Lunchbox #70

Today, my preschooler's lunch featured (clockwise):

• A banana
• Kerrygold Dubliner cheese
• Baby carrots
• Blueberries (formerly frozen) mixed with organic whole milk yoghurt and a couple of drops of liquid whole leaf stevia

~

Lunchbox #69

Today, my preschooler's lunch featured (clockwise):

• Pork carnitas, mango salsa, spaghetti squash
• Tiny container with some dried cranberries (dessert, pretty much)
• Half a banana
• A Clementine

~

Lunchbox #68

Today, my preschooler's lunch featured (clockwise):

• Onion and cheese omelette, cut into pieces
• Baby carrots
• Remaining mango salsa, on top of some guacamole
• Banana yoghurt - A blend of sunbutter, whole milk yoghurt, and a banana

~

Menu Plan

Here's the menu plan for this week. We are trying to make it through 'til Friday with what's left in the fridge...I might need to get a little more creative. :) Definitely lots and lots of eggs and...pork. I had the "brilliant" idea of making 10 lb. of pork loin roast in the crock pot on Sunday, slow cooked in mango salsa. Delicious, yes, but entirely too much. So, sorry for the lack of variety, but budget and practicality demand it this week! ;)

Monday:
Breakfast - Fruit and eggs for my girls, for me - hot buttered chai - recipe to come soon
Lunch - Leftover pork roast with strawberries on salad greens
Dinner - Various and sundry leftovers

Tuesday:
Breakfast - Same as Monday
Lunch - Leftover pork roast with salsa
Dinner - Eggs, in some format

Wednesday:
Breakfast - Smoothies
Lunch - The last vestiges of the pork with added mango salsa, no joke!
Dinner - Onion and cheese quiche

Thursday:
Breakfast - Mashed boiled eggs with Kerrygold
Lunch - Maybe fasting for me
Dinner - My inlaws are bringing Chipotle! Steak salad for me. Best. In-laws. EVER.

Friday:
Breakfast - Whole milk yoghurt with raspberry extract and liquid stevia
Lunch - Fried eggs and potatoes
Dinner - Whatever I've rustled up at the grocery store that day :)

Lunchbox #67

Today, we went to a friend's house for a lunchtime playdate. My preschooler's lunch featured (clockwise):

• Spaghetti squash noodles with leftover pork carnitas
• Cantaloupe and strawberries
• Whole milk yoghurt drizzled with honey
• Mixed greens salad with cherry tomatoes and mango salsa

~

Submit Your Links and Lunchboxes to The Real Food Lunchbox Carnival!

Woo hoo! The time has come for you to submit links to your blog post from the past week featuring a meal/(s) or snack/(s) that you packed for yourself or your loved ones. The linky will be open from right now through 3 p.m. Sunday afternoon (giving y'all a little extra time since I'm late getting this up...). Now's the time to get your linking up groove on!

Also, in case of technical difficulties, please bear with me AND shoot me an email - this carnival series is my first time using this linky partner, so I'm not certain of what to expect.

A reminder of The Real Food Lunchbox Carnival Guidelines:

• 

  Voila! The Real Food Lunchbox Carnival logo.
  Please be sure that when you add it,
  it links back to this carnival's label page!

  Feature The Real Food Lunchbox Carnival logo in your post  - and your logo should link back to that the Real Food Lunchbox Carnival label page, so that your readers can come to read the rest of the carnival for fresh inspiration, too!
  
  Grab the logo JPG right now if you like for your posts. It's available on Flickr; click the logo on the right and you will be able to pick up embeddable HTML under the "Share" tab.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Please link to your individual packed meal's post using a permalink, NOT a link to your blog's home page.
  
  
• One linked post submitted per blog per week.
  
  
• The packed/assembled meal or snack that you've chosen to link/feature for this carnival should be primal / paleo friendly. To simplify: no grains or refined sugars should take the spotlight in your linked/featured post, please!
  
  
• No recipes-only posts, please. The goal is to showcase how you've put together your packed meals and snacks! If a recipe is involved but still shows the end product of your packed/assembled meal or snack, that is OK.
  
  
• Your packed/assembled meal can be breakfast, lunch, dinner, or even a snack.
  
  
• When you link, please use this format to tell us what you've packed, and who you are!
  Subject (Blogger or Blog Name)
  
  
  Sample Format (as far as I know these blogs are fictitious):
  
  Chicken with Sweet Potato Fries and Dip! (Cro-Magnon)
  Grain-Free Breakfast Burrito On the Go (Grokerella)
  Paleo PB&J (Cave Kid at Heart)
  

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
These are just tips, not mandatory:

• A picture or pictures help your readers' frame of reference bigtime. A list of foods is kind of dry, but a close up or a few of your packed meal or snack is much likelier to capture readers' imagination. Plus, you get to add the picture's thumbnail to the linky below.
  
