Today is prep day again. I’m getting things ready for a very busy weekend. We need food to grab very quickly and easily, so I started a pot of bone broth last night. I have never left the stove on all night, and that was super weird (though it was on the lowest setting and the soup was just barely simmering away), but I know people do it. The recipe says for 12-24 hours, and the way today worked, I didn’t get to it until 4:00 this afternoon, so it was about 21 hours!
And it was totally worth it! I have never made such good stock. You can see in the picture that it is not really clear. It is so rich (it’s not thick, just rich) I could absolutely just drink it from a mug – which is what is recommended. It’s good for your joints, I guess. Well, it turns out, it is also good for egg drop soup. We made some tonight, and it was fantastic.
So, this morning, as I crisped up some potatoes to go with our scrambled eggs, I boiled up some eggs for the weekend. Hard boiled eggs with the homemade ranch dressing is a great snack. It’s not a Whole 30 snack, really. We eat that all the time, so it just feels good to sit down to a regular 
thing we would eat – and have it be compliant.
I also cooked two giant chicken breasts and made chicken salad – and filled several meal sized containers, so we are ready to grab it and toss in our lunch boxes.
It occurs to me how incredibly boring this blog is. I made chicken salad. Oooh. Egg drop soup! Big deal. But, I’m convinced that this Whole 30 blog will be a great tool for my health. I will come back here to remember recipes, feelings, accomplishments. After all, I have been eating well for 18 days, now. I really can’t understate how much of a turn around that is. I was drinking more than one soda a day. ALWAYS several snacks during the TV hours of the evening. And when I say snacks, I do not mean apples and peanut butter. I mean 6 small KitKat bars. I mean big bowls of ice cream. I mean half a pizza. So, these 18 days are a bit of a miracle, really. The way my body did not have severe withdrawals, does not have severe cravings that I’m having to fight – those are a part of the mystery I call God.
I can imagine doing Whole 30 again (maybe every year?). And if I do, I will come back here and remember that every weekend of the 30 days, I need to simmer some bone broth FOR A DAY. I will remember that I started with 16 cups of water, a chicken carcass, the inner part of a “bunch” of celery, 1.5 cups of diced carrots, one large onion, 3 cloves of garlic, generous amounts of poultry seasoning, salt, and pepper…and I ended up with about 12 cups of bone broth. (I will also remember that before the stock pot, I roasted the bones and veggies with plenty of olive oil at 400 for about 30 minutes or until they were getting a lot of brown on them.)
But, there is another thing about this blog: it’s practice. It’s learning about inserting pictures and hyperlinks and such. It’s discerning how long things should be…which always seems to be an issue for me. It’s learning about how to manage things if people make comments. If people contact me. Maybe it will never happen, but if it does – I’ll need to know what to click and how to access things.
I intend to tell people about my blog after I’m done with Whole 30. Then, I’ll use this space for things I really need to write about. But, for now, it’s an odd blog about food, kind of boring food, actually. But, I’m learning and growing, and writing it down helps.
Be Gentle With You 