Junk Free July Week: 1

 

Well, week one went pretty well. I weighed myself first thing Monday morning and then first thing Sunday Morning, and after 6 days I lost 6 lbs! Overall I feel great! By day two I was finding that I wasn’t as hungry as I usually am.  I was feeling fully after eating quantities that were much less than what I eat in other foods. Realizing this I thought to myself….there must be something in processed foods that makes you feel hungrier than raw unaltered foods.  Well I researched it, and sure enough! Read about it here  .  Sure, I had my moments of weakness where I seriously contemplated eating a piece of chocolate or just grabbing a quick granola bar-but I didn’t!  You don’t really realize how much of your food is processed until you do something like this.  Day 3, I felt like DANG THERE IS NOTHING I CAN EAT!  I love this though, it is forcing me to think outside of the box, to learn about nutrition, and to learn more about cooking.  This week I made some homemade bread…

Once it was done cooking and I cute off a slice to eat, I realized…..I don’t have anything unprocessed to eat on it! So I ate some plain bread and rolls this week.

I also made some banana muffins this week, due to have a lot of ripe bananas.  This is the recipe that my mom would always make….

Bright Day Banana Muffins-

1 C. All Purpose Flour                        1/4 tsp. Nutmeg

3/4 C. Whole Wheat Flour                  1/2 C. (1 med) mashed ripe banana

1/2 C. Sugar                                         1/2 C. Milk

2 tsp Baking Powder                          1/3 C. Vegetable Oil

1/2 tsp. salt                                          1 Egg (slightly beaten)

(To make this unprocessed you would need to use raw milk)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. In a large bowl combine all dry ingredients, and then stir in remaining wet ingredients just until dry particles are moistened.

Fill (12) muffin cups 2/3 full. ( if you don’t use paper baking cups you will need to grease the pan)

Bake at 400 degrees for 18-22 minutes. (the mini muffins I cooked for a little less)

Remove muffins from the pan immediately.  Now brush the tops of the HOT muffins with 2 TBSP. melted butter, and then dip each muffin top into a mixture of sugar and cinnamon. ( I obviously skipped the butter and sugar part on my personal muffins, but my family and friends got to enjoy the full product)

Serve Warm!

I made a quadruple batch, and was able to store my personal muffins in a bag to eat during the week. This came in handy and was super convenient, especially when I would get home from a run and was completely famished!

One night I made some roasted veggies…. I cut up some carrots and potatoes.  Threw them in a tupperware with a tsp. of olive oil. Shake it around until all veggies as shiny.

Spread veggies on a cookie sheet then sprinkle with salt and pepper.  I used this salt (so it’s unprocessed)

                       

Bake the veggies at 375 degrees for 25 min. or until they reach your desired tenderness.

SO DELICIOUS.  I do this with the veggie blend bags from Sam’s (the ones with cauliflower, broccoli, and carrots)  I used to hate broccoli and cauliflower, but now I love it!

Later in the week I found a recipe for Homemade Fruit Rollups. They turned out great, even though I had to change up the cooking method.  I will definitely make these again in the future. The best part is there are only 2 ingredients! It just so happens that i had some strawberries that were on the way out, and ripe enough that I couldn’t eat them straight.

2 Ingredient Strawberry Fruit Leather-

2 C. strawberries

1/4 tsp. cinnamon.

Puree it!

        

The cooking instructions were to pour it over a cookie sheet with some tephlon baking sheets or whatever it’s called.  Then to cook it at 100 degrees for 8 hours.  I didn’t have any of those cooking sheets so I wanted to split up the puree to try a few other methods. I put some in my silicone muffin pan, and then poured the remainder straight onto a greased cookie sheet.

Now my the lowest temp my oven will go is 170.  So I cooked the leather at 170 for 5 hours. Next time I will do a little less so it’s a little more maluable, so maybe 4 hours?  I think I will do it all in the silicone pans too. I like how their already little discs.  I cut up the other portion using a pizza cutter.

These are seriously sooo delicious. I’m excited to experiment making other fruit leathers.

For dinner the other night we did Salmon (we finally bought a grill, we had been without since we moved to utah!)

