Bread...yummmm

My copy of Healthy Bread in 5 Minutes a Day arrived today. I cannot WAIT to start trying some of the recipes! In fact, I have my first batch of dough rising right now. I am hoping that I'll learn enough about this that I can stop buying store bought bread. There are recipes for sandwich bread loaves, pizza crusts, crescent rolls, dinner loaves, hamburger buns, etc. I'm SO EXCITED about this. Especially considering that when I went to the grocery store to buy whole wheat bread this weekend, I couldn't find a single solitary loaf - not even that in the bakery section, that was whole wheat, no refined flour, no salt, and no sugar. I can have sea salt, but not regular table salt. I'm cutting out sugar completely. Even the loaves that said sugar free had a degree of refined white flour. I was very disappointed, but that just proves it's time for me to learn to bake my own bread at home. Check out my bucket o' rising dough:

I decided I had to have this book after watching this video. Tomorrow morning I plan on getting up early so I can bake my first loaf. I'm excited to see how it will turn out :) The only difference is that I did not use the all purpose flour. All purpose flour is refined, and I'm trying to stay away from it, so I substituted rice flour instead. It was all I had for now. I ordered some whole wheat pastry flour from amazon since I cannot seem to find it in stores, but it hasn't arrived yet.

In other news, it's been 17 days since I had a french fry. Laugh all you want, but sadly, that's kind of a big deal for me. It's also been 17 days since I had a soda or ate at a fast food restaurant. I never ever thought I would be able to do this.but I can, and I am, and I will continue. When I drive past a fast food restaurant, I have that initial thought of "OMG I want a burger..." but it's followed up with a thought of "Manda, you're doing SO GOOD, don't blow it now..."

I'm far from being perfect on this Eat Clean journey. There has probably been at least 1 thing every day that I eat that is not truly clean. In fact, the peanut butter I'm currently using has regular table salt in it rather than sea salt. It doesn't have sugar, so it's not as bad as some other peanut butters, but once this batch is gone, I'm going to have to shop for a different kind. I've been eating alot of apples with PB as my mid afternoon snacks at work.

I currently have kidney beans soaking, and ground turkey thawing. Tomorrow morning before I head out to work I'm going to make a crock pot of chili. I learned this weekend that I will never again be able to buy canned beans...unless I buy organic, which is ridiculously overpriced. Regular canned beans have salt or sugar in them :( However, I HATE waiting on beans to soak. I am considering soaking all the beans I bought this weekend and putting them in the freezer so that when I need them I just need to thaw/cook them, and wont have to wait on the soak process.

Thanksgiving dinner is coming up. It's not going to be completely clean. I'm using this as an opportunity to continue to get rid of stuff in my pantry that I don't need. 2 boxes of cheap mac n cheese, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes, cream corn, dressing, etc. It sucks that the turkey is literally going to be the only clean item this Thanksgiving - wait, no the pumpkin pie will also be clean because I'm subbing some ingredients to make it clean. I think I'll be able to plan better for next year. I'm too new at this process to throw it together in such a short period of time and really research my options without feeding my family/friends tofu who may think I've turned into a hippie health nut.

Enough rambling for now. G'night.