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Whole 30 Week 3

As I sit here and write this I am eating a cookie. Ok, it’s barely a cookie. Almost none of it resembles a cookie. There’s no sugar, flour, butter, or chocolate. Regardless, the #1 rule of this Whole 30 thing is no fake baked goods. Really, it’s more like rule #143. But it’s still a rule.

After 21 days, the last 3 of which were cooped up in the house thanks to storm Jonas, I broke down. If it’s any consolation, they weren’t very good cookies and everything in them was Paleo- and technically Whole 30-approved (Whole 30 just doesn’t doesn’t approve of putting them all together into anything that resembles a treat).

I feel like this story serves as the perfect metaphor for week 3. I am starting to get a little sick of the restricted eating and some of the cravings are back in full force. But I am also a little bit afraid to go back to total unrestricted eating and I definitely want to see the 30 days through.

I am now really looking forward to day 31 when I can start introducing certain foods back into my diet. Not just so I can eat all those foods I have been missing, but so that I can actually find out if I do have any sensitivities or allergies that I was unaware of before.

Other than that, there isn’t much I can add about week 3 that I haven’t said in previous weeks. I am still feeling great. There have been a couple days where my stomach didn’t totally agree with me, but I probably wasn’t eating enough vegetables and too much meat and nuts. And while I am not weighing myself, a friend of mine who is doing the Whole 30 with me had lost 5 pounds at the end of week 2, so that’s promising!

This week, the meal plan went a bit out the window. I had a 2 day training that involved a catered lunch, Wednesday my husband was out, Thursday I had book club, and on Friday we had a snow day. I also tried to mix up the breakfasts more since I am getting so sick of eggs.

Paleo lasagna

Monday:

Breakfast: scrambled eggs with salsa and avocado
Lunch: leftover butternut squash soup and Traders Joe’s Just Roasted Chicken
Dinner: zucchini noodle lasagna (recipe to come)

Tuesday:

Breakfast: leftover lasagna
Lunch: leftover lasagna (that’s how much I’m sick of eggs)
Dinner: Slow cooker pork carnitas topped sweet potato. Altered this recipe.

Wednesday:

Breakfast: Acai smoothie and chia pudding bowl (recipe to come)
Lunch: Steak and chicken fajitas with no tortillas (catered)
Dinner: Leftover butternut squash soup

Smoothie bowl

Thursday:

Breakfast: Acai smoothie and chia pudding bowl
Lunch: Garden Salad with chicken (catered)
Dinner: Classic Greek Salad with chicken (ate out)

Friday:

Breakfast: Sweet potato fritata
Lunch: Salad topped with smoked turkey (ate out)
Dinner: Paleo Chili

Saturday:

Breakfast: Acai smoothie and chia pudding bowl
Lunch: leftover salad
Dinner: Naked turkey burger (ate out)

Sunday:

Breakfast: Sweet potato hashbrowns with a fried egg
Lunch: Cucumber Tomato Salad
Dinner: Korean Beef Lettuce Wraps (inspired by the Against All Grain cookbook, similar recipe here)

I only have 1 full week left. This week may be the hardest. The first week was full of excitement and I planned every little meal. The second week I was feeling great, like I could do this forever. The third week was just more of the same, feeling good, but getting bored. As I go into the fourth week, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but I can feel my self control and motivation slipping.

9 days and counting.

I think it is fair to say that most women (or anyone watching their weight) have a love-hate relationship with pasta. It’s easy and comforting. But the carbs. Oh the carbs. I, personally, try to limit my pasta intake to once or twice a month. My husband, on the other hand, could eat it every. single. day. To compromise with him, I try different tricks to substitute or limit the pasta. My new favorite might just be this quinoa pasta I whipped up.

With the right tools, homemade pasta is actually really easy. Really, all pasta is is flour, eggs, and a little seasoning rolled thin and cut into strips (or some other fun shape). For this recipe, I replaced part of the flour with “quinoa flour”, which is dry quinoa processed into a fine “flour”.

The quinoa flour is much coarser than normal flour, so you may not be able to make fine angel hair pasta. But it works perfectly well with any pasta roller attachment for making fettuccine or pappardelle noodles.

Because of the graininess of the dough, I only rolled my noodles out to about a 3mm thickness on my pasta roller attachment for the KitchenAid. Then I cut them by hand with a pizza cutter to make thick papparadelle noddles.

I would love to give you a play-by-play of how to make pasta with a pasta roller, but the hard work has already been done by the fine folks at the Kitchn. And I probably couldn’t do it better myself.

Once you have the noodles, you cook them just as you would any other pasta noodle. But because they are fresh and not dried, they cook much faster. Almost too fast if you are not careful and take your eye off of the pot.

With my quinoa pasta, I just tossed the noddles with some store bought pasta sauce and some sauteed veggies for a quick and light meal. But I plan on making this recipe again and using the noddles for lasagna.

Whole 30 Week 3 Recap and Meal Plan

Quinoa Pasta

Search Results for: lasagna