I have never been a fan of fish but I love salmon now using this seasoning we got from Costco. The salmon we also get at Costco!

                          

                        

 

We also grilled up some white corn on the cob!

 

I’m super excited with the results i’m getting, everything i’m learning, and to get more creative in the kitchen! Wish me luck on this next week, and please feel free to share any fun new recipes you find!

Junk-Free July (Day: 1)

With most aspects of our daily life we tend to fluctuate in efficiency.  This happens with sleep, keeping the house clean, positive thinking,  budgeting, scripture study, prayer, exercise, eating right. Sometimes I’m better at doing some of these things than others and as of lately I have been lazy and slacking in the health department.  I needed an overhaul!  The more crap you let into your daily diet, the more you feel like crap, and when you feel like crap you don’t usually get the exercise in you need.  You hear it all the time from people like me, who fluctuate in and out of being fit and healthy. “Wow I just have so much energy! I feel great.  It’s so nice to start my day off with a good workout.”  Then it happens AGAIN.  Why do we let ourselves fall out of love with being healthy, and full of energy?  Well I think it has alot to do with our environment. So I’m gonna CHANGE my environment, starting with processed foods.  I’m doing away with sweets as well this month, due to my unhealthy relationship with chocolate.  Portioning and exercise is great, but are you really healthy consuming all these processed foods?  Processed foods are like the gateway drugs into obesity.  Obesity didn’t used to be an issue, and processed food didn’t used to exist. Not to mention they teach people to be LAZY.  Heck there are premade pb & j’s.  Really?! How much time does it take to make a pb & j? Pretty soon we’ll all be fat blobs floating around on hover crafts like in the movie Wall-e.
I’ve been on kind of kick a lately about being self-reliant. Our church (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) really stresses the importance of this.  I’ve always agreed with them, and thought that it’s good to be prepared for anything, but with where this world is heading I’m more and more eager and motivated to get to where I need to be.  If there were a natural disaster, or any disaster for that matter, would I have the means and skills to feed my family?  Back in the day people grew their own food, raised their own livestock, and had to rely on themselves for EVERYTHING.  I could go on forever, delving into this, but the main thing I’m trying to get across is you can’t be self-reliant and unhealthy, and there may not always be a store you can run to, to get your food.   So Junk-Free July is my trial run.  I am removing ALL processed foods from my diet this month to 1. Help me achieve my health goals 2.Prove to myself I can do it 3.Use how I FEEL to motivate me to truly change my environment 4.Force myself to learn what I NEED in the home (and eventually in my food storage) to provide healthy meals for my family  Eventually we would like to have a garden, chickens, etc and be completely self-reliant. So join me on my journey this July as I get healthy, and as I educate and prepare myself for caring for my family in the case of any emergency.  
Well, Day: 1 has gotten off to a great start. I woke up early and went on a 4 mile run with a friend.  When I came home I was bit faint and needed somethign to eat.
BREAKFAST: I made a smoothie (I have a smoothie just about everyday, sometimes it’s my breakfast, or sometimes it’s my lunch)  It’s easy, cheap, refreshing, and unprocessed.  All you need is a blender, ice, frozen strawberries, frozen mixed berries, and orange juice. Of course there are all kinds of smoothie recipes.  You can add all kinds of fruits and veggies this is just my favorite, because it’s the quickest, tastiest one I’ve tried and it’s super low calorie. Doesn’t this look delicious?

Total Calories: 185
Total Fat: 0g
Total Carbs: 40g
Protein: 2g
Grab your blender!
Throw in: 1 1/2 C. ice

1 C. frozen strawberries (approx:5)

I buy the 6lb bag from Costco        

Next add a 1/2 C. of Mixed Berries


I buy the 4 lb. bag from Costco      
Lastly add 1 1/2 C. fluid (I did 1c. OJ & 1/2c water doing the 1 1/2 C OJ is only 50 calories more)

I buy the 6 pack at Costco      
Blend and ready to go!

