Whole30: Thai Basil Chicken

Hahahahahaha oh man! Good one, Kate! We almost believed you.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm feeling great right now! I went to the gym last night and ran for 20 minutes straight which, if you know me, is quite the feat; I am not a runner. But ever since last night I have felt really good. I feel skinny and not in the "I haven't eaten for days and I'm starving" way. In a good way. #Day12

BUT come on! I can think of at least 20 things right now that taste just about as good as feeling skinny feels, if not better. Have you been on pinterest lately? There are about one million recipes that I'm dying to scarf down right now and if it weren't for the Whole30 I would do it. Kate, your argument is invalid.

Now, if Kate Moss has said "Feeling healthy and good about yourself is worth not stuffing your face with treats every day" that may have been a legitimate argument. Not as catchy, but more true.

Anyway, you probably came here for a recipe. So here it goes:

I found this recipe for Thai Basil Chicken on the (you guessed it) Whole30 website! It's by @wholefork. If you're like me then you love Thai Food, which can be a hard food genre to swing on the Whole30. So, I was excited to give this recipe a try.

Thai Basil Chicken

1/2 Tbsp olive oil
1 garlic clove, minced
1/8 onion, chopped
4 oz boneless chicken chopped into bites (Again, left overs from Butterflied Chicken)
1/8 cup coconut aminos
1/2 red or orange bell pepper chopped (gross)
1/2 yellow zucchini shredded
Handful of carrot shreds
Handful of fresh basil

Heat olive oil in a pan over medium heat. Sauté onions and garlic until they turn translucent. Add chicken and aminos and cook until chicken turns white, stirring every 2 min. Add veggies and mix with chicken and sauce. When veggies have softened to your liking add fresh basil and stir a few times until basil slightly wilts. Salt and pepper to taste.

I left this recipe pretty much how it was (besides the bell pepper) since I didn't really know how it should turn out. I guessed that the carrot and zuccini were supposed to act as noodles. Wishful thinking.

Instead of explaining what went wrong I'll just show you.

This is what @wholefork says the dish is supposed to look like:



Now, I know that my pictures aren't exactly professional, but let's take a look at what my dish looked like:



Do you see any discrepancies? The differences don't end there (I assume, since I've never tried her dish). Basically, it tasted terrible. I have some thoughts on why: The chicken I used didn't really taste good in the first place which kind of ruined the dish. I also may have overcooked the vegetables which made them slightly mushy instead of noodle-like. It wasn't great.

However, I was able to eat most of what I made by putting Ginger Sauce on it. This sauce saves a lot of things, apparently.

I'm giving this recipe a big *FAIL because not even basil could save it.

*I attribute all failures to my shortcomings, not to the recipes themselves.

Whole30: Taco Salad

I have officially made it to Day 10 of my Whole30!! Second week, baby! I've definitely had my ups and downs, but I'm feeling pretty good about myself and I'm excited to see my results at the end of this.

I wanted to mention that while I am on a "diet" exercise is very important to my results. My plan is to exercise 1 hour a day, 5 days a week. Unfortunatley I strained my thigh muscle during my husband's office softball game (while running to first) and I haven't been able to make it to the gym as much as I want. Excuses, excuses, I really need to pick it up, I know.

So, I was planning on blogging about a recipe for chicken lettuce wraps that I found on the Whole30 website, however I decided to talk about one of my favorite recipes that I've made in the last two weeks: Taco Salad. This is my first blog about a recipe that I put together myself, although I did model it after several established recipes. I hope you like it!




Taco Salad

Taco Meat - For this I looked up a recipe for homemade taco seasoning. This one is from Bill Echols at Allrecipes.com

1 lb ground beef (or any other ground meat)
1 Tbsp chili powder
1/4 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tsp onion powder
1/4 tsp crushed red pepper flakes
1/4 tsp dried oregano
1/2 tsp paprika
1 1/2 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp sea salt
1 tsp black pepper
1/2 tp 3/4 cup water

Brown meat and discard grease. Add as much of the seasoning as you'd like (I use half) and the water (depending on how much seasoning you used). Cook until water is gone and the seasoning has mixed with the meat.

Cilantro Lime Vinaigrette - This is a knock off Cafe Rio recipe which I changed to be Whole30 compliant.

6 Tbsp oil - I used olive oil. (Originally, the recipe called for half olive, half vegetable)
1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 Tbsp white vinegar
1 small hot pepper, finely chopped (I used a tiny bit of Jalapeno)
Juice from one lime or to taste
Salt and Pepper to taste
If it's not sweet enough feel free to add more lime juice or even orange juice to taste.

Combine all ingredients and let sit for at least ten minutes to allow the flavors to blend.

