Making this Real Life

I spent the first three or four days after the Paleo challenge trying to enjoy my old food favorites. I was surprised to find out they weren’t really all that great. Not surprised to find out it’s difficult to digest a bunch of crappy food after 30 days of real food…. but I digress….

The last post had hundreds of views. Seriously. Like more than 700. I had a lot of emails and messages about what my daily Paleo menu looks like. I think I’m going to attempt to keep my blog updated with what our family menus look like. Maybe it will make a Paleo attempt seem more realistic for the people who are on the edge or maybe just prove a point for those who are skeptical.

Typically, our day starts with eggs and some kind of veggies, but sometimes I get an urge to bake something for breakfast. Yesterday, I took my kindergarteners on a field trip to a strawberry farm, so I came home with tons of fresh strawberries. I can only eat so many plain strawberries, so I started looking for Paleo strawberry muffins. I’m in love with paleOMG.com, and I think the author, Juli, and I could be friends. I used a recipe I found there for muffins.

Juli posted a recipe last spring for Strawberry, Banana & Chocolate Chip Muffins. Here’s how I tweaked the recipe to make it work for the Garlands….

•   I used crunchy almond butter (because I love it and had plenty in the fridge) in place of sunflower butter

•  I didn’t have flaxseed meal, so I put some chia seeds in the food processor to make a “meal” with those.

•  Chia seeds tend to soak up any extra moisture in a recipe… so I had to add about 1/3 cup of almond milk to the recipe to keep it at a muffin-batter texture. 

The muffins turned out great. I know it can be scary to experiment with these recipes, but if you don’t have an ingredient on the list, it’s okay to find a way to make it work. You can’t be afraid to try. You will probably mess up along the way, but we all learn from mistakes, right?!?! It may not always turn out the way you plan (ask Jamie about my apple-cinnamon muffins from two weeks ago--- gag). But, you won’t learn anything from buying those 600-calorie muffins at the store.