Day 8: the blahs

I am really bored with this diet.  Bored and annoyed.  It seems to require so much (too much) prep to eat anything and since I’m a person who likes to eat what I crave in that moment, it’s hard to plan ahead.

For breakfast I had cashew bread with coconut manna.  Not because I wanted it, but because I couldn’t think of anything else to prepare quickly that sounded good.

At least this time I had the patience to wait for my breakfast to toast (rather than eat the first slice plain while making the second).  Coconut butter doesn’t spread does it?  Is mine weird?  Should I add oil to make it more spreadable?  I thought it was weird and crumbly all through winter because of the temp in the pantry, but my oil is basically liquid at this point so I know the room is hot enough that it should be as soft and as melted as it’s going to get.

I finally did myself a solid and made a jar of balsamic dressing.  I tossed the greens in the dressing and then figured out what to add.

Since avo and bacon weren’t enough last time, I added salted roasted almonds this time.

And ate 1/2 pound of baby carrots as I was making it.

After I had chopped it all up, I realized I may have over-dressed the salad, so in searching for something more to soak up the dressing…

The shredded zucchini seemed like the best move and it totally made the salad special and different.

For an unplanned lunch on the fly, this was 100% the best thing I could have come up with. And fast too!  If it were a chopped challenge I think I would have won.  Or at least not been eliminated.

We were gone all afternoon but Kyle was going to be home that night (eating dinner with us), so I couldn’t slack like I had been when it was just me.  Luckily, he’s appreciative of anything homemade.

Ta-da!

I made the sauce for this during naps, but it was more lime-y than I was expecting, so I wasn’t as in love with it as I had been hoping.  It’s the thai “peanut” sauce from Against All Grain.  The sauce calls for a huge amount of coconut oil, but not very much almond butter and I think I may have preferred the reverse.

I ended up adding 1/2 cup almond butter to it because I wanted a more nut butter sauce.

Then I added it to a few cups of cabbage and broccoli slaw.  Plus shrimp (because I needed a new protein).

The shrimp was a great call and worked well with it, but the kids (well, P mainly) don’t love shrimp so much.  It’s especially interesting that P doesn’t really enjoy shrimp because when he was younger he couldn’t get enough of it.  Like, he would eat 50 shrimp in a row if I let him.  It was insane.  And now?  Nope. He must have overdone it.  I gave V some (she likes shrimp) but also gave the kids chopped up hard boiled eggs in their bowls.

And everyone but me got rice.  It was sad.

I had kombucha for dessert and was bummed about it at first, but after Kyle’s dessert was done, I realized I was fine with the ‘buch and my chocolate needs are psychological cravings, not real hunger.

On the late night, I got to baking because I felt inspired to create something delicious and exciting for breakfast that would help shift my mentality.  I feel like I’m missing out on all these yummy foods I want to eat, and that’s been harder than I anticipated.  I have strong willpower, but I wish I knew the payoff was worth it.  I had more GI activity today that leads me to believe what I’m doing is working, but it’s hard to say definitively.  In any event, my random baking experiment turned out stellar and I went to bed looking forward to the next day’s eats.