Cook All the Food

Today was another busy day in the kitchen. Let me tell you, my house smells freaking divine right now. I probably smelled pretty good too. Found out last night that apparently when you spend a day in the kitchen, you end up smelling like it. Literally people were drooling. But anywho.

Got up this morning and had brunch since I went to bed late last night. Had a couple of the banana pancakes with unsweetened applesauce on top (delicious!), two pieces of turkey bacon and a slice of pineapple. My snacks were prosciutto chips and a boiled egg. Dinner was another pork chop with zucchini fritters and a side salad. I currently have a headache that would kill a horse that I'm trying to douse in Advil and water with no luck (<_<).

Made 3 more recipes today. Two of them were repeats: shepherd's pie and lara balls. This time around I added peas to the shepherd's pie and a little bit of almond butter to the lara balls. Can I just say, making lara balls is a pain in the ass. You get this nice grainy textured stuff after you're done processing it and then you have to form it into balls, which just gets pieces of walnut everywhere.

The new recipe I made was the Chicken and Biscuits Casserole:

6 boneless chicken breasts
1 pound of carrots, peeled and sliced
1/2 onion
1 bag of green beans (I used frozen)
Salt and Pepper
1/4 tsp garlic powder
1 celery stalk, sliced
2 cups chicken broth
2 tbsp tapioca flour

Topping:
2.5 cups almond flour
1/2 tsp sea salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 cup ghee/coconut oil/olive oil
2 eggs

Preheat oven to 350. Grease a dish and place the chicken breasts in. Season as you like (I did salt, pepper, garlic powder, poultry seasoning and onion powder). Bake for 35-40 minutes. In large frying pan place ghee (or fat of choice), add onion and start sautéing. Add carrots, and season with salt and pepper. Cook until carrots just soften. Add green beans, poultry seasoning, garlic powder and celery seed. Adjust salt and pepper.

Once chicken is done cooking remove from oven and cut into bite sized cubes. Mix veggies and chicken together in a large casserole (9x13 or so). Add chicken broth, coconut milk and tapioca flour. Now prepare topping. In large bowl mix almond flour, salt and baking soda. Add eggs and ghee and mix until forms a ball. Using two sheets of parchment to sandwich the dough, roll it flat to match the size of the casserole. Place over the top of the casserole and bake for 25-30 minutes or until biscuit topping just starts to brown. Serve and enjoy!!

I don't know if I'm impressed with this recipe or not. Everything looked great when I first put it in the oven, but when it came back out I found that the liquid was still there, hadn't really formed a "gravy" or anything. To be fair, I don't have tapioca flour but I didn't think that'd be the big game changer since there was so little of the flour compared to how much broth was in there. It smells very fragrant, but there's not really a "casserole" consistency to it. The only thing "casserole" about it was that I took a whole ton of ingredients and put them in a baking dish together. Also would have been easier to make the topping if I'd actually had some parchment paper and a rolling pin. I still think I should get brownie points for my creativity though. I also completely underestimated the sheer volume of food that this recipe generates. I should have been able to guess from the fact that it called for 6 chicken breasts but apparently I wasn't thinking ahead that far. I may just end up freezing half of it just to have it handy. 

Tomorrow starts my first week of unlimited classes at the gym. Gotta say I'm kinda nervous but I'm so ready to take the next step. I'm not going to go crazy all at once but I'll definitely be starting with 4 per week and going from there. 

Just for shits and giggles I dug out the scale and the measuring tape again today. According to my scale, which is probably somewhat inaccurate, I'm 1 pound away from my goal weight. The report from the tape measure is that the weight is coming right off my hips. Nothing else has really changed that much, but my hips are where you really notice it. Wish it would come off my waist a little more but I know that's going to be the hardest spot to get rid of the pudginess. Scale's going back from whence it came now.

Today started Week 5 of the challenge. Man time has flown. I'm definitely going to stay on paleo after it's done. I might not be AS crazy strict about it, but it'll be consistent. As in, adding back a guilt-free cheat day and maybe adding back some dairy like cheese or butter/cream (when needed for cooking). Other than that, I'm just gonna stick with it. Clearly coming off the crap in my life has done nothing but good for me so why go back to my evil ways? Plus I'm actually kind of used to it. It'll be a relief to not be going crazy about it 24/7 though. I'm not going to go crazy with the cheats, but I'm also not going to hate myself for cheating every once in awhile. 

Well I'm going to go back to pretending I'm doing work. And by that I mean I'm heading to bed so I can get as much sleep as possible before the calls start coming in. 

G'night all!