Kitchen Sink Paleo Roasted Sweet Potato Soup!

Hey everyone! I've been meaning to do an article on the freezer exchanges I've been holding for awhile. Monthly me and some other folks get together with a bunch of the same freezer meals we've made and then trade for some variety. Saves money and time and kicks my butt into gear to make meals ahead! There's a whole article on it here so I won't repeat but this month I'm going to share a recipe I whipped up the other day. I call it kitchen sink soup because the first time I made it I used everything I had in the kitchen except the sink!

Let's get started, the ingredients are as follows (bear in mind I made 6 in one go for the freezer exchange but you can scale it back for a family sized portion, proportions are not a science here!):

• 4 costco bags of sweet potatoes
• a giant costco ham
• 2 boxes of almond milk
• 3 boxes of beef broth
• 2 jars of pickled jalapeno peppers (these are to taste, I didn't use all of them)
• cauliflower (because it was in the fridge)
• goats cheese (garnish)

So if you're looking at these ingredients this recipe is cow dairy free, grain free and sugar free! You could easily substitute the almond milk for some cream if you wanted it to be smoother or use regular cream cheese :)

I seem to have deleted all my photos so I'll have to remake this in the future to retake the photos, please bear with me for now! Bear in mind also that I cooked this up half at a time because of the size of my stock pot, but if you have a bigger pot you can do it all at once.

To prepare the sweet potatoes I smothered them in coconut oil then baked them on a parchment paper lined cookie sheet at 400F for 45 mins like they say on Nom Nom Paleo.

I let those chill in the fridge  overnight because it was late, not because it's necessary. The next day I peeled the skins off (they just slide right off by hand, which I guess it's good I chilled them after all!) and tossed them in my stock pot. I also put in my almond milk, beef broth cauliflower and jalapenos and cooked it on medium to high heat until the cauliflower was cooked. You can play around with the ingredients, honestly I don't think the cauliflower did much for the recipe except act as a "done" indicator.

I then took my immersion blender and blended it until it was a smooth silky consistency. I then poured in the ham and mixed it up. This was a lot of ham BUT it gave the soup some weight and made it more of a balanced meal. From there I scooped it into freezer bags and froze them.

What's your favourite make ahead meal? 

Bad Night Can Bring Good Things

So I had a bad Night Friday. I was tired, my boyfriend had been working the evening shifts testing at work and coming home around 2 am which totally messed up my sleep. To top it off I was trying to increase the amount of cycling I was doing last week and Friday night it all caught up with me.

I stopped at no frills to get the last few ingredients for my dinner and a bag of chips and a container of dip. When I got home I was TIRED. I'd biked a total of 49.5 kms in one week up from 16.5 kms. I sat down to the bag of chips because it didn't need to be "prepared" and I ate. And I ate. And I ate. And I looked in the bag and all that was left was crumbs. I mindlessly ate an entire bag of chips. I felt awful and quickly realized what I'm trying to do isn't working. I felt like crap.

I turned to the internet, youtube to be specific. I arbitrarily searched "Mindful Eating" and what came up was a video by Dr. Melissa May. Honestly I'd been on her website and saw that she mainly catered to her US patrons with only one Canadian doctor posted on her site from Winnipeg so I wrote it off. Well wrote it off until I watched these two talks she gave:

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ze2W0-nsGy0
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSDaqBwG6e0

They're long but well worth the watch! I honestly cried a little at one point because I felt like she was talking about me. I went to her website and was about to order the Mindful Eating Toolkit until I got to the till and shipping was 33$!!!! This is a 43$ dollar package we're talking about. In Ameribucks. So I trekked on over to amazon.ca and found just the book for 25$ and roughly 4$ shipping. It's not the whole kit but it will do for now. You need to read the reviews for this book, with people not really giving it their all they're reporting losses on the order of like 5 lbs a month. Not a massive drop but clearly sustainable!

I've talked about The Thin Womans Brain before and how as much as I love that book I felt like she walked you up to a cliff and told you to fly but you had no wings right? Well I feel like Dr May takes it so much further. I took from Mindful Eating that I was to eat only until I was full and only when I was hungry otherwise I was BAD. Really it's not BAD to eat when you aren't hungry, the point is to think before you stuff your face mindlessly. You'll see clarification on that in the second video and hopefully more in the books, which I shall report accordingly :)

Have you tried mindful eating? Have you read Eat What You Love Love What You Eat?