real food challenge week 3

We’re three weeks into our real food challenge!  This whole thing has gone much easier and quicker than I expected, and we are both so pleased.  Here are some of the things we’ve eaten this week:

After we ate up all our refried beans from last week, we then turned our extra tortillas and the chicken we had left from our first whole chicken cooking experience into chicken quesadillas, topped with our homemade salsa.  So yummy!

Some meals we just have veggie plates like this lunch one day: boiled okra, cucumbers with homemade ranch dip, roasted rosemary potatoes, green beans, and tomatoes

hardboiled eggs are a great snack

We decided to buy another chicken at the Farmer’s Market this week, but rather than cooking it on the stove like we did with our last one, we cooked it in the crock pot (using this recipe).  It was incredible!  It was really easy (other than the touching the raw chicken part…thankfully Michael did that part for me).  Once you put the spices on it then you just let it cook in the crock pot and after about four hours it will literally just fall right off the bone.  And it was wonderfully delicious!

We ate the chicken with corn, squash, and zucchini

Fresh watermelon – finally!  I’ve been looking at the Farmer’s Market every week and they finally had some this week.  It was tasty and sweet.

Speaking of the Farmer’s Market, Michael suggested that I show you what all we bought yesterday so you can get an idea of what our grocery shopping looks like each week.  Most Saturdays we go to the Farmer’s Market, Jackon’s Orchard, and then to Kroger to get whatever we couldn’t find at the first two places.

Left (Kroger): yogurt, bananas, peanut butter, mixed greens, mozzarella cheese, parmesan cheese, and pasta

Middle (Jackson’s Orchard): watermelon, apples, peaches, blueberries, and okra

Right (Farmer’s Market): corn, banana peppers, cheddar cheese, blackberries, watermelon, tomatoes, squash, potatoes, (not pictured: whole chicken)

also not pictured: milk (from a local dairy, purchased at the gas station by our apartment)

 I also usually go to the Farmer’s Market on Tuesdays to get anything we forgot, couldn’t find on Saturday, or have run out of since Saturday.  We also usually have to make at least one other Kroger trip during the week (mostly for bananas – we go through them like crazy!)

After we got home from all our grocery shopping yesterday, we went ahead and cooked a bunch of stuff for the upcoming week.

Michael made another batch of whole wheat biscuits

I tried out a new recipe: whole wheat blueberry muffins.  We loved them!  They are so so good!

I made another loaf of sandwich bread – third time’s a charm because this loaf turned out so much better than my first two attempts!

One of the biggest problems I’ve had since we started this challenge is keeping our bread fresh.  We’ve had to throw away sandwich bread, zucchini muffins, and biscuits due to mold.  It is so frustrating after I spend a good chunk of time cooking all this break to have to throw it away.  I hadn’t been keeping it in the fridge because we have a very small fridge and it was stuffed to the brim with other things that had to be refrigerated, so I just left the bread out and hopped for the best.  This week, I finagled some things around to make sure everything we baked yesterday could go in the fridge.  I’m crossing my fingers that we won’t have to throw away any bread this week!

If you want to see what other things we’ve been eating, check out week 1 and week 2.  Want to know what this whole crazy thing is about?  Look here for the scoop.