go to the supermarket on Saturday while my husband stays home with the kids. We make a detailed list beforehand of all the meals we plan to make in the coming week and all the things we need, and I go to the store armed with the list on my phone.

On Friday I went to the local health-food store to see if I could find some of the more obscure items on the list, and came home with “coconut aminos” and tapioca flour and stuff like that. On Saturday I made the main shopping list, and it was gigantic.

I had never spent such a long time in the produce department or filled my cart with such a vast amount of produce. I was surprised to find that one pound of potatoes is really not that much. At the end, my grocery order cost about 3 times what my usual order costs. I hoped this would not be the case every week.

When I got home I realized I had bought fennel instead of celery root. I had forgotten what celery root looked like, I just knew it was a big white bulb with green leaves shooting out of it, just like fennel. Oh well, I’d just have to get actual celery root sometime before making the recipe that used it.

There were also a few items I couldn’t find. One of these, which I needed to use on the very first day, was Red Boat Fish Sauce. The supermarket carried two other brands of fish sauce, but both of them contained added sugar. Online research yielded the info that Red Boat was available at Whole Foods, and although there isn’t a Whole Foods near me, I was going into Manhattan with my older son on the day before I started, and could swing by Whole Foods while there. Thankfully, there’s now a Whole Foods next to Bryant Park, right on our way back to the train station from the theater, and I bought the sauce there with no trouble.

And then, since it was already almost 6 pm, we decided to eat dinner at the station before heading home from the city. I had a perfect “last meal” before starting the Whole30: a bacon cheeseburger, fries, and black-and-white shake at Shake Shack.

Tomorrow: The Whole30 begins. It begins with steeling myself for touching a lot of raw meat.