Simple & Elegant Breakfast

Garlic and Kelp Zucchini fried in duck fat, pan cooked cherry tomatoes, and 2 perfect over easy eggs. That is my idea of a beautiful and delicious breakfast. If only I had some bacon in there it would have probably been out of this world!

This is something simple that you might not think of right away. A really good substitute on the 21DSD for hash browns made out of sweet potatoes with your breakfast. The best part is it takes under 15 minutes for this whole beautiful plate to be ready!

Kelp and Garlic Zucchini

1 small zucchini, sliced with a mandolin or very thinly
1/2 tsp. kelp flakes
1/2 tsp. organic garlic powder
1 tbsp. duck fat for frying

Combine in a frying pan over medium heat and stir regularly for 5 minutes. voila. that simple!

For the tomatoes: simply put them in the pan alongside your two eggs, in a small amount of duck fat for frying. They are so incredibly amazing! and so simple. This is really something you have no excuse to try! Unless you can’t eat these foods of course.

Fake It Till You Make It: Oven Beef Skewers

One thing I have always really enjoyed is ‘shish kebabs’. There is just something about meat on a stick, LOL! But really, they are great. Unfortunately though, I am an apartment dweller. I’m betting that a lot of my younger readers are as well! Apartment living seems to be very normal for us twenty something’s. Anyways, apartment dwelling = no barbeque in a lot of cases. It is a SHAME! I hate not having a BBQ, but what can you do?

Make kebabs in the oven, for one thing. Yes, it is possible! And yes, they will still taste delicious, promise J All you need is an oven with a broiler option, which I’m pretty sure every oven has! These are simple and delicious. And a great way to get those vegetables in, seeing as you need to eat them to get to the meat! They are very customisable as well, which I really like. My boyfriend doesn’t like zucchini so I just skipped it on his skewer. More for me, muahaha!

The other good thing is that on a baking sheet the meat juices sort of leak onto the vegetables and oh my god, they taste sooo good. Especially the cherry tomatoes! NOM! That’s all I have to say about that: NOM. I wish I could have another beef skewer right now! Serve these up with a Greek salad on the side for a real treat, or just eat them as they are! A kebab with steak and vegetables on it is a great mix of protein, fat, and carbs!

Ingredients

Bamboo Skewers soaked for 30 minutes in water to avoid burning

2 Steaks

1 bell pepper (I used yellow)

1 red onion

1 package cherry tomatoes

2 zucchinis

Paleo-friendly steak seasoning (gluten free, soy free, etc)

Instructions

1. Pre-soak the skewers in water to make sure they don’t light a fire in your oven! Preheat the oven to the broiler settings.
2. Cut up the steak into 1 inch pieces and trim the fat off for more even chunks. Season with the seasoning of your choice.
3. Cut all veggies into 1 inch pieces. Arrange the veggies and steak onto skewers alternating between vegetables and meat.
4. place on a cookie sheet with parchment paper to avoid sticking. Cook in the oven for 8 minutes, and then flip and cook for another 7 – 8 mins. The steak will stay juicy but it will also get a nice browning from the broiler.

That’s it! These are so good. My boyfriend and I LOVED them! When they were cooking in the oven it smelt like I was making pizza! I think it’s because the tomatoes were cooking down in such a delicious fashion. I can’t wait to start making more things on skewers! It’s fun and convenient. I actually ate mine standing up by the oven about 5 minutes after finishing a brutal workout. Now that was satisfying! It’s also nice to pretend you have a barbeque, even if only for one day!

Sausage Breakfast Patties

These sausage patties are a serious life saver. It’s so nice to have a hunk of protein waiting for me every morning in the fridge. And it’s much more affordable than bacon every morning (for me…I need like a gazillion slices of bacon to be satisfied). I managed to pick up a package of 3lbs of ground pork on sale at Costco for only 10 dollars! That provided me with about 30 sausage patties, and I eat 1 – 2 each day. Pretty good huh? I used my amazing deep freeze of course, so one 10$ investment went a very long way for me.

