Whole 30: Day 17

24 hours with our Tesseme dressings and Michael is ready to buy another box because they are that good. Seriously, read the ingredient list. You can pronounce all the names. It's all real stuff!

I made a egg and sweet potato casserole for breakfast. Hubby thought I used too many sweet potatoes and not enough eggs. I like sweet potato more than eggs so I guess we will have to agree to disagree on this one.

For lunch we had leftover salmon on spinach with grape tomatoes and avocado. We used the Southwest Ranch dressing. I was hungry by dinner time so I grabbed a few almonds while I was cooking to tide me over. We had pork loin that marinated in the Tesseme BBQ sauce and I put on the George Foreman grill. I served it with mashed potatoes and salad. We used the Tesseme ranch dressing with the salad (I told you we were in love with these dressings!).

 Not being able to load up the mashed potatoes with butter, milk and sour cream was a bit of a challenge in in the beginning. Tonight I used Trader Joe's clarified butter, along with some coconut milk and to thin it out a little I added some of the chicken stock from the chicken I cooked the crock pot Sunday night. There were no potatoes left. All 3 of the kids had a clean plate after tonight's dinner so I'm gonna call this one a definite win. Now you and I both know I can cook the exact same dinner the exact same way next week and they will refuse to eat it!

Cooking 3 meals a day for 17 days takes a lot of time and leaves a very messy kitchen. After one particularly nasty tantrum from one of our older kids Hubby and I decided their 2 measly chores were not enough. For the past 18 months they have each emptied part of the dishwasher and folded 10 pieces of clothing every day. This was a good start to the chore list but they needed to be doing more. I guess I kind of got into the groove of doing everything for them because they were little. Then one day I looked up and I had a 9 year old. Tonight I branched out and let her cut up the potatoes after I peeled them. I have been very hesitant to give any of my children sharp knives. But she did a good job. The 9 year old and the 5 year old helped mash potatoes and pound out the pork chops. Maybe that's why they ate better because they helped cook it. Who knows. We are learning a lot more than just about food through this 30 day journey!