Eating Explorations

It's time to start our next diet, and this one, I'm hoping anyway, will be amazing! I've been waiting for about 4 months to start this one, and am so excited to bring all the information I've been collecting about it all this time to you all. China is a fascinating place when it comes to food. So much of what we think of as "Chinese food" doesn't even really come from China - at least, not the natural elements that make up the country's culinary wonderment. And so many things that we think don't come from China, actually do. Now, because there are so many things that don't come from the country, I had to take some liberties, and again, am only using ingredients that have been available to the people of that native land for several centuries. Let's put it this way, if something I look up online, and I discover was brought to China in the 1600s, I dismiss that as being "too recent". This being said, everything that I will be eating ...

  Week 4 is officially over, and I won't lie...I was kind of bad... So, I'm just going to come right out and say it: work has been stressful. And I'm not really one to stress-eat...but sometimes it's nice to have some chocolate or a drink to calm my nerves. This happened once last week, Friday as you'll recall, I stopped to have a drink at a bar. No biggie. Especially since I didn't even finish the glass of wine. But this last week of the French Polynesian Diet, I ended up having another drink at lunch two days before my official cheat day. Yes, it was a cheat. But, a much needed one, and it was good. And, even more importantly, I didn't cheat on the food at the restaurant. But we'll get to that momentarily. First, let's go through my final week of the diet, day by day and assess everything I had... Day 1: Breakfast were 3 (picture was taken after the first one was eaten) of the left over macaroons I'd made the day before Lunch consisted of sweet...

  Well, week 2 is over and now it's onto week 3 - because that's how math works. Week 3 will be fairly boring, not going to lie, but it will also be very healthy  - or at least I'm hoping it will be. Most everything that I'm eating this week has been prepared in advance, and I have come up with this neat little trick in the past couple of weeks that's worked really well for me. So on Fridays, before I go grocery shopping, I plan out the entire upcoming week of meals, and mark them down on a list that keep in a kitchen. That way when I'm getting ready to leave home in the morning, I know exactly what to pack for myself and exactly what to make the night before for lunch, and in turn what to cook for dinner that night - if I even need to cook. It has proved to be quite useful and beyond helpful to me throughout the week. Makes things so much easier and that way I'm not scrambling each day and evening to know what to make. That having been said, sometimes I hav...