Sweet Potato Chips - I used these on my second salad and I thought they added a lot. This recipe was originally from paleogrubs.com.

1 sweet potato, peeled and thinly sliced.
1 Tbsp. oil (coconut preferrably)
Salt

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Mix sweet potato slices with oil and salt and lay flat on a baking sheet. Make sure the potato slices are VERY thin, use a mandolin unless you have a real talent for paper thin slices, otherwise they won't cook properly and won't get crispy. Cook for 10 minutes on one side, then flip and cook another ten minutes. Take any chips that start to brown out of the oven, they won't be good burnt. Obviously.

Putting the Salad together:

Chop up some romaine lettuce, add the meat and chips, and drizzle with salad dressing. I added cut up avocado and fresh cilantro. Feel free to add whatever you like, I like to keep things pretty simple.

This is a really tasty meal that doesn't make you feel like you're on a diet. I love making mexican food at home and I can almost forget that there's no beans or cheese when I eat this salad. I'm giving this recipe a big: SUCCESS.

Whole30: Butterflied Chicken

Day 6! Does this seem like the longest week ever to anyone else?

One thing I forgot to mention about the Whole30 is that after the 30 days you are supposed to gradually reintroduce the foods that you've been abstaining from back into your diet. This will tell you how the different types of food affect your body. However, I do not plan on becoming lactose intolerant or developing a gluten allergy within 30 days. I'm a whole milk drinker and bread lover and nothing can change that! Right?

Today, I want to talk about the first recipe I made on the Whole30: Butterflied Chicken by @clean_eating_journal.

Recipe as found on the Whole30 website:

3 large carrots, peeled and chopped into 1″ chunks
3 medium onions (white, red, or a medley of both)coarsely chopped
3-4 sweet potatoes peeled and chopped into large chunks
6 garlic cloves, crushed and peeled
Coarse salt + pepper
1 orange
1 whole chicken
1 Tbsp fresh or dry thyme
4 Tbsp avocado oil or ghee
1 lemon

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Fill the bottom of an oven safe high-rimmed dish with onions, carrots, sweet potatoes. Add a dash of salt + pepper, and 4 crushed garlic cloves. Slice half of the orange into rings, peel, place on top of the vegetables. Discard the peels. Butterfly the chicken by removing the backbone with a sharp knife or kitchen shears. Lay the chicken skin side up on your work surface, and apply firm pressure with your hands to flatten it. Rub the chicken with the 2 remaining garlic cloves, salt, pepper and thyme. Place the chicken on top of the vegetables. Squeeze lemon and the remaining half of the orange over the chicken. Drizzle oil or ghee over the chicken and vegetables. Cook for 1 hour, or until done.

While doing my paleo research I read that cooking a whole chicken can provide meat for up to 10 meals, so that was my main inspiration for trying out this recipe. I had a whole line up of chicken recipes I wanted to try and this seemed like the easiest way to get started.

First of all, when cooking an entire chicken, make sure it's completley defrosted. Otherwise you will end up with an icepick and a stick of dynamite up the chicken's you-know-what trying to get hack away at a solid chuck of ice. Tip: Apparently, this takes more than one day so plan accordingly.

To butterfly a chicken (I had to look this up on youtube) you hold the tail and use kitchen sheers to cut up either side of the backbone, removing the bone. Then the guy on the video removed the breastbone or keelbone by some act of wizardy that I failed to duplicate. Good luck. Smash the chicken down, put it over the veggies and pop it in the oven.

Bad News: My chicken cooked unevenly, I had to cut some off and put it back in the oven, and it took much longer than an hour. This made the vegetables a little soggier than they were supposed to be.

Good News: It tasted alright, the skin was pretty good, and I was able to save quite a bit of chicken from it.

More Bad News: The chicken I saved tastes funny and kind of ruins the dishes I use it in. I don't know if this is a result of the chicken being freezer burnt or of not waiting til it defrosted all the way. I'm guessing it's my fault and not the recipe's.

All in all I'm calling this recipe a Sucess, though a small one, because I learned how to butterfly and cook a whole chicken and it gave me a lot of leftovers.

Honestly, how do people eat paleo all the time?

50 Shades of Grey

Anyone who knows me knows that I love to read. I love books, especially fiction and fantasy, and I love to talk about the books I read. And I know you've all heard about the super popular erotic novel (can a book be erotic and YA? If so then that's this book), 50 shades of Grey. It was hugely popular a couple years ago when everyone started reading it (and loving it) and now the moving is coming out on Valentine's Day so everyone is all hyped for it again. And so far this blog has been about cooking and sewing and things like that, but I figure its a blog about my first attempts and I want to talk about my first attempt at reading 50 Shades of Grey.

