JERF meal plan - the first fortnight

Our meal plan for the first fortnight in June is a fairly simple one - but I think simplicity is best when it comes to making over our eating habits. I've listed the breakfasts, dinners and snacks below - with links to recipes where possible. As I mentioned in my previous post - we tend to eat leftovers for lunch, so I won't list the lunches separately.

Breakfasts:

Homemade muesli with coconut yoghurt*

Egg and bacon cups** (Sophie Guidolin My Kids Eat)

Baked beans** with avo and feta

Peanut butter chocolate oats (Sophie Guidolin My Kids Eat)

Healthy banana bread*

Porridge

Spelt pancakes

Big breakfast (bacon, eggs, homemade hash browns, mushrooms and grilled tomatoes)

Granola bars* (Sophie Guidolin My Kids Eat)

Dinners:

Hungarian goulash* with broth steamed greens

Chicken stew (Jamie Oliver Save With Jamie) with spelt challah

Preservative free sausages with mash and greens

Poached eggs in broth with greens

Lettuce burgers* (Pete Evans Family Food - Joy burgers patty recipe) with sweet potato chips 

Butter chicken* with cauli rice and veges

Spelt pizza* with salad

Silverside with mash and veges

Spicy BBQ chicken

Meatballs* with zoodles

Pumpkin soup*

Popcorn chicken (Sophie Guidolin My Kids Eat)

Grainfree lasagne (Quirky Cooking Cookbook)

Snacks:

Spelt banana muffins*

Corn fritters*

Choc zucchini muffins* (for this recipe, I switch out the flour for wholemeal and the sugar for rapadura and drop the quantity to 100-150g)

Vegetable chips

Pizza scrolls* 

Peppermint slice

Vege sticks with tzatziki/hommus

Carrot cake* (Sophie Guidolin My Kids Eat)

Chickpea brownies* (Sophie Guidolin My Kids Eat)

Arrowroot biscuits (I swap out the sugar for rapadura and use spelt or wholemeal flour in place of plain)

Crackers

*All these recipes can be made ahead and frozen. This definitely helps when packing lunchboxes or on busy weeknights.

**These recipes can be made 2-3 days ahead and kept in the fridge. 

Hopefully there are some ideas here to help fill out your meal plan.

Getting prepped - countdown to Monday

Ok. Monday is D day (or is it J day?). You've got this weekend to get prepped to give yourself the best chance possible in succeeding at #JERFinJune. Here's a quick checklist to help you prepare.

Have you:

• planned your meals for the next week (or fortnight or month)
• shopped for delicious, fresh, real ingredients
• cleared out your fridge and pantry of all not so real food 
• thought about condiments and spreads (will you not eat them, buy alternatives or make your own)
• prepared and frozen a couple of enticing meals for those nights when things go awry and you CBF (tip: make sure these meals are something you really enjoy so you aren't still tempted by takeaway)
• prepared some yummy wholefood snacks for the week ahead
• precut your veges (and any fruit that needs it - I'm looking at you pineapple!) to make them an easier to grab option 
• stocked your freezer with frozen fruit for juice and smoothies
• got yourself into the mindset of nourishing your body?

Honestly, depending on your diet until now, the first week in June is going to suck. I suspect I'll be enduring some killer sugar withdrawal headaches and some mad chocolate cravings. There are three things that will get me through - delicious snack alternatives that will take the edge off, bucket loads of lemon water to flush toxins and the knowledge that I'm making better food choices for my body and my family. Stick with it, with me and the community of JERFers we have on Facebook, and we'll all feel better for it.

Feel free to post questions or let us know how your JERF journey is going throughout the month on our FB page and we'll do our best to support you through it.

Good luck my fellow JERFers. Let's #JERFinJune :) 

Getting prepped - cleaning out the pantry

They say at the start of any change in habit or challenge it's important to take away the temptation to maximise your chances of success. For JERF in June that includes clearing out the pantry of any sneaky processed foods that have crept in.

Now, I thought we were a family that ate relatively well and limited our processed foods, but...this is the before shot.


After spending a good hour or so clearing out items that didn't fit with my real food mantra, this is what I have left.

Bit of a difference! (Plus, wow, how easy is it to find everything now!!)

I really dislike waste, so I haven't thrown out the food that we won't be eating in June, I've stored it in a plastic tub so I can see how we feel at the end of the 30 days. Some foods may be reintroduced as a once a month/fortnight type splurge for the kids - things like the Weetbix and rice crackers. This is how full the tub is...

All this left me thinking about pantry staples for wholefood eating. 

In my pantry I have the following left:

- tinned tomatoes

- various tinned beans (mixed, cannellini, kidney, butter beans and chickpeas)

- coconut cream and coconut milk 

- tahini

- tinned corn (I've left this at the pleas of my son - but once it's gone, I won't be restocking)

- tomato paste (homemade and 100% tomato store bought)

- various homemade jams and marmalades (made with rapadura sugar)

- spelt flour

- wholemeal flour (to be used very rarely)

- brown rice flour

- bicarb soda

- baking powder

- rapadura

- maple syrup

- honey

- lots and lots and lots of herbs and spices 

- rock salt

- organic brown rice

- popcorn kernels

- homemade vanilla extract

- sunflower seeds

- pepitas

- flaxseeds

- sesame seeds

- cacao butter

- various dried fruits (organic where possible) 

- buckwheat

- oats

- lots and lots of shredded/desiccated coconut

- coconut oil

- olive oil

- macadamia oil

- a whole variety of nuts (walnuts, almonds and cashews are my basics, but I love to have macadamias and hazelnuts on hand too)

- quinoa

- chia seeds.