They are very versatile as well, I often take them for breakfast OR lunch at work! I use them in recipes or on their own. They are a great addition to ANY omelette! Of course you can also spice them however you want, I just chose this way because it is my favourite. I bet some spicy cumin sausages would be REALLY good!

Anyways, these sausages are also incredibly EASY to make. And when you make them yourself you don’t need to worry about what’s in them. No gluten, sugar, or anything else weird here! You could add some honey if you want that yummy honey garlic flavour, but if you are 21DSDing, the nutmeg will add that sweet flavour profile instead!

Ingredients
1/4 tsp. Nutmeg
1 tsp. Garlic powder
Salt & Pepper to taste
1 lb. Ground Pork

Instructions

1. Mix all the spices and meat together. Form medium sized patties and cook them in a medium frying pan, for about 10 minutes each side. Tada!

This is possibly the simplest recipe ever. Don’t be afraid of ground pork! It’s easy to use and tastes great!

Easy Paleo Chicken Soup

This soup is just the thing for those cold snowy days, or any day really. But it is really nice on a snowy day.

Let me tell you, just for a moment, how snowy it has been here lately. Today it is March. On the last day of February we had a crazy, crazy snow storm. It snowed 25 centimetres in one day! That’s probably 10 – 11 inches guys. It took my boyfriend and I 3 hours to get home, and it usually takes 30 minutes! We were soooo over it by the time we got home. I took some pictures on my ipod of all the snow, check it out:

None of this was there the day before. UGH. We thought it was almost spring…PSYCH! Anywho back to the soup…

This is easy to make and easy on the stomach. My homemade broth was extremely flavourful and it really makes this a knock out dish. My boyfriend complained that there are too many sweet potatoes, but what does he know. He doesn’t like them at all! HA! I just eat his that he leaves in the bowl at the end :) More for me! Muahah.

Ingredients

3 chicken breasts
2 tbsp. butter (organic preferably)
2 sweet potatoes
4 stalks celery
3 carrots
1 onion, large
2 parsnips
1 head broccoli
8 – 10 cups homemade chicken broth

1 tsp. Himalayan rock salt
1 tsp. pepper
2 tsp. organic garlic powder

Instructions

1. Dice the chicken into 1 inch cubes and then sauté it in the bottom of a soup pot with the butter until browned. Remove from pot and set aside.

2. Chop all vegetables and place in the same pot. Add chicken broth and bring to a simmer. Let it simmer for about 20 minutes or until vegetables are mostly cooked.

3. Return Chicken to pot and season with salt, pepper, and garlic and continue to let simmer until fully cooked through, about 5 minutes.

there you have it! It is so simple and sooo good! It feels really nice on a sore tummy.

21DSD: What not to do (recap)

*Last day to enter the giveaway! Hurry up and go! There have been almost 300 entries already…WOW! If you want a chance to win, simply enter here. The prize is a digital copy of Skintervention by Liz Wolfe, a new all natural skin care guide that very well could change your life!*

Hey guys! So, my 21 day sugar detox is over, and I really wish I was here with some great news to tell you how it changed my life and I’m done with sugar forever now, but unfortunately that is not the case. This has nothing to do with the actual program, and in fact I’ve found it incredibly useful for showing me where my weaknesses lie. I don’t think I really grasped how much sugar controls me until I tried to do this. It is crazy, really crazy, how much I love chocolate and ice cream. I had no idea that it meant so much to me, and it was really really really hard to cut it all out. As I have posted, I had a couple of slip ups. I posted about 1, but not the more recent one. I had another couple of drinks, which was one of the things I found REALLY hard to restrict.

