Menu Planning, Things We Don't Miss and Soup Times 16!

I am trying something new this week!  A week-long menu plan.  We are now five months into this clean eating lifestyle.  It is rather ironic that I am just now getting myself disciplined enough to map out a week's worth of meals...  My Beachbody Coach (who is also my youngest sister!) supplied me with a blank menu plan in the form of a word document.  I am not yet blogger-savvy enough to know how to upload it any way other than taking a photo of my own printed out copy.  Oh well, you get the idea!  For anyone who is curious about what exactly we eat around here these days, here is a sample!  

We had overhauled our pantry and fridge last September.  I remember snapping this photo early one morning as we were in the midst of the initial change-over of our kitchen inventory!  The six items pictured here were leaving our kitchen and were headed to a local food pantry instead.  I am more of a "figure it out as I go" sort of cook and once we had removed a few items and replaced them with choices that were more along the lines of "whole foods", I felt comfortable to just cook day-to-day.  Or I could say meal-to-meal.  Or even snack-to-snack!  

For me, perhaps the biggest adjustment in switching over to this lifestyle is the fact that we are designed to be eating rather frequently.  This has been the part that requires the most effort in my own mind.  A bonus is that my two kids are already natural reminders that snack time is approaching!  This sort of dining schedule works out great for my two young children.  This campfire image had caught my eye several times and still comes to mind whenever I am tempted to just keep moving with the task at hand rather than stopping to grab a snack as scheduled.  I can honestly say that never before in my adult life has my metabolism felt as efficient as it is becoming now at age 35!  I think that the combination of strength training with Chalean Extreme workouts, drinking Shakeology for breakfast and then eating complex carbs paired with proteins throughout the day has me moving in a better direction than at any other point in my life.

Something that happened in the kitchen this past week made me laugh!  It was honestly the first time in my life that I took a recipe and made it times 16!!  See the link below for the fantastic Chicken Spinach and Rice soup recipe that my sister Rachel had posted four months ago.  

http://rachelfledderman1.blogspot.com/2013/10/chicken-spinach-rice-soup.html  

My family has enjoyed this recipe many times since discovering it back in October!  This past week we were making a dinner for a family who recently welcomed baby #6.  We were also cooking for a family of three who had just moved into their new home.  Then add in my own family of four and the fact that I was hoping to have enough soup to serve everyone twice.  As originally posted above, the recipe is more along the lines of a "cooking for two" size of batch.  It really has become a family favorite here and I was glad to be able to share it with others during this chilly (and seemingly never-ending!) Erie winter.  So, in doing the math, 1/4 cup of celery morphed into 4 cups of celery!  Good thing I have some excellent knives from my former days as a Pampered Chef consultant!  Doing some of my prep work later at night, alone in the kitchen, was actually quite relaxing.  I was even able to catch up on a Sunday morning message that I had missed while we were out of town visiting my family earlier this month.  You have to check out this message!  I will include a link below.  I so appreciate our pastor (Mark Harris) and the combination of humor and truth is just really wonderful.  Even without viewing the corresponding slides, the first part of this message had me laughing so much that I had to rein myself in if I wanted to remain alone in the kitchen with two children asleep in their beds!
http://www.facerie.org/sermon_whenlifethrowsacurve 

Speaking of Sunday mornings, it is time to wrap things up here and head off to bed.  Thanks for stopping for a few moments to share a bit of the past week of life here in my kitchen!  We'll see what the coming week brings!