the fresh 20

unlike the freshman 15, The Fresh 20 is not about weight gain.  it's an online meal plan that i recently heard about from alyssa.  she'd been following the plan for 3 weeks and was describing how she logs in each friday to get the next week's meal plan complete with shopping list and prep guide.  my first question was, "why would you pay for that when you could just create your own mealplan for free?"  well, it's $5 a month - $1.25 per week's meal plans essentially.  and the more she talked about the pros, the more i was intrigued.  because though i say, "why not do it for free yourself?", i've been TALKING about meal planning for about 2 years now and have not done it once.  well, that's not true - one time i sat down to do it and realized that i dislike most of the meals that i even make.

i signed up THAT night.  and our lives have completely changed for the better.

okay - that sounds so dramatic but i'm completely serious.  i make meals that have a only a handful of ingredients.  is there a spice in the recipe?  if it's not already in my pantry, i skip it.  onions and garlic?  i don't need to put those in since i don't like onions and that garlic smell stays with me for days.  fancy ingredients?  that recipe is not for me (see proof here).  and half the days of the week, i forget to thaw the meat so i don't want to make dinner.  or i let meat go bad in my fridge - a serious waste of food.  essentially, i hate making dinner but i do want to eat.

enter The Fresh 20. 20 is the number of ingredients that you need to buy for the week (though there are 20 pantry staples that they assume you have on hand).  they incorporate seasonal fruits and veggies so that you don't have to break the bank to buy asparagus in the middle of winter or something like that.  also, while there is always one fish recipe (good for your brain!), they give you an idea for a substitute if you're anti-fish.  (but we love fish and just didn't know how to cook it differently)  then, they give you a prep guide so that you can chop all the veggies or cook all the rice or quinoa that you'll need that week and store it til you're ready for it.  easy to do on a saturday or sunday afternoon.  the meal plans are enough for 4 which is great for us because that means leftovers for tim's lunch the next day.

  i got my first week's shopping list and it looked fairly straightforward.  it took me awhile in the store to find all the right ingredients but my shopping was done for the week!  meal #1, make bbq chicken (in the oven), then save half of it in a container for meal #3.  i probably used more spices this first week than in all my years of making dinner combined.  the first meal was bbq chicken with a warm corn orzo pasta salad.  it was awesome.  there was also salmon in there and there always seems to be one vegetarian meal on the last meal of the week (because how long is that meat going to stay good in your fridge, right?).


 then week 2 - kind of a mexican theme to the week (because if two of your 20 ingredients are black beans and tortillas, more than one meal needs to use those) and it looks a little harder.  in fact, the first meal had tomatillos in it.  i didn't even know what tomatillos were.   my initial feeling to this first recipe (chicken chili verde) was that i didn't want to make it BUT i needed half of the chili to add to my mexican lasagna on meal #3 so i googled a photo and went to find them at the grocery store.  for the chicken chili verde, i had to fry the whole tomatillos, chunks of onion, and garlic in olive oil then BLEND them in a BLENDER until smooth.  this is WAY too hard for the likes of me.  but i did it.  and it worked.  and it actually wasn't that hard at all.  a revelation!


week 3 was this past week.  an italian theme.  looking at the recipes, i was like, "i don't want to make any of these."  (creamy basil polenta with an italian sausage ragu, tilapia with red pepper, caper, and mushroom sauce with brown rice, turkey scallopini with ricotta and spinach linguini, etc)  Polenta?  that sounds awful.  red pepper, caper, and mushroom sauce?  yuck.  what is crazy is that i still went an bought the ingredients and made all the meals.  because The Fresh 20 had not yet let us down.  tim and i were loving the food and could not believe how good we'd been eating (the kids are a different story - after years of bland food, everything is too much flavour or strange looking).  AND while the polenta wasn't my favourite, it WAS edible with the ragu.  the tilapia with the pepper/caper/mushroom sauce was my favourite recipe that i have made so far.  The Frech 20 comes through again!

so yes - next week will be week 4 for me and i'm love love loving it.  that said, it's not as easy as i had first thought it to be.  the first week was easy enough but many recipes are very involved right before serving which is always hard with kids.  last night, i was boiling pasta, browning turkey cutlets, and trying to zest a lemon with avery hanging on my legs and ben rolling around on our teeny kitchen floor.  then i had to get the turkey off the pan, and cook red pepper, spinach, and garlic while making the ricotta sauce which was lots of measuring spices and squeezing lemon juice.  these things are definitely more difficult with the kids going squirely.  by the time i sat down to dinner, my pasta was cold and neither child would eat more than one bite.  so there's always those nights...HOWEVER, if i'm alone in the kitchen, most of the meals only take about 30 minutes to cook completely which is awesome.  it means that i can wait for tim to get home to hang out with the kids and still eat at a decent time.  we've been eating at 5:30pm most nights which gives us time for a walk to the park or to play with the kids before their bedtime at 7pm.  (and really, my kids didn't eat many of my old meals either.)

this week's menus includes Goat Cheese Stuffed Chicken Breasts with Roasted asparagus in balsamic brown butter and Spicy Mango Shrimp with coconut sauce and brown rice.  who knows?  after years of categorizing myself as a non-foodie, one of these days, i could surprise myself!

week 14

Please excuse the messy table around my book!  This is where my PL binder usually sits - at a skinny little table in our kitchen.  It makes for handy access when I want to work on it here and there throughout the week but it's often a big mess (much to tim's chagrin)!  

