Day 3

I slept really poorly last night. Normally I would have blamed it on too much caffeine, but I didn't have any. I think I saw every hour and just couldn't turn my brain off. It might be a long day.

I gave the pumpkin pancakes one more try this morning.
...I'm giving up on pancakes.
I'm fine with eggs, canadian bacon, and veggies so I might as well save the time and frustration. :)

I do need to figure out what to do with the last cup of pumpkin puree though, so if anyone has ideas, let me know. I can't add sugar, sweetener, dairy, or grains. No protein powder. No soy. I can use coconut milk and almond flour though. And spices.

This is my adaptation of a smoothie  recipe I found on Pinterest. Maybe I'll try it tomorrow:

2/3 cup water or coconut milk (plus more if you want to thin it out)

1/2 cup pureed pumpkin (roasted or canned)

1 ripe banana or peach

1 Tbsp almond meal

1 Tbsp almond butter

1/4 tsp pumpkin pie spice

¼ tsp cinnamon

I also forgot to mention that on day 1 I tried cinnamon carrots. They were pretty good. I've never been a fan of cooked carrots, but roasting brought out their sweetness and cooking the life out of them gave them a nice crunch.

CINNAMON CARROTS

• slice 1 carrot VERY thinly - try to get them all equally thin
• toss the rounds with coconut oil
• put parchment paper on a cookie sheet and lay carrots out in a single layer
• sprinkle with cinnamon - as much as you like
• bake at 425* for as long as it takes to crisp them up - about 12-ish or more if they're thicker.

You can play around with other spices too, I'm sure.

Lunch was carrots (shocker! Am I turning orange yet?) and APPLE CHICKEN SALAD.

I chopped up one of my 5oz portions of chicken strips and added 1/2 a diced apple, 1/2 a green onion, diced, and a mixture of Paleo Mayo and Mustard.
I meant to use red grapes but the kiddos got to them first and polished them off. I also meant to put almonds in there but... I forgot. I do miss the blue cheese that I normally put in this mix but I'll survive without it. It was still good.


My youngest and I went to the grocery store and got some fun items. They have a machine that makes fresh ground almond butter for you. We both got a kick out of it. It's the little things...  I also picked up some strawberry sauce in the health market. The ingredients are strawberries and concentrated grape juice. I intend to create a vinegarette with it for salads or maybe I'll just use it as it is over a chicken salad. I stocked up on some more organic, grass fed beef and also got some almonds and cashews. I intended to get some ready made meatballs in the meat case but quickly remembered that they add bread crumbs. Can't have that. I really wanted to make meat sauce with tonight's dinner, but my oldest daughter insists that we have meatballs instead. It would have been easier to buy them already made, but I will make the meatballs out of love for that kid.  ;)

Dinner was a little labor intensive. We had
SPAGHETTI SQUASH WITH PALEO MEATBALLS AND TOMATO BASIL SAUCE.
(and no carrots - whew!)

I roasted the spaghetti squash for 45 minutes at 375 degrees with a little water in the bottom of the pan.

For the meatballs, I squished together:
1lb grass fed, organic blah blah blah ground beef
1 small grated onion
2cloves of garlic
1tsp seasoned salt
1tsp garlic powder
1tsp Italian Seasoning
(and I really wanted to use worchestershire sauce but can't)
and baked at 400 degrees for 15 minutes as soon as the squash came out.
It needed to cool a bit before I could scrape out the "spaghetti" anyway.

For the sauce, I carmelized 1/4 onion to a really nice brown (to add sweetness since we can't have sugar.) Then I tossed in some diced up Roma tomatoes, salt, olive oil, garlic, pepper, dried basil and dried oregano. I let it simmer for a bit and then ran the immersion blender through it.

Assemble and enjoy your hard work.
It tasted good. It was not spaghetti but it was good enough.