Some of you know that Chelsea and her family do a 21 day Daniel Fast at the beginning of each year. Since I’m the primary ‘cooker’ in the family, I decided to support them and join in. Basically the food goal is to eliminate processed foods, sugars, and meat and dairy. In addition, this is a period of reflection and allowing God to come into our lives through fasting and prayer. This is new to me as we never practiced a regular ‘religion’ although I do believe in a higher spirit and find there are many things that can’t be explained by science… But that is for another time and place 😉

I don’t do well with diets, never have… However, now that I’m gluten free and I try to be dairy free, I thought this would be a piece of cake to stick with it. The nice thing is that we’re not limited to specific quantities of foods, which drives me crazy and I don’t have the patience to measure, weigh, calculate calories etc that goes into all of that. In addition, I’m a grazer, so I want to eat when I want to eat, simple as that.

We have some standard recipes that they use each year, and to be honest, I wasn’t over the moon about trying some of them, but the first week I went along with the prepping. We had some great successes and some “meh” meals. What I’ve discovered during the second week is that there are a lot more choices than I realized, and even some of the items I normally would not have paired together really enhance each other.

Do not try to get fancy, this diet is for sustenance and not satisfying any cravings. That said, making my own almond flour tortillas and chips was fun and I love the fact that if I want to have chips and hummus, I can 🙂 I haven’t really missed the meat, I was thinking that I would, but I am missing the dairy a bit, no butter, sour cream, and my favorite topping, cheese. The other item I miss is eggs, I’m a huge breakfast person and could eat eggs daily. This has been a great lesson in experimenting with different breakfasts, I’m loving the home-fries that Chelsea makes! Otherwise, I’m eating non-dairy yogurt with homemade granola with some cayenne pepper, it’s really yummy! My banana bread missed the mark greatly, but to be fair, we only tried one recipe, and for me, without the butter, I can do without it.

Tonight we had Moroccan Baked sweet potatoes. Both adults loved it and the seven year old ate most of his. The two year old didn’t love it, but that was more for us 🙂 This is one of the easiest meals we’ve had and very satisfying! We made our own spice mix and the yogurt drizzle to put on top, definitely adding to the regular menu.

More to come! Enjoy your Sunday and I hope you get to spend it with those you love.