  
• Make it fun! Add some discussion in your post as to the meal's contents, or even explore whether the meal was a hit or a miss. (Yes, lunchbox fails are very much welcomed and even celebrated! Lessons learned make for great commiserative reading and fyi.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 ♥ Thanks so much for submitting a link! It makes my heart sing. :) ♥

Let me know if you have questions, comments, suggestions for the carnival! You can also email me at primalkitchen at gmail dot com.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Lunchbox #66

Today, my preschooler's lunch featured (clockwise):

• Baby carrots with a cheese dip
• Whole milk organic yoghurt with honey drizzled on top
• Half a banana
• Egg salad

~

Celebrating Special Occasions While Sticking To Your Low-Carb Weight Loss Goals

Though special occasions are often reserved as perfect times to let loose and indulge a little, it would appear that I have a dilemma - a good kind of dilemma. Special occasions come too frequently!

Using a fairly loose definition, see how many special occasions fit into a year for our family:

• Celebrating local relatives' birthdays, including my own family's birthdays: 10 parties/year
  
• Celebrating the birthday parties of my daughters' friends, and local family friends: 10 parties/year (at least!)
  
• Celebrating New Year's, the Super Bowl, Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day, Easter, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas Eve/Christmas Day: 12 parties/year
  
• Anniversaries, Mother's Day, Father's Day: 6 get-togethers/year
  

I could go on and on tallying up the ways that we could celebrate, but guess what? The above alone adds up to 38 parties or get-togethers in a year. If I were to take each of these special events as license to exercise my 80/20 rule...well...I'd be doing so approximately 3 out of every month's 4 weeks throughout the year!

Here I want to emphasize that without a doubt it is a wonderful thing - an enormous blessing - to be able to rejoice in so many milestones and special occasions. The excuse to gather and celebrate with friends and family is priceless.

However...none of these celebrations come without lots. and. lots. of. FOOD. Deary me - the cakes, the cookies, the sweets! Of course many do also come with delicious primal / paleo-friendly party fare like steaks (grilled in the summer, yum!), nuts, veggie trays, and so on.

But here's the reality for me (and I'm betting for many of you!): My body reacts to sugar like a recreational drug user suddenly encountering another high. Simply put: I cannot eat such a significant amount of cake and ice cream (or pie, or crumble, or...well...you get the idea) on average three times per month. What's the big deal? some might rightly ask; It's such a small proportion of your overall food intake, and you can be disciplined the rest of the time.

Well, yes, and no. Objectively, it is a relatively small amount, having a carb spike once per week or so. But there are reverberations from that one sugary indulgence. For one, I personally cannot indulge in much of something so sweet and not immediately develop immense sugar cravings that will last for days afterward. Also, horking down a bunch of sugar can compromise my immune system for more than 24 hours. And, folks? I have a four-year-old in preschool, who also accompanies her one-year-old sister to the church nursery every Sunday. In other words, our household has regular and persistent pathogen exposure. I need every bit of immune strength I can muster, because if there's anything worse than a household of sick kids, it's a household with sick kids and a sick mom, amirite?

So here's how I tend to handle celebratory occasions:

• Skip it. Simple - enjoy other foods present (and if you're low-carbing, go for cheese, nuts, coffee with half & half, etc.), or fast altogether.
  
  
• Enjoy a very small amount. If you consider this an occasion worth the cheat, eat one or two bites, very slowly, and then back away from the cake. I probably personally wouldn't do this with a gluten-based cake (wouldn't want to risk the digestive reaction) unless social circumstances all but dictated it, but I did it this way at my daughter's 4th birthday party -- she had a gluten-free marshmallow cake that we had special-ordered.
  
  
• Offer to make or buy a treat to bring. You could dig into any of the myriad paleo / primal friendly dessert recipes on the blogosphere. Most of them may not be low-carb, but you know what the ingredients are and can indulge knowing that you won't suffer as huge of a blood sugar surge that a trans-fat-iced Costco cake would give you. Even better? Bring some very dark chocolate, or a bowl of fresh berries and some unsweetened (or stevia-sweetened) whipped cream - all delicious and fairly low-carb!
  

How do you deal with your frequent special occasions while keeping on track for your weight loss goals?

Lunchbox #65

Today, my preschooler's lunch featured (clockwise):

• Dark chocolate dipped strawberries
• Fresh blueberries
• Kerrygold Dubliner
• Baby carrots

~

Menu Plan

Here we go, here we go! :)

Monday:
Breakfast - Chicken cooked overnight from the crockpot
Lunch - Queso omelette with guacamole
Dinner - More leftover chicken with broth, baby carrots

Tuesday:
Breakfast - Bacon, eggs (plus blueberries for my girls)
Lunch - Salmon with mixed greens
Dinner - Chicken brats with butter cream sauce, asparagus

Wednesday:
Breakfast - Ham and cheese quiche
Lunch - Fasting perhaps, or creamed coffee
Dinner - Pork sausage with Trader Joe's vodka sauce and spaghetti squash

Thursday:
Breakfast - Mashed boiled eggs
Lunch - Banana cream protein smoothie (I get around carby bananas by using banana extract instead)
Dinner - Braised beef short ribs, coconut lime veggie stir fry

Friday:
Breakfast - Whole fat yoghurt sweetened with liquid whole leaf stevia
Lunch - Leftover short ribs
Dinner - Leftovers, or maybe going out

Charmed Inspiration

Nicely matches my itty bitty sample from Crisco..