A little background: I have been adamently against this book from the start. As I said, I love reading. However, I do not enjoy reading graphic sex scenes and I especially wouldn't enjoy reading an entire book full of them. So, during the first surge of popularity, when everybody and their mother was reading this book, I really couldn't see why normal people would like it so much. I was disgusted. I was right up there with all the Christian/Feminist bloggers who hated the book and everything it stood for. And I definitely never thought to read it.

Flash forward a few years to last week. I've had a lot of time on my hands lately and since I've spent so much time on TV and the internet, I've seen a lot of 50 Shades of Grey advertisements. I'm also married now and things tend to shock me less. So, I just decided that I wanted to see what all the hype was about. I thought I'd give 50 Shades of Grey a try.
I am just going to tell you right now, I did not make it all the way through this book. I don't even know what chapter I was on when I stopped reading, but I can tell you the exact moment I gave myself a good look in the mirror and asked "Why are you still reading this?" I knew from the start that I probably wasn't going to make it all the way through. Again, I'm not a fan of sex scenes. But I wanted to give it the ol' college try.


My First Attempt at Reading 50 Shades of Grey:

Plot Summary(Spoilers):

Anastasia Steele is a graduating senior at Washington State University in Vancouver. She is traveling up to Seattle to conduct an interview for her best friend, Kate, who is supposed to be interviewing a young business tycoon for the school newspaper. However, Kate is sick and asks her roommate, who is not on the school paper, to do it for her. (At this point I'm actually pleasantly surprised because I'm from Seattle and I didn't know it takes place in Washington). So, "Ana" drives to Seattle, trips into this guy's office, and conducts the interview. Of course, the young tycoon is Christian Grey, our hero(?) and of course, he's absolutely beautiful. In fact, he's so beautiful that Ana will use every other sentence to talk about how beautiful he is for the rest of the book. From the start she can hardly look at him and feels electric shocks when they shake hands. She interviews him, gets the impression that he's an egotistical control freak (oh, if only she knew) and leaves.
Back at college, Ana goes to work at a hardware store and who should show up, but Christian Grey? He asks for an odd assortment of materials such as straps or tie downs or whatever while acting very cryptic and Ana gets the feeling he's laughing at her. They end up setting up a photoshoot for the newspaper article.

The next day after the photoshoot, he takes her out for coffee. It doesn't last long and he doesn't seem to like talking about hsi family. On their way back, Ana trips and almost gets hit by a biker, but is saved by Christian Grey. While in his arms she wills him to kiss her, but instead he says, "I'm not the right man for you." or something like that. And she goes home and cries because a man has never made her feel this way. Even though he's apparently not the right man for her, Mr. Grey can't leave Ana alone and sends her some first edition books. She thinks its inappropriate. It is.

Fast forward, Ana and Kate take their last exams, are done with college and go out to party. They go to a bar with Ana's friend Jose and get wasted. Ana decides to call Christian Grey and drunkenly ask him why he sent her the books and he just says that she's drunk and he's coming to get her. She doesn't tell him where she is and goes outside to get some air. While out there, Jose tries to kiss her because he's always been in love with her. She tries to fight him off and is subsequently rescued by Christian Grey. But how did he know where to find her? He traced her cell phone, which isn't stalkerish at all. Ana blacks out. Grey whisks her back to his hotel where they sleep. In the morning Ana finds herself in his bed without her pants on. He assures her they didn't do anything, but that they did sleep in the same bed, which is a first for him. He's bought her new clothes, including underwear, which fit perfectly. He's also ordered her everything on the room service menu and gets mad when she doesn't want to eat it all because he has a problem with wasted food. Intriguing.

Long story short, they go on a date that night where he helicopters her to Seattle, they go to his apartment, and he makes her sign a non-disclosure agreement. She can't talk about anything they do. He then shows her a room where he has a bunch of BDSM toys, handcuffs, hooks on the ceiling, and a bed. There's other stuff, but you get the picture. Then he finds out she's a virgin and obviously they can't jump into the kinky stuff if she's never done anything before, so he leads her to his room and takes her virginity. This is the first sex scene. They do it twice. There's a lot of sex. You know that from now on there's going to be a lot of sex. The rest of the stuff I read consists of him trying to convince her to be his "submissive" to his "dominant" which basically means that she spends every weekend with him and has to do everything he says, sexual or otherwise. He can do whatever he wants to her, whenever he wants, wherever he wants, and she has to accept it happily or she will be "punished". He sends her a contract with all of this in it. She spends a lot of time considering this because she doesn't want to lose him since no man has ever made her feel like this before. But she also knows she wants a real relationship. Finally, he wears her down enough that she agrees to give it a try. And even though she hasn't signed anything yet the first thing he does is spank her 18 times because she rolls her eyes at him and he told her not to.
This is where I stopped.
Whew! Sorry that was so long. Check out Part 2 to hear my views on the book.

Tex Filipino

Today was Sunday and Sundays are kind of hit or miss with the cooking thing because you either planned ahead and bought something to make or you have abosolutely nothing in your fridge. Today was sort of a "miss" day. Lucky for the starving Doc, I like to think of new things to make. So, today I'm going to post about two recipes:

Cilantro Lime Rice and Pork Tocino!

So, once again, this isn't exaclty a first attempt. I have made the Cilantro Lime Rice (Cafe Rio Style) before, but I loved it so much and was definitely craving it. Maybe I should call this blog "Second Attempts" since that's all I've posted so far. Anyway, I found a rice recipe I really love online at ohsweetbasil.com which promises to be just like Cafe Rio. So, I tried it and I'll give you the recipe now:

Cilantro Lime Rice

2 c. rice (I always use Botan Calrose rice, but IDK why??)
4 c. water
1 chicken bouillon cube (the recipe says 2 tsp. but I think its the same)
2 tbs. butter
1 handful chopped cilantro
1/2 lime, juiced (I actually juice the lime and then throw it in the pot for a few minutes while it boils to soak up all the flavor
1/2 - 1 can diced green chiles (I used half today, but could have used the whole thing)

Basically, you just put everything in a pot, cover it, and wait til the water evaporates, then you mix it all up. You can use a rice cooker obviously, but some of us aren't so fancy. Not only do I not have a rice cooker, but I don't have any sort of kitchenaid or electronic mixer, a baster, and my husband STILL won't buy me a creme brulee torch, but I digress...
The rice ends out turning out really flavorful and a little mushy, but I actually like it like that for this recipe. Not only can you eat it by itself, it's great for Tex Mex dishes, but, like you'll see, you can use it for other things.

Italian Sweet Bread

For my first official post I thought I'd start with what I'm making today: Italian Sweet Bread (via Laura and Kris Olson)

Now, this isn't exactly a "first attempt" because I've actually made this bread once before, a couple weeks ago. I'm attempting to make it again for a few reasons:
1. It was really addicting, we finished it in like three days
2. The bread wasn't actually as sweet as I though it would be, so I wanted to try a couple things on it
3. It's Sunday and I'm bored

I am a big experimenter in the kitchen. Meaning, I like to take a bunch of things that I think would taste good together and make something out of them. As my cooking knowledge has increased this has become more fun, as I can broaden my horizons a bit. Also, after watching all 8(?) seasons of Desperate Housewives, I learned that it could take years to perfect a recipe through experimentation. Thank you Bree and Katherine. I also have a HUGE sweet tooth. This is why I've decided to experiment a little on this Italian Sweetbread recipe.
Don't get me wrong, this first attempt was really good. This bread has an awesome texture; it's almost doughy in the middle which makes you keep eating it. It also tastes really good, especially with tons of butter. Not to mention that it's pretty simple to make, the first time I made this was my first time baking bread, ever.

This Original Recipe:

1 c. flour
1/2 c. sugar
1 t. salt
5 t. yeast
1 1/3 c. milk
1/2 c. butter
4 eggs
4-5 c. more flour

You mix the first four ingredients (1 c. flour - yeast). Then you warm the milk and butter in the microwave til the butter melts. Pour the milk and butter over the dry ingredients, mix. Add eggs and mix again. Then you just add 4-5 more cups of flour til it becomes a soft dough. You grease the dough, cover it, and let it rise for around 1 1/2 hours. Then you punch it down and divide into 4 equal pieces. Roll each piece into a rope, about 15 to 18 inches long and twist two together and join the ends. So, you end up with two twisted circles. Brush tops with egg whites and sprinkle with sesame seeds or poppy seeds. Cover and let rise about 30 minutes. Bake at 350 for 20-25 minutes.

So, as I began baking this time around, I already had some changes in mind:
1. I added about a quarter cup of sugar
2. I added two tsp vanilla before adding the additional flour
3. I added some coconut caramel sauce I had previously made
*Warning: As of yet, I'm not super familiar with how different ingredients affect the outcome of baked goods ie: More sugar???
Well, the second attempt went much like the first, except it took a lot longer for the dough to form. I ended up using probably 7 or 8 cups of flour. I also add a little vanilla to the egg whites I brush on top, but you can't really tell the difference. The new sweet bread actually does taste a little sweeter and the texture is the same, so I'm calling this one a WIN! I will probably keep experimenting with it. Cuz it's fun! (One other thing, bake the bread near the bottom of the oven, it doesn't get as dark.)

Picture of First Attempt