Overall I did pretty good, definitely not perfect though. This is my story of what you should not do. You should NOT do the 21dsd and then as soon as it’s over jump head first into a bucket of ice cream. Yep, that’s what I did. I just wanted it so badly, I felt so deprived! And afterwards, I felt so sick. This is the reason I am glad I did this:

After essentially cutting out most sugary foods for 3 weeks, I woke up the morning after my ‘binge’ with my mouth hurting. All of the sugar I had the night before had a serious effect on me! It’s as if the sugar actually burnt my mouth! There’s a sore in my mouth now that was definitely not there beforehand. My stomach hurt too, even until the next day! I was not expecting this! I thought that it would just taste really sweet and I wouldn’t want it anymore and that would be that. Well, let me tell you, that was NOT the case! It still tasted good. DAMNIT!

Those physical effects just really hammered home how important this really is.  Another thing I realised is that sugar has the opportunity to send me into a huge binge spiral. I ate a WHOLE container of coconut ice cream, which is supposed to be like 3 – 4 servings? Then an hour or two later I also had 2 bowls of ROLO ice cream. SERIOUSLY. How did I even fit all of that inside of myself? I don’t know, I just could not stop. I logically said to myself that I didn’t want it, I would feel sick, etc but it did not stop me.

This is something I need to continue to work on.

I’m giving myself some ‘life rules’ in relation to sugar:

1. I’m NOT going to limit fruit intake right now, but I will aim for max 2 servings per day.

2. I will stick to 1 c kombucha per day.

3. I will not limit my alcohol consumption, but I will try to drink less and not consume alcohol with extra sugar, IE. no more rum and cokes!

4. I will not be baking large batches of anything. I will not bring tubs of ice cream into my house. I will not be buying chocolate bars with 4 servings in them. Basically, I want to eliminate the temptations so I don’t even need to USE my self control in the moment.

5. I will set small attainable goals for myself each week and try to make slow and consistent changes in my life! Stay tuned for those.

Hopefully these few guidelines will help me to be better at this.

Overall

I think this is a good program, and if you have a lot of willpower or aren’t as addicted to sugar as I am I think you could be quite successful. When I WAS off of the sugar, I felt GREAT! And honestly, if you are as addicted to sugar as I am, it probably means you should do this even more! Even if you ‘fail’ or go right back to your old habits, I do believe it will be an eye opener, as it was for me. I probably will revisit this sometime in the future, but I want to be more consistently on the right track before doing any more ‘challenges’. I still need to work on getting the basics down pat. I definitely will say this: I am still addicted (or at the very least attached) to sugar.

With the ice cream…I felt like a drug addict. I needed it SO bad, and I didn’t care that it was bad for me. I could not say no. I felt powerless in those moments. Even when I had already gone overboard, I went OVER overboard. I’m going to be taking these tempting items out of my life for good! I will not be bringing them into my house. The plan is to use the strategies I learnt from the detox to improve myself in the future. That’s all I can do at this point. So, overall, I would still recommend the 21DSD even though I was not completely successful. For me, I just have a big piece of work still ahead of me. Don’t worry; I will keep you updated on my progress on this one. I think I might need to start a count down…

It’s been 4 days since the last ice cream incident.

What now?

Well, as I mentioned earlier I will be trying to follow a few guidelines to keep the sugar under control in my day to day life. I’m also happy to report that I’ve been back on the clean eating wagon since this bingeing and feeling like crap episode. I’m feeling better being back to basics and eating quality foods. FEWF!

Here are some GOOD things I’ve been eating since I went crazy:

And Just in case you are curious, here are the other posts I wrote during this experience:

21DSD take 2! Day 1

21 Day Sugar Detox: Day 2

A day in the life–21Day Sugar Detox: day 3

Paleo Valentines Day Breakfast! #21DSD approved

21DSD: Week 1 recap…aka 7 days off of the sugar crack!

21DSD Day 8: “Hey, Cravings! Leave this kid alone.”

I get knocked down, but I get up again!

21DSD Day 18–More on cravings