I have met so many cool and colorful personalities in the online primal / paleo world. One such gal, whom I've mentioned before, is now in maintenance after 6 years spent dropping 111+ lb. - and she is a working mother, to boot!

She didn't do it all as a paleo eater - but she went paleo to drop the last few body fat percentage points, and now she is a ripped triathlete!

I am always so impressed by her dedication, her persistence, her sheer chutzpah.

She's given me a lot of advice (at my request!) about exercise and food journaling, which has been so helpful. One day on PaleoHacks she mentioned that she had a kettlebell necklace. I, of course, being obsessed with charm jewelry, added a comment to that thread asking where she found such a piece of jewelry. She had found them on Etsy for a steal - and had actually bought quite a few with friends in mind over the holidays.

Long story short, just a short time later, I was opening my mailbox to find a small envelope containing not one, but FOUR of these adorable teeny tiny pewter kettlebell charms, which are smaller - about the size of a pencil's eraser. I soon came to the conviction that I wouldn't wear any of them until I met some mini weight loss goals - which I then proceeded to set for myself.

Last week I hit the first minigoal - 1/4 of the way through my overarching goal! I was so stoked to put on my single bitty bell. It's a great reminder to me of this gal's surprising, touching gesture of support - and that if she did accomplished her truly huge (pun not really intended) feat, then my more modest feat can be tackled, too!

Submit Your Links and Lunchboxes to The Real Food Lunchbox Carnival!

I am so excited about this! The time has come for you to submit links to your blog post from the past week featuring a meal/(s) or snack/(s) that you packed for yourself or your loved ones. The linky will be open from 12:01 Friday morning until 11:59 p.m. Saturday night, so link up!

Also, in case of technical difficulties, please bear with me AND shoot me an email - this carnival is my first time using this linky partner, so I'm not certain of what to expect.

A reminder of The Real Food Lunchbox Carnival Guidelines:

• 

  Voila! The Real Food Lunchbox Carnival logo.
  Please be sure that when you add it,
  it links back to this carnival's label page!

  Feature The Real Food Lunchbox Carnival logo in your post  - and your logo should link back to that the Real Food Lunchbox Carnival label page, so that your readers can come to read the rest of the carnival for fresh inspiration, too!
  
  Grab the logo JPG right now if you like for your posts. It's available on Flickr; click the logo on the right and you will be able to pick up embeddable HTML under the "Share" tab.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Please link to your individual packed meal's post using a permalink, NOT a link to your blog's home page.
  
  
• One linked post submitted per blog per week.
  
  
• The packed/assembled meal or snack that you've chosen to link/feature for this carnival should be primal / paleo friendly. To simplify: no grains or refined sugars should take the spotlight in your linked/featured post, please!
  
  
• No recipes-only posts, please. The goal is to showcase how you've put together your packed meals and snacks! If a recipe is involved but still shows the end product of your packed/assembled meal or snack, that is OK.
  
  
• Your packed/assembled meal can be breakfast, lunch, dinner, or even a snack.
  
  
• When you link, please use this format to tell us what you've packed, and who you are!
  Subject (Blogger or Blog Name)
  
  
  Sample Format (as far as I know these blogs are fictitious):
  
  Chicken with Sweet Potato Fries and Dip! (Cro-Magnon)
  Grain-Free Breakfast Burrito On the Go (Grokerella)
  Paleo PB&J (Cave Kid at Heart)
  

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
These are just tips, not mandatory:

• A picture or pictures help your readers' frame of reference bigtime. A list of foods is kind of dry, but a close up or a few of your packed meal or snack is much likelier to capture readers' imagination. Plus, you get to add the picture's thumbnail to the linky below.
  
  
• Make it fun! Add some discussion in your post as to the meal's contents, or even explore whether the meal was a hit or a miss. (Yes, lunchbox fails are very much welcomed and even celebrated! Lessons learned make for great commiserative reading and fyi.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 ♥ Thanks so much for submitting a link! It makes my heart sing. :) ♥

Let me know if you have questions, comments, suggestions for the carnival! You can also email me at primalkitchen at gmail dot com.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Lunchbox #64

Today, my preschooler's lunch featured (clockwise):

• Shredded leftover roast beef
• Kerrygold Dubliner
• Chocolate banana pudding
• Baby carrots

~

Reminder: Real Food Lunchbox Carnival Open Friday and Saturday, So Post Your Packed Meals and Link Up!

A quick reminder: I'm going to post this coming weekend's edition of the Real Food Lunchbox Carnival tomorrow morning, and the linky widget in that post will be open for link submissions from 12:01 a.m. Friday through 11:59 p.m. Saturday night.

If you packed a paleo or primal meal or snack this week (main consideration: no grains or refined sugars showcased, please!), copy your post's permalink and add it via the linky widget so that readers can peruse the links over the weekend for packed meals and snacks inspiration! What a great way to introduce readers to your blog and spark new ideas about portable paleo / primal foods. :)

For more info about the Real Food Lunchbox Carnival, including the logo and guidelines about drafting your packed meal post, click here.