Friday, October 21, 2011

whole30, day fourteen

Today's end will mark two full weeks of the Whole30, and tomorrow's the half-way point. I watch for mileage signs, land marks, even small groups of trees when I travel. I know it makes me an annoying travel companion, but it's not truly voluntary. I do the same thing in the kitchen. If I'm cleaning shrimp or trimming asparagus, I count and calculate each step of the way. How many so far? How many more to go? What percentage is that now? and now? and now? Weird, definitely, though since I live with it, I don't always notice. I seem to have to have markers to cope. Period.

My counting down of these thirty days, playing with the ratios, is not a reflection of its complexity or my struggle. It is not complex, and I am not struggling. This is simply what I do. And today is Day 14 of 30. And mostly this is fun. There is something strangely exciting about it. In many ways this plan could be said to be limiting. Whole groups of seemingly edible items are excluded. Yes, I'm weird, but that's half the fun of it. The other half is the wonderful foods we're eating. (For the time being, I'm leaving all the health benefits out of this equation.) Real food. Real meats, fish, and poultry. Real vegetables. Real fruit. Real fat.

This combination is hard to fault, in my opinion. Speaking solely as an uncredentialed consumer in the field of food and health, eating real food just makes sense to me. Speaking as one who lives to cook and eat (only a slight exaggeration there,) real food just tastes good and makes for lots of fun in the kitchen. Wellness Meats has been one of our favorite sources for a lot of that food for several years, since my sister, Bev, introduced me to them. Over the years, we've tried all kinds of different products and loved most of them. (I must confess, I am not a fan of beef bacon.) One thing I love about Wellness Meats is that you can order very small quantities if you'd just like to try something or large packages if you know you love it. So often ordering items to be shipped means you have to commit to a very large quantity. That's fine if you know you love it, but if you aren't sure, then not so much.

One thing that's been on my wish list and made it in and out of my online shopping cart is beef tallow. When I was a child, my mother preferred beef tallow for use in her deep fryer, though we usually rendered it ourselves. That fryer's primary purpose was fresh French Fries, and beef tallow made them crisp and flavorful. We each got our own "batch" which consisted of a whole large potato. I don't eat potatoes much anymore, certainly not while doing the Whole30, but the memories are great.  I haven't used it in years and want to give it a shot. Problem is what size to order. Being rather frugal, I can't help but notice the very large tub is much less per ounce than the little guy. Having gone through several waves of trying to find which foods work best for my body and its silly issues, I've already ordered enough jumbo containers of foods I no longer eat. I'm more timid now. So I was quite delighted to see a new offer, a sweepstakes, from Kelly the Kitchen Kop and cosponsored by Wellness Meats with a large tub of coveted beef tallow as the prize. Check this out at win wellness meats beef tallow $100 value.

Of course, I may just have to break down and order some soon.

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