What I noticed I was missing from my pantry with the clean out were some of my homemade condiments - peanut butter, tomato sauce and bbq sauce. They've slowly been replaced with the store bought "easier" options. I'll need to get started on those this week so we've got some on hand once the June starts. More about those later this week though.

Tomorrow's job is to clean out the fridge.  

What are your pantry staples? 

Getting prepped - my favourite recipe inspirations

While one part of the key to successfully making real food choices is preparation, I often think the other part is in making real food more appealing. For me, part of that is about shifting my mindset. Years of making poor food choices have left me with a ridiculous sweet tooth and senses that need the flavour to be bursting off the plate to entice me away from processed options. 

With access to the Internet there are thousands of real food meal ideas out there to inspire you to make some interesting meals, but sometimes it's really a case of trial and error to see what will make the kids flip and what will be a flop. 

I don't know about everyone else, but the last thing I want to deal with is a flop on a busy work night where the kids refuse to eat dinner. I refuse to force my kids to eat food they genuinely don't like (I'm fussier than both of them so I don't think it's fair to enforce a take it or leave it approach) so meals that are sure fire winners are a necessity.

I get my inspiration from both hard cover cookbooks (who doesn't love flipping through the glossy photos) and online. Some of my favourite cookbooks and websites are:

• Quirky Cooking (both the blog and the cookbook)
• Pete Evans' Family Food
• Skinnymixers 
• Nourish by Lorna Jane Clarkson
• Well Nourished 
• 100 days of real food
• Wholefood Simply 

These books and sites are full of tried and tested recipes that produce delicious meals and snacks that my family adore. 

My lovely friend Lena has also recently pointed me to My Kids Eat by Sophie Guidolin so expect to see me trying some of her recipes over the coming month. :) 

What are your favourite recipe inspirations? 

Getting prepped for JERF in June - meal planning

As a busy working mum, meal planning is critical in our household. It saves the afternoon dilemma of "what's for dinner", the mid meal preparation freak-out of a missing ingredient and the realisation that your dinner is going to be on the table well after the kids' bedtimes.

When we first set up as a family, our pays were done fortnightly, so we meal planned (and shopped) fortnightly. Though many things have changed since my husband and I moved in together, this pattern has remained consistent. 

So, every second Thursday night, in preparation for a Friday shop, we sit down with our recipe books and our meal planning template and fill out any upcoming activities for the fortnight, expected late nights and days when we know we'll be too exhausted to cook.

Then we look at our freezer for any pre-prepared meals, leftover meats from the last fortnight and any other bits and bobs that could be used to make a meal. Then we plan...

As a family, we tend to only eat chicken, beef and vegetarian dishes (with the occasional fish based meal for my husband and the kids), and Sundays are a good night for a roast or silverside. 

I work from home Tuesdays and Wednesdays so I tend to choose Thermomix meals that I can make during my "lunch break" at home. Mondays and Thursdays are meals that are either from the slow cooker (in winter), from the freezer, prepped the day before, or breakfast for dinner. Friday nights we do "fake away" - homemade takeaway options - sometimes Indian, Chinese, burgers with sweet potato chips, etc. 

Knowing that pattern we plan our dinners. 90 per cent of our lunches are leftovers from dinner the night before, so that just leaves breakfasts and snacks. My lovely children tend to prefer a cooked breakfast so most of the time they'll have an omelette, scrambled eggs, or dippy eggs with soldiers. They're also fond of my healthy spelt banana bread or breakfast muffins for variety. A and I tend to stick with my homemade muesli (recipe to come) or Quirky Jo's buckwheat cereal.

Snacks are usually fruit and vegetable based, with all muffins and other carby snacks still including at least 1-2 serves of fruit or veges. The kids get 2 pieces of fruit, 1 sweet snack and 1 savoury snack in their lunch box, as well as yoghurt and their lunch. 

I'll share the family's meal plan for next fortnight (starting next weeked) over the coming week. 

What is JERF?

JERF is about Just Eating Real Food. 

In today’s society it is all too easy, too convenient and too cheap to choose things that we think are “healthy options”. After all they’re low calorie/low fat/paleo/whatever the latest food trend is. And it’s all too confusing to find what is really a healthy option. But by choosing to just eat real food – to JERF – you are choosing food that hasn’t been highly processed, that doesn’t come with a set of numbers in the ingredient list, that doesn’t have the potential myriad of effects on your body. You are choosing to fuel your body straight from the source. 

There are some competing ideas about what constitutes “real food”, but to my mind, real food is:

• fruit and vegetables
• meat, chicken and fish – preferably grass fed and finished for the beef, hormone and antibiotic free for the chicken and wild caught for the fish
• nuts and seeds
• whole grains – quinoa, whole grain rice, barley, oats, buckwheat, etc
• legumes – beans, lentils, chickpeas, etc
• dairy (in limited quantities) – yoghurt, cheese, milk
• eggs
• natural sugars (in very limited quantities) – coconut sugar, honey, maple syrup
• water, juices (natural and not reconstituted), smoothies, teas, etc.

It is food that is an ingredient, not a food made of ingredients. It is food that will fuel your body, regulate your mood and improve your brain function. 

So, I’m in to JERF in June. 

I want to track my moods, how I feel, and my energy levels and share them with you. I want to share my hints and tips for staying organised and keeping on track to JERF in June (and beyond). 

I will share how I keep real food on the table for my family, around all the obstacles of working full-time and keeping my house on track. I’ll share links to delicious recipes and meal planning ideas. 

I’d love for people to join in the challenge and find some inspiration to ditch some of the overly processed “food” we eat and choose more natural options. 

I’m no saint, and certainly no stranger to eating less than stellar food choices (McDonalds, M&Ms, Dairy Milk, anyone?) but I’m committing to make real choices for June, to see and highlight the benefits and to try to make some new, better habits.

So, will you join me and JERF in June?