Going clean was a little harder than expected, but it was well worth the work.
I love to cook, and coming off the holidays full of baking, drinking, and merriment, I needed a fresh start. Call it cliché, but I wanted to realign myself for a great year, and eating right was the best way to do it.
Enter BuzzFeed’s 2016 seven-day clean eating challenge. The “healthy eating bootcamp” — which is easy to follow even for beginner chefs — has everything you need, including photos, videos, printable recipes, and a complete shopping list. Below are my tips and photos, though I didn’t remember to snap every item. Some were just too good to wait!
I hope you get the chance to give this a try, and here’s to a fun 2016!
Emily Jasper / Via Instagram: @emilymj6
Day One: Sunday
The challenge really starts on Saturday with the shopping, but Sunday is a cooking day. Here are some things you should do to start the week off right:
* Read everything. You may need to adjust your schedule a bit to keep up with the cooking, such as moving some of the preparation around. If I hadn’t read ahead, I wouldn’t have been able to complete everything without some very late nights.
* Get your cooking appliances situated. I forgot I had a small food processor until Wednesday. It definitely would have come in handy earlier in the week.
* Buy mint and lemon. You drink a lot of water during the week, and if you’re not used to it, this will help you jazz it up a bit.
* Empty your dishwasher. There are SO many dishes. Just be prepared.
* Spring for the pomegranate seeds. I bought a whole pomegranate, but it was past ripe. Go ahead and splurge on the already-separated seeds.
Emily Jasper / Via Instagram: @emilymj6
Day Two: Monday
It was super helpful that the challenge accounted for people’s work schedules, and all my coworkers started to be curious. It ended up being helpful knowing they’d want to see the food all week.
* Plan breakfast. This is the only weekday breakfast I had to cook at home. Give yourself time if you usually eat at the office.
* It’s OK if you don’t finish each portion. This surprised me, but I didn’t finish breakfast or the evening snack. And I didn’t have time for the afternoon snack, but I wasn’t hungry. These are filling meals.
* Keep the pumpkin bark in the freezer. Since I had only a small amount, I put all the remaining bark back in the freezer. That way, I could grab it any time.
Emily Jasper / Via Instagram: @emilymj6
Day Three: Tuesday
The stuffed acorn squash impressed everybody at lunch.
* Soak the soup. Tuesdays are usually busy, so I actually prepped everything for the soup on Monday, let it cool in the pot, and then put the pot in the fridge. It was so easy to blend and reheat when I was home, I could actually sit down for dinner and enjoy it.
* Throw the remaining proteins in the freezer. This applied to the ground turkey for Sunday and the tempeh for Tuesday. I now have them handy for meals in the future.
* Try new spices. I have a lot of spices on hand, so getting the most out of a curry powder purchase wasn’t something I worried about. My boss gave me a Za'atar spice blend for Christmas, so that went in the soup. Awesome.
Emily Jasper / Via Instagram: @emilymj6
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