The Fresh 20

This is our second week of doing a new meal planning service called "The Fresh 20." Each week I get a shopping list with 20 items to buy, a menu, and recipes for each day of the week! Most of the items on the list are "whole food" items, meaning they are fresh ingredients / non-processed food items. My grocery cart has never looked healthier! I kind of accidentally found out about this service, I was reading a blog of a friend of a friend (this is what I do at night after Ellen goes to bed... I stalk people's blogs!!) and saw this link on the side of her blog under popular posts called the Fresh 20. I read her post and decided to check it out.

What I like about the plan is that it plans the meals for me. I was doing an OK job of planning meals before this, but I never know what I want to cook. While the gluten free cookbook has been awesome, I've only really been doing one new recipe a week from it. With the fresh 20 plan I love that I can go to the grocery store ONCE a week, instead of several times to keep getting things that I forgot or hadn't planned for. Oh, and they have a gluten free menu option - so all of my meals are gluten free! Amazing. :) (they also have vegetarian and standard for anyone interested)

The catch: you have to pay them $5 / month. BUT, you get to keep all of your menus, they can be saved as pdfs, so you have them forever. For me, its worth it.

Here are a few of the dishes that I've made in the past two weeks:

Braised Chicken with Apples and Polenta


Herbed Cod, New Potatoes, and Kale



Stuffed Cabbage (Glompki!)


Pozole Soup


One more thing I love / hate about the Fresh 20 is that most of the recipes preparation right before you eat them, there is not a lot of cook-ahead stuff you can do. This is hard for me because I am usually working till 6:30 or 7 every night. I try to do the chopping before I leave for work, but there is still a good chunk of cooking that needs to be done. So... I've been leaving the ingredients and recipes for Matt to do! He's been doing a great job of starting most of them - he is actually an amazing cook so its easy for him. On the plus side this means that I'm not doing ALL of the cooking anymore!!! YAYAYAY!!

The dishes have been epic though. By the time we eat we are too exhausted to do most of the dishes... so they just sit and get more dirty for the next morning.

All in all its been totally worth it and I recommend it to anyone who wants to try something new!

In a personal update: Ellen is about to be 18 months and wow is she acting like it! She threw a huge tantrum at the vet's office today when she was not allowed to play with my keys. It was embarrassing and horrible she was so loud. She screamed all the way out to the car and only calmed down when I talked to her about her new grocery cart that she LOVES to push around our house. Hello terrible twos!!!

She has also gotten really hard to photograph lately, she usually runs away from the camera or makes some horrible face. Here she is yelling at me that she wants to get down from her spaceship:


She is really starting to talk a lot now and likes to mimic new words that we say. A few of her new words: doctor, shots (about the cat at the vet today), shopper (meaning her shopping cart), Puff (the cat), Mara (the dog, Amara), body (pointing to her belly), and butt (well pointing to her butt!) oops probably should have taught her a different word for her bottom. :)

We are not pregnant *yet* but hoping that we'll have some good news soon. I am trying so hard to be patient but I have come to realize that I am not a patient person and am in fact quite obsessive. Poor Matt. He claims he knew this about me before we got married so at least he was warned. :) If we don't get pregnant this cycle I think I'll probably go on some fertility drugs again, I'm undecided about it. (Ellen was conceived using fertility drugs so I have nothing against them, I just don't want to use them unless I have to) Hopefully I won't have to make that decision and we'll get a positive result soon! :)

Cajun Chicken and Rice

On Sunday night we finally got back from our awesome marathon of spring break travels and I did NOT feel like cooking AT ALL. I was tired, hungry, and depressed that we are not pregnant yet. I so felt like just ordering a pizza and saying to hell with it! But, I was good and instead cooked us a yummy dinner of cajun chicken and rice from my gluten free bible cookbook.

This recipe was surprisingly easy and pretty tasty! Basically you just sprinkle some salt and cajun seasoning on some chicken breasts, brown them on all sides, and then bake in the oven with chicken broth, rice, and veggies. I added green onions, red and green bell peppers, and garlic. The rice soaks up the chicken broth nicely and the chicken stays nice and juicy as it is cooked fully while being baked in the rice. The browning also helps keep the chicken from drying out and the crust on the chicken is delicious and cajun-y. :) Yum. I probably could have added in even more vegetables to be more healthy, but compared to ordering a pizza I get points for just cooking at all! :) And as a bonus, it made enough for two nights of dinners!

Here is a picture of the final result:



And here are a few pictures of our trip to Texas for spring break:

Enjoying the awesome spring weather at the park:


Very Busy


Went down the slide all by herself!


Love!


So tired!