Meat Month: I don’t know what a Jedi is, but I know this is some Jedi mind-trickery

We’re coming up on our final week of Whole30 and things are looking up. I haven’t woken up feeling sluggish since day 16 (that arrived right on schedule, they tell me) and other than my quinoa-based stress dreams, I’m doing quite well.

Also, I feel I should mention that while I jokingly call this Meat Month, the reality is it’s mostly just Shitton Of Vegetables Month. I almost feel like a vegetarian. A vegetarian who still eats animal. So. Anyway, lots of greens and cooked vegetables and green salads and raw vegetable salads. Lots.

Here are some winning dishes we made recently, dishes that I believe will stick around post-Whole30.

Everyday Paleo’s Steak Dry Rub, Avocado Salsa, and Chopped Broccoli Salad

We didn’t have broccoli and aren’t eating bacon on Whole30, so we subbed green beans and almonds. Oh, and apples, while a perfect match for broccoli, seemed weird with green beans, so we used orange segments. So basically we didn’t follow the recipe at all. (I actually did use her dressing recipe and it was delicious, highly recommend.)

Everyday Paleo’s Southwestern Frittata (h/t Kristabella for the recipe rec!)

Because I’m me, I changed up all the ingredients — spinach instead of Devil’s Tuber, ground turkey instead of ground beef — but this was delish. We’ve all been eating it for breakfast all week, including LG, who digs on jalapenos because she’s totally our kid.

The Clothes Make The Girl’s Chocolate Chili (thanks Kristabella and Holly!) There’s no picture of this, because chili is ugly (womp womp sorry chili), but we did add extra meat (tri-tip) to this so we’d have some leftovers. It was quite tasty and I’d totally use the spice base again for chili with BLACK BEANS LIKE GOD INTENDED.

The Clothes Make the Girl’s Chicken and Moroccan Dipping Sauce (That makes it seem like there’s chicken in the sauce. That’s not the case. I’m just bad at grammars.) (Again thanks to Holly for the recommendation.)

See? Look at all those vegetables.

So that’s what we’ve been eating. Well, that and like three gallons of olive oil. Seriously. So. Much. Olive oil. I hearken for the days when we used to fry up our white potatoes in bacon fat. It was a simpler time.

Anyway, some things I do/don’t miss:

– I still don’t miss any food in particular. Okay, except Mexican food. There’s just no way to do Mexican food on Whole30. I’m sorry, there’s not.

– I know Chris misses Asian food. Give me another month and I might start to miss potstickers with soy sauce, but for now I’m cool.

– I miss my morning tradition of coffee, and yeah, okay, the crack-like feeling it produces. I’m looking forward to bringing that back, hopefully right in time for the weather to not be ninety degrees (WHY? It’s OCTOBER.)

– I miss not cooking. And I love cooking. I would really like to just not have to think about dinner right now, but that’s not the case for like 9 more days.

– I miss not being able to use honey in my salad dressings.

– While I don’t miss snacky foods (really, I don’t! The Whole30 is like some Jedi mind-trick shit), I do miss the experience of post-dinner popcorn or ice cream or chocolate or something/anything other than tea.

– I miss wine.