I learned a pretty important lesson on the very first day of week three: I don’t have to eat ludicrous amounts of sweets just because they’re in front of me and free.

One of my best friends and roommates from college had a baby shower on Sunday. I let myself get lost in the excitement and ate like there would be no tomorrow — or at least like I would only have a few dollars to eat on tomorrow. As baby shower food typically goes, there were cupcakes, cheese and crackers, baked brie, candy, fruit and vegetable trays, and punch. The punch might have really been what did me in. After a few weeks of drastically reducing our sugar intake, I drank about three or four (or five? I lost count) cups of this delicious punch made with sweet tea, pineapple juice, and some sort of soda. The high fructose syrup coursed through my veins, taking me to a new, beautiful, and extremely brief sugar high before causing a 24-hour come-down.

I knew better. We all know a little better than to gorge ourselves on sugar, but come to face the unfortunate fact that we’re programmed to want it. Our systems crave three things that are rare in nature, but are now in the majority of popular foods: salt, fats, and sugar. The market is oversaturized with all three, and it can be hard to take a step back and keep them rare in our diets. The good news is, once you do, you can’t really overdo it with any of them without feeling pretty crappy for a while. I’ve never had quite as hard a sugar crash before, and it helped me get past the fact that we didn’t have any budget for sweets this week at all quickly.

We DID budget in popcorn, so I took it to the Naro with me in a paper bag to fit in.

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Jake, on good sugars

Our main source of sugar over the past few weeks has been fruit — and we haven’t had much of it, either. The grapefruit sale really helped, and with that gone we settled for a bag of apples for $2.50 at Trader Joe’s, which were harder to make last as long. Fruits are one of the most perfectly intelligent foods. While they’re rich in sugar, they also contain fiber, which helps metabolize that sugar and reduce the spike to your blood sugar. Losing the grapefruits this week was hard, but we also invested in a bag of lemons. You can’t have a lemon for breakfast like you can a grapefruit, but I love to incorporate lemon into a lot of our recipes (especially meals with raw or cooked greens in them) for taste and for nutrients.

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Other than fruit, we also missed out on something sweet, salty, and deliciously fatty: peanut butter. This week the price of organic peanut butter unfortunately doubled at Farm Fresh, and we missed our chance to get the regular, unorganic kind for $1.79 at Trader Joe’s, where they leave out the high fructose corn syrup.

Surprise sriracha smiley on lunch

Two things we weren’t short on were protein and fiber. With plenty of lentils, rice, collards, and kale, we couldn’t really complain. We were always full, and tried to keep things spicy with garlic, black pepper, or sriracha so we wouldn’t get bored. We’ve settled into our fall-back recipes — the recipes we’ve made every week now: lentil soup, dosas, and cheesy potato kale casserole. They’re the easiest recipes for me to make consistently without ruining (although I did make some crunchy lentils this week), and they’re the easiest to make flavorful.

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Jake, on the ease of lentil flavoring:

It’s easy to love lentils, no matter how they’re cooked, when you know how great they are for your body. Just one cup of cooked lentils has 18 grams of protein and 16 grams of fiber. On top of that, they have B vitamins, a good deal of iron, and even a little bit of calcium. Lentils are also like rice in that once you get water boiling and throw some initial spices in the water (a little turmeric makes them softer), they can cook themselves with little supervision.

Liz and I have been mixing brown lentils, or masoor as they’re labeled on the package, and what we call white lentils, or urad dal, which are actually black lentils split open and dehusked, leaving only the white insides. Boiling the two kinds of lentils together seems to make them much thicker and softer — great for soup, or just as they are. A simple spice mix of cumin, coriander, garlic, salt, black pepper, and maybe an onion is all you need. A dried red chili is always nice, or sriracha if you like spicy foods as much as we do.

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I’ve mentioned it before, but we’d definitely have more variety in our meals if Jake wasn’t so busy this month. Though it’s a shame this experiment coincided with him composing for two plays and getting more hours than normal at Barnes and Noble, it makes it pretty realistic. Besides the fact that eating out can be delicious, I figure most people eat out because they don’t have to spend any time in the kitchen. We loved having bread all week for the first two weeks, but as opening night approaches and he’s not around to make the bread, we go without. If we were in dire need, I’d get up and get to baking at night, but it hasn’t starved us yet. Realistically, that’s why people buy loaves of bread — it takes a long time to make it a loaf, and sometimes we just don’t have a long time to do any one thing besides work.

Fortunately, it doesn’t take long to make flat breads, and that’s something I can handle on my own, though I’ve only done it once so far. I’m planning on making a bulk batch of flat breads, like a pack of whole wheat pitas, to take us through our last week because at we really need, more than anything I think, is more portable food. I take my lunch to work, and Jake takes all of his meals all over Norfolk in his backpack, so carrying glass Pyrