Wholelife Challenge - Menu Plan - Monday 10 February

Well I admit I have been slack in my menu planning and recording what I have been eating with the WLC. So I am going to *try* to document everything I eat until the end of the challenge - so almost 4 weeks... be kind to me if I miss a day here or there... I do have a lot on with life in general and also organising the final touches for our big holiday! :)

So saying all that here was today's menu plan...

Breakfast

Green Smoothie with Peach, Banana, Mango, Baby Spinach and Coconut Water with a banana. I had this post run.

Lunch

Last night dinner leftovers - Marinated Chicken Drumsticks with baked sweet potato. (kinda boring but delicious!)

Dinner

Chicken Fingers (chicken tenders in a almond flour crumb) with baked sweet potato

As you can tell my home delivery for shopping is arriving on Wednesday so we are down to bare bones!!

I am about to put a chilli con carne into the slow cooker ready to cook tomorrow for dinner. Lunch I think tomorrow will be a nice big garden salad, and breakfast probably another smoothie! :) I have to make sure lunch is quite filling since I will be doing a big run early afternoon to get the kids from school. I will be on tomorrow night to post about what I eat! :)

I haven't shared recipes for the above as it is all quite boring but if you want to know how I crumbed the chicken tenders, or the drumsticks marinade let me know and I will post it. :)

My favourite Breakfast

My absolute favourite breakfast is poached eggs, ham and avocado with peach tea! So delicious. I just had to share this picture to show how delicious it is. I also love smoked salmon in place of ham. I have this several times a week and never get sick of it.

Paleo Pizza

One thing I really miss on the WLC is Pizza! We used to do Friday night home made pizzas and it has been strange not doing it. Last night we had friends come to visit and decided to do homemade pizza. So then of course I had to find a home made pizza recipe that was WLC compliant. A blog I regularly read is Everyday Paleo. I also have a few of their cookbooks too. Anyhow I was searching for a pizza dough and found an almond dough on that site. So decided to test it out. Here is the link to it on Everyday Paleo and I will list below what I did. Everyday Paleo Pizza.

Ingredients for base:

2 cups almond meal
2 eggs
3 tbsp olive oil
¼ tsp baking soda
1 tsp garlic powder
1 ½ tbsp fresh rosemary chopped

Method for Pizza base:

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees.

I placed all this in the Bellini on speed 4 for 10 seconds.

Lightly grease a pizza tray with olive oil. Place the ball of dough in the center of your pizza tray and using your hands, push and pat the dough down into the shape of a circle. You want to make the dough as thin as possible. Bake JUST the base in your pre-heated oven for 20 minutes.

Toppings:

Capsicum
Pizza sauce (see how I made this below)
Mushrooms
Baby Spinach
Diced bacon
Red Onions

For the Pizza sauce - combine:

Small can of tomato paste,
1/2 cup diced tomatoes
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp dried oregano
1/2 tsp dried basil
1/2 tsp garlic powder

While your base is cooking, prepare your toppings. After the base is done, remove from the oven and evenly spread the pizza sauce over the base. Add the diced bacon and all remaining toppings evenly over the sauce and bake again for an additional 25-30 minutes. Use whatever toppings you like.

Next time I think I might try a pizza with avocado and salmon - to try something different! I only used what I had in the fridge and while it was delicious it definitely will be better next time. Enjoy!

Quirky Cooking - Fajita Chicken & Salad Pizza on Quinoa & Chia Seed Flatbread

My favourite blog is Quirky Cooking and I am always on there trying to find cooking ideas.
Tonight I thought I'd try a recipe I've been looking at for a while -

Fajita Chicken & Salad Pizza on Quinoa & Chia Seed Flatbread.

It is not WLC compliant as it has honey but i was happy to lose a point tonight as it was DELICIOUS!

Here is what I did - a little different to QC due to what I had in our house:

It makes 2 large pizza size flatbreads.

1. Toast 150g white quinoa using the Bellini at 100C for 10 mins, speed 1, with measuring cup off.

2. Then grind the toasted quinoa, 2 Tbspns chia seeds and 1/2 tsp salt in Bellini bowl for 1 minute, speed 9.

3. Add 180g water and mix on speed 5 for 10 seconds.

4. Drizzle pizza trays with some extra virgin olive oil (use baking paper if needed), and divide dough between trays. (The dough will be more like a sticky batter.) Drizzle the dough with some more oil. Using your fingertips, pat the dough out evenly into a thin circle, about 3mm thick. I find it's easier to use my fingers than a spatula, as the dough is very sticky. The oil will stop it sticking to your hands. There should be oil all around the edge of the dough, and a thin sheen over the top. This will make it crispy. If you want it soft, there's no need to use much oil.

5. Bake at 200C for 20-30 minutes, depending how crispy you like it.


Fajita Chicken & Salad Topping

1. While the pizza bases are cooking, make the toppings.

2. Chop garlic on speed 7 for 3 seconds - 2 garlic cloves

3. Add the remaining ingredients except the chicken and mix on speed 5 for 5 seconds
- 20g extra virgin olive oil
- 1 Tbspn honey
- juice of 1/2 a lime
- 1/2 tsp ground cumin
- 1/2 tsp dried oregano
- 1/4 tsp sea salt
- 1/4 tsp smoked paprika

4. Add 500g chicken breast - thinly sliced, and cook for 5 minutes, ST temperature, blunt blade, with measuring cup off.

(There will be a bit of 'juice' left after cooking the chicken - you can just lift the chicken out with a fork or slotted spoon. I actually drizzled the juice over the top of the pizza because it was too yummy to waste!)

When flatbread is cooked, remove from oven and top with baby spinach, chopped tomato, thinly sliced Spanish onion and fajita chicken.

Enjoy - they are absolutely delicious! The fajita chicken was so delicious I will be making it regularly!

Chile Lime Chicken Wings, Beetroot Salad and Sweet Potato Fries

Two of my favourite paleo / healthy eating blogs are Quirky Cooking and Nom Nom Paleo and while looking for ideas I found some great recipes for dinner tonight.

I have wanted to make Quirky Cooking's Beetroot Salad for a long time so have finally taken the plunge... sweet potato fries are a staple in our house, and chicken wings are always a winner - so I am hoping to other 4 people in this house like it all too!

So here goes with the recipes and some pictures.

Sweet Potato Fries

Ingredients

1 large sweet potato
2 tablespoons of coconut oil
salt, pepper and paprika

Method

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees celcius.

I peeled the sweet potato and cut into even matchsticks.

Line a baking tray with baking paper and spread the matchsticks out.

Then bake for 20 minutes - turning after 10 minutes.

Then they should look something like this:

Chile Lime Chicken Wings

Ingredients

½ medium onion
2 jalapeno peppers
3 garlic cloves, peeled
½ cup coriander
Freshly ground pepper
Zest from 2 limes
¼ cup lime juice
2 tablespoons fish sauce
2 tablespoons coconut aminos
2.5kg chicken wings

Method

Place the onion, jalapenos, garlic, coriander, ground pepper, lime zest and juice, fish sauce, and coconut aminos into the bellini. Blitz it all on speed 9 for 10 seconds.

Place chicken wings into a bowl and cover with marinade. Use your hands to mix it in. Place in the fridge for 30-60 mins to marinade. Leave up to 6 hours, but no longer.

Once you are ready to cook - preheat the oven to 220 degrees, line an oven tray with baking paper and bake for 30 minutes. Turn the chicken wings over at 15 minutes. Grill for the last 5 minutes to brown the top.

Beetroot Salad

Ingredients

400g raw beetroot (I cut the top and bottom of the beetroot off but didn't peel)
100g carrot, quartered
1/4 small red onion
1 green apple, quartered
1 handful of parsley leaves
2 tbsp olive oil
juice of 1/2 lemon
pinch salt

Method

Place all vegies in Bellini and chop on medium speed (sp. 5) until evenly chopped (3-4 seconds). Scrape down sides and chop again for a couple of seconds until desired consistency.

This was the whole dinner together.. just delicious:

Coconut Rough

School snack preparation underway today.. :-) My lovely neighbour bought over a sample of this the other day and I had to make it again. The kids loved it, so I knew they would be happy to have it in their lunch boxes.

Ingredients:
2 cups desiccated coconut
1 heaped tablespoon cacao/cocoa/carob
10 medjool dates, seeds removed
2 tablespoons coconut cream

Method:
Place all of the ingredients into your blender or food processor. Blend until well combined, this may take a little while. Press the mixture into a loaf tin lined with baking paper, place the mixture into the freezer to set, slice and enjoy!

I got this recipe from the amazing Wholefood Simply website ;)

Easy lunch idea: Salad Jars

Since B & I are undertaking the Wholelife Challenge I have been thinking of good work lunches that are easy, filling and tasty.. (can be quite difficult to find!).

So I decided to make us salad jars for lunch as a test! In the jar I had from the bottom:

Paleo caesar dressing
Boiled eggs x 1.5
Cherry tomatos x 6
Shaved Turkey breast x 100g
Diced apple & carrot
Lettuce mix

Of course after I made it up I thought how lovely cranberry sauce would have been.... but I didn't have any - so caesar dressing just has to do! You just tip the salad straight into the bowl and apparently it ends up being super fresh... let's see if it is true! I will report back on the verdict from myself and B. B is a hard taskmaster with this sort of thing so I hope he is happy with it as it was so easy to do!

I will update to let you all know how it tastes! :-)

Apricot & Coconut Bites

I absolutely adore the Wholefood Simply blog. The recipes are just amazing!

Here is one of our faves and the easiest of all recipes: - Apricot Bites - from Wholefood Simply (did I mention I love this website??):

Ingredients:

1 cup dried apricots
2 cups desiccated coconut

Method:

Add the ingredients to your Thermomix / bellini, or food processor. For Thermomix / Bellini put on Speed 6, 50 seconds. For a normal food processor process until fully mixed - could take a while. Once mixed press the mixture into a lined loaf tin. Refrigerate to set. Once set chop into pieces and store in the fridge.

Enjoy!

The Wholelife Challenge

After a lot of research we decided to undertake the Wholelife Challenge which started on 11 January. This post is a little late (as I was a little late organising my blog).. but I would love to share how we are going with it, and why we decided to do it!

Here is a blurb I found about it:

The Whole Life Challenge is an 8-week health and fitness game designed for you to see what kind of impact you can have on your body, fitness, and lifestyle if you commit yourself to a specific structure. There are three categories for the game - Performance Results, Physical Results, and Lifestyle and Accountability. This is not just a “change your body” challenge. It is a “who you are” challenge! Nutrition, workouts, mobilization, supplements, daily accounting, community engagement -- if you play all out you won’t believe the results you can get!

The Rules
How Points Work
What can I eat? WLC Nutrition Levels Detailed Chart

The main reason we wanted to do the Wholelife Challenge is to be healthier. B and I were both feeling very bloated, unhealthy and just wanted to feel better. In the past I have cooked a lot of paleo recipes and always loved them, so knew it was achievable. We also wanted our children to recognise that eating well doesn't mean eating junk food! Yes we allow them to eat McDonalds, KFC etc every now and then but want it to become a sometimes food more than a weekly food. We wanted to get out of the rut that we were in. It doesn't hurt with the motivation that I signed up for the Paris Marathon and know I need to be in tip top condition to complete it. :-)

Welcome!

I hope you find my blog interesting and fun to read!!

Please feel free to message me with any ideas you have or things you are interested in seeing on my blog... in the meantime please keep reading! If there is anything in particular food wise you would like help with (paleo wise), please ask as I am always experimenting and hoping to cook anything and everything that I possibly can that is paleo friendly!