Don't forget to click on the pics to make them larger!  :)

 The floral date card has been a theme for the last couple weeks!  This week, I was aiming to try out a black and white theme but gray and pink snuck in there too.

A regular week.  I love that pic of the kids helping my mom make pizza in the top right.  Too cute.

All the black and white cards here are from the BH Seafoam edition - I bought a handful of cards from someone's kit.  I have instagram pics for both B&W cards but I have to wait until I have 25 instagrams before I can print them.  Those will be added later.  Some new black washi tape though - love that!

Again, waiting on an instagram for the black and white striped card but the floral will stay as is in an attempt to unify the layout!

On the bottom right photo, I worked and worked to make that photo work with some writing on it but it was such an unbelievably frustrating process getting to look "right" on ipiccy.com and then when I got it printed, it did not come out as expected.  I may change it but it's in there now to finish off the week!

That said, let's focus in on the bottom left picture of B doing sit ups.  There is a "work out" park right next to a playground at Mill Lake.  We went to the playground this day and all B wanted to do was "exercises" at the workout area.  I dragged A away from the swings so that I was close enough to watch B and A ended up loving running around in this area as well.  But seriously?  What 3 yr old wants to do exercises more than play at the playground?

the pour-over

confession: we've slowly but surely developed into coffee snobs over here our house.

5 years ago, i didn't drink coffee and neither did tim.  when B was born, we didn't OWN a coffee maker so we took an old one from a friend to have in our house when my mom stayed with us to help us with B.  and so began drinking it in the morning but tim wasn't totally on board - didn't really like the taste.  

i can't even really remember how it start but in the last year or so, tim started drinking starbucks and he put less and less cream and sugar in.  Then he started refusing the coffee that i was making at home.  "it's not strong enough" he'd say.  i bought the starbucks beans.  "this doesn't taste the same."  i cleaned the coffee maker with vinegar 3 times.  "it didn't help."  i continued to drink my coffee alone.

i started hanging out with a new friend who also loves coffee and she had bought her husband a burr grinder for his birthday.  a burr grinder grinds the coffee more uniformly and makes better coffee.  i asked for one for christmas and we got it! "it's still not strong enough."  oh. my. goodness.  forget you, tim.  i'm going to stop trying to make a better cup of coffee.  haha.  but really, i didn't want to be alone in my addiction so i hadn't totally given up my quest.

but then, last week on a playdate at this same friend's house, she made me this stellar cup coffee.  it was so good. when i commented this, she described the pour-over.  of course, i know the pour over but she does it straight into her coffee maker and flicks the on switch to keep it hot.  how to do it?  grind your coffee, put it in the filter, but instead of measuring and pouring out the water into the coffee maker water area, pour it into your kettle.  bring to an almost boil then pour over the grinds in your coffee maker. turn on the on switch to keep hot.  

i started making coffee like this last week.  tim says, "you like this?  it's so strong!"  i put way less sugar in even though he says it's stronger.  and would you believe it?  he LIKES it!  he took a mug of it to work this morning.  YES!  addicted together.  what i've always wanted.  ;)

this is our coffee maker

week 13

 The whole first page is Monday's day at the park!  It was such a gorgeous day!

I reorganized all my PL papers and cards which makes it easier to pick out a colour theme and stick with it for the whole layout and I'm loving the way the cut photo in the bottom left works with the journaling around it!  We checked out another new park on Saturday so in the bottom right, I have a little "pull" tab and there's another pic behind the one displayed.

I find that I struggle with honest journaling with these albums because you have such a small space to write or you have too many pics to have a space for a 4x6 journal spot.  I don't figure out what I want to say before writing, I just start and hope I can fit it on the card!  I want to remember that the day to day can be hard sometimes and this week, B was especially cranky so I wrote a little about it on the cream card in the center.  When I'm keeping up with blogging, I can always print those and add them.

To be added later: I'm going to print my blog post about Dessert Night and insert the pic collage of the 4 of us plus a close up of Ben's face!

week 12/13 : easter weekend

Two pages with a 2-5x7 insert.  On weeks where I have so many photos, I tend to forget about the embellishments and just get the pics and stories documented!  

I tried out some overlays for this layout - AE word, hunt, in the top right and the picture frame in the bottom right is a little hard to see with the reflection but it says hello spring and describes our afternoon in Bellingham.

 Too many cute photos not to add an insert of the kids hunting for eggs!

On the reverse of the insert - Sunday's decorating eggs.  I think I'll add some words about Sunday to the egg dipping photo but I haven't done that yet.

