Week of April 21st

Last week! I am pretty happy with this process. Many times I get lazy and I am like oh I won't make the smoothie today but then I remember it is only another week, and that actually makes me continue. I am not sure why, but I guess it sets an end to it, it is not like if I don't do it know I will do it later. I want to do it this month, so I should do it.

The smoothie plan went very well, I changed a lot of recipes, specially I mostly used orange juice instead of almond milk. One thing I learned about smoothies, at least the type I like, is you can combine any combination of milk/juice, fruits, banana, nuts, sesame seeds, yogurt and honey and the result is usually satisfactory. So I am not posting any recipes because that is actually what I did last week.

For the meals, I will have the following plan (some days repeated because I am making more than one serving)
1- Ashe Jo
2- Stuffed peppers and tomatoes: the stuffing is brown/wild rice, herbs, lentil, tomato sauce
3- Chicken Salad

Week of April 14th

Last week was good, but I need to reduce the nuts amount. They give me canker sores. We have this notion of 'garmi' (which literally means something hot) and 'sardi' (which literally means something cold) in Iranian old medicine, and surprisingly it is very common even nowadays. Ask any Iranian born and raised in Iran about if something is hot or cold, and most probably they will know what you are talking about. All said, nuts are considered very hot, and apparently my body does not like it. So I need some cold meals to balance everything. Examples of cold ingredients are watermelon and barley. To get rid of the sores, I am trying a lot of watermelons in my smoothies, and I will also have barley soup.

Here is the smoothie plan:

1. Watermelon Smoothie
2. Watermelon Smoothie and Strawberries
3. Berry and Watermelon (without cinnamon which is hot)
4. Mango, Berry and Banana
5. Banana - Oat Smoothie

Here is the lunch plan:

1. Tahchin
2. Salad Olivieh
3. Soy Marinated Chicken
4. Chicken Vesuvio
5. Cesar Salad

Week of April 8th

This is a quick post, just to say last week was good, I really liked the smoothies. Here is the plan for next week:

1. protein packed blackberry smoothie
2. strawberry smoothie
3. cantaloupe smoothie
4. berry watermelon smoothie
5. Banana-Mango smoothie

Here is the lunch plan:

1. Barberry Rice with Chicken
2. Peri-Peri Chicken
3. Jooje-Kabab (from last week)
4. Vegetarian Loobia Polo (Green beans with Rice)
5. Vegetarian adas Polo (Lentil with Rice) 

Week of April 1st

Here is the Smoothies' plan of the week:

1. Oatmeal & Strawberry Breakfast Smoothie Recipe
2. Persian Smoothie Majoon
3. Banana-Oat Smoothie 
4. Nicole Scherzinger's Blueberry-Flaxseed Shake

I am not working on Monday(Easter holiday), so it is a 4 day plan. We will see what happens.

Here is the lunch plan:

1. Jerk Chicken with Tabooleh Salad
2. Kashk'e Bademjan
3. Tuna and Quinoa Salad
4. Marinated Chicken Persian Style: I will be using this recipe without the rice.

Smoothies

I love having breakfast, but in the meantime I love my morning sleep. Therefore, nowadays my breakfast is having cereal and soy milk/milk at work. Now, cereals are not that good for me because they make me feel bloated. To have my morning sleep, and still have a fast and healthy breakfast I thought of having smoothies every day. It is easy to make, and I can bring it to work in a container even if I don't have time to drink it at home. Like the first month I will write about the recipes for the week here. The only difference is this time, I also will prepare the recipes ingredients in small ziploc bags, and will freeze them. This way it would be harder to get lazy in the mornings.

End of First Month

Last week was the last week for my every day salad for lunch plan. It was a pretty good week, here is what happened:

1. Sprouts Salad: This was very similar to Salad Shirzi. I think because of the cucumber/tomato combination in both of these. 
2. Chicken Celery Salad I replaced the mayo with plain yogurt, and only added half a table spoon mayo. Also, I added some parsely. It turned out very good.
3. Wild Rice Salad This one was both yummy and filling. I added brown rice instead of long rice and boiled the wild rice as it is explained here.
4. Chopped Greek Salad with Chicken A very normal greek salad.
5. Green Salad With Dried Figs and Nuts  I didn't find time to prepare the ingredients. I had a green salad with chicken.

I am happy with the whole experience. It makes it easier for me to overcome laziness when I come home from work. I will continue doing the same, but this time I will not restrict myself to salads. I will try to write the plans here. For the next month I have a new challenge in mind. I will write about it in the next post.

Week of March 25th

Considering everything that happened, last week was a success. I ended up not having lunch at work for two days, so it remained 3 lunches. Here is what happened:

1. Wild Rice Salad I didn't go to work, and I actually ended up not having lunch at all.
2. Persian Cucumber Yogurt (Mast-o-Khiar) This was super yummy, I had it with stuffed bell peppers persian style (kind of like this one). My favorite dish of the week.
3. Quinoa Tabouleh This was super good, but I got hungry very soon.
4. Mango Blueberry Quinoa Salad I  liked this one as well, I have come to the understanding that berries make salads super yummy.

Next week is the last week of my challenge to have salad everyday at work. Because I missed some recipes during last weeks, and due to the mere fact that I am lazy to search for other recipes while those ones haven't been used yet, the next week plan is a mixture of new recipes and old ones. My friend asked me how I choose the salads. It is based on what I feel like having on Sundays (which is my grocery shopping day) and what I have in the fridge, and of course Google. I google the ingredients and if I find the recipe appealing to my taste, I add it to the list. The issue with this approach is, you might not still feel the desire to have what you wanted on a Sunday during the week. But that is the best I can do for now, otherwise if I don't plan ahead most probably I will end up having mall food every day.

Here is the plan for next week:

1. Sprouts Salad
2. Chicken Celery Salad
3. Wild Rice Salad
4. Chopped Greek Salad with Chicken
5. Green Salad With Dried Figs and Nuts

I am not sure if we have this Friday off or next Monday for Easter. If the Friday is off, then it would be a 4 day week. We will see.