As you can see, this recipe renders a good amount. So no feeling hungry or unsatisfied, this fills you up! Half the time I don’t even finish it in one sitting and stick it in the freezer and come back later and spoon it.
LUNCH: Steamed some Frozen Peas and Sliced a Granny Smith
Lunch was pretty basic and quick. We were doing stuff around the house so I didn’t have alot of time. I could eat snow peas ALL DAY LONG and be happy!


Dinner: Chicken Tortilla Pie
Okay the name makes it sound WAY better than it was!  Okay it wasn’t bad at all, but was a little lacking in flavor. I’m a fan of a kick of spicy where chicken and tortillas are concerned. Here we are.

Well basically I made some tortillas….

…which I topped with spring mix, rice (that i made in our new rice steamer I LOVE it, and we use it all the time) The rice turns out EVERY time!
                    
Next I added some blackbeans.  I usually used canned but that is considered processed so I had to do it the long way.  It was a much longer process than I realized. Lots of rinsing and soaking going on…..

To top it all off is sauteed Chicken along with red pepper, green onion, and white onion.

I had two of the tortillas and the calories are somewhere in the ballpark of 375 and 400….not too bad. I’m betting if I had made some homemade salsa to go with it would have been much better. I may give this a try later this month. Well these were my eats today, but I’m hoping to really experiment with some things so this should get interesting. I of course continue to drink LOTS and LOTS of water. I ended Day 1 off with a nice hot bath!
Well being a mother of two, and preparing for a litter of pups coming early august I don’t have the time or energy to take pictures of all of my meals for this month and then blog about them.  So I will take pictures of my favorites and of course my flops throughout each week and do a weekly rap up. Probably Sunday afternoons? Feel free to join me in this month long challenge, or if you have any yummy recipes I could try this month (unprocessed of course!) I’d be happy to try them. I’m afraid I’ll be running out of things to eat. I CAN DO THIS! right?

In a “Pinch Pizza”

Jeff showed me a coupon one night for this delicious looking pizza, and I wanted it, but we weren’t gonna do it.  The worst part is I still had to make dinner and didn’t have much to work with, and now had a craving for pizza.A friend of mine had posted a video on her instagram about easy pizza’s to make with your kids using tortillas.  Which my family would have been more than happy with, but i’m a pizza snob as in I only really like Papa John’s. If i’m gonna eat pizza it’s gonna taste like pizza. A delicious pizza.  The light bulb went on! I had Rhoades Rolls in the freezer- yummy dough!

We made it work, and It was delicious, and that’s saying a lot for a pizza snob! From start to finish it took less than 30 minutes.

Let’s add a hand in there for size reference…

     

Individual Pizza’s. Adorable right?! Everyone can choose their own toppings.We were in a Pinch, so i’m calling them “Pinch Pizzas”

Ingredients:

-Frozen Rhoades Rolls (make as many as your heart desires)

-Tomato Sauce

-Italian Seasoning Packet (I did Great Value)

-Shredded Cheese (we did Mozarella)

-Oregano

-Pepper

Toppings: whatever meat, veggies or fruit you desire

We had mushrooms and some lunch meat so I sliced up some ham.

 

Easy Peasy….

Get the oven preheating to 375

      

Take your alotted number of rolls and place them in a gallon ziploc bag.(I sucked all the air out) Put them in the sink with hot water to thaw.

If the water is hot enough this won’t take long (only took me 5 min. I flipped the bag halfway through)

While these were thawing I got out all the ingredients and mix the tomato sauce and italian seasoning.

                      

Now that the dough is thawed roll and pat rolls into pizza patties…

Smear sauce onto each patty.

Sprinkle your pizza with cheese, jeff smothered ours.  

            

        

Top it off!

And sprinkle some oregano and pepper on top.

                       

Throw them in the oven for 8 minutes.

WALLA!

Heck, Talynn gobbled hers right up!

Start to finish it took less than 30 min. and we were able to spend time as a family preparing them.We had some left over, and it just so happens these fit perfectly into sandwich ziplocs. So we were able to freeze them, and then heat individually later.  Jeff’s already done this a few different days when he comes home hungry! It’s great, these ingredients are all things I usually have lying around the house. So if you’re in a pinch or even if you’re not give these a try, and you won’t be dissappointed!