There's still a blank as I need to check my mom's camera and see if she has a photo of dinner on Sunday.  I was sad that we didn't think to get a photo of our family dressed up for Easter Sunday's church service but on the pink card, I've included a quote from B at church.  :)

Monday, we spent the morning at a park and I took so many pics that I included most of them on the next week's layout!

week 12

 I covered the week from Sunday to Thursday and then did another layout for the Easter long weekend.

 Mostly Sunday pics - we were happy to have M, K, and baby L home from Mexico.  Gotta document when we see that girlie!

We checked out two "play place"s this week - we've never been to the Abbotsford one before because it sounded too expensive to be worth it when usually B doesn't like the noise that reverberates through these plastic tunnels and such.  BUT we met up with friends and B and his buddy had a GREAT time! (top two pics) I couldn't believe he was willing to go down the huge slides!  The toddler area was great too so Avery had fun and when she got tired, she sat on my lap for awhile with her soother and bunny.

In the bottom two pics, we went to our friends' son's 4th birthday party - they rented out the whole Captain Kid's in Langley!  Woah!  Fun!  The toddler area is way smaller than Abby so A kept daddy busy crawling through the tunnels and going down the HUGE slide.  The slide is so steep and fast that, at one point, I got to the top with A and wussied out!  Too scary for me!  :)

I used some new hot pink washi tape on 3 of the pics but it's not super cohesive with the floral.  Sometimes, you just can't spend forever trying to fix up the pages or I get stuck and never return!  Haha.

week 11

 Lots of fun this week!  One extra half-page insert and I threw in one of Ben's watercolour paintings as well.

Friends from up north were visiting over Spring Break so we got to spend Monday afternoon and evening with them.  Lots of pics to document.

 This is the back of the half-page insert - just playing at home pics.  Ben's painting was a picture of "a ladder store".  This is his favourite thing to paint right now.

Last page documents mostly a fun playdate in Bellingham at a "play cafe".  I used these gold letters from my most recent Citrus Twist PL kit but I find the little square letters are difficult to keep straight!  Oh well - gets the idea across!  :)

week 10

a rough week with FEW pics.  ugh. and what's crazy is that we did so many fun things this week seeing as i was pumped to have finished report cards.  PLUS, i had this ridiculous page layout to deal with from week 9.  but we see lots of gray and turquoise again!  

not my fav looking 2 page spread

the sandbox and A's legs pics are actually from week 11 but i journalled about "regular" life along with those pics so that they were relevant to this week's layout.  the bottom gray card is waiting for the one instagram from this week to get printed.

aaaand all these pics are from saturday - the day i realized that i no pics from this week!  haha.  at least we had something going on on saturday with friends!  i also geekily journalled about our latest favourite board game in the top left 4x6 spot.

it's weeks like these that would set my back in my 2012 book because i wouldn't want to document the week so i'd leave it and fall far behind.  2013, head down, power through.

week 9

if i didn't care that every layout looked the same, i'd use gray and turquoise for every page!  even so, you see these colours a LOT already in my PL binder. i bought a handful of the Becky Higgins Seafoam Core Kit cards from another PL-er on facebook so this was my first chance to use some of them.  (see "True Story" and "Recorded" cards)

i love the washi tape days of the week for my two instagram pics

i had a few vertical pics that i really liked and wanted to have as 4x6s instead of the 3x4s so i delved into my stack of OTHER pages... but i always find that i don't like these layouts as much.

dessert night...

everything you read in parenting mags says that forcing kids to eat everything on their plates in order to get dessert is wrong.  it's teaching them not to follow their instinctual hunger/full cues.  when B was two or so, i would say, "just eat three more bites" or something to that effect, patting myself on the back for knowing that he shouldn't have to finish his meal.

and then he started eating less.  getting pickier.  demanding dessert.  augh.  so i started putting less on his plate and saying he had to eat it all.  "am i done yet?"  "finish all the food on your plate."  i was going against everything that i'd congratulated myself on a few months ago.  and i was tired of dinner time.  i was tired of arguing over every meal.  i was tired of meltdowns after we'd say that he couldn't have dessert.

new plan!  no dessert.  maybe that was an easy solution for all you healthies out there but tim and i love dessert.  we grew up on ice cream after dinner.  but really, it's not a right at the end of the night.  we made the new plan that friday and saturday would be "Dessert Nights"!

all week, if B asked, "am I finished?", the answer was, "if you're full."  B probably ate about the same amount of food that he'd eat if we were arguing about it.  but dinner was much less stressful for me...and likely for him too.

then friday got here.  B cheered that "tonight is Dessert Night!"  he even ate all his dinner anyways.  and the ice cream tasted better than usual.  i think this new plan could work for us!

our attempt at a family selfie with our cones...but check out ben's face:

he had accidentally poked a hole in his cone - horrifying.

a sneak peek...

can you believe that i'm currently working on LAST WEEK's PL layout?  i'm caught up!  i'm behind in posting however...will aim to do that tomorrow - make sure to check back.  but until then...here's one of the photos i worked on adding an Ali Edwards overlay to today.   

(can't take credit for the photography though - my friends over at Photobooth Vancouver had the camera out during the egg hunt on Easter weekend AND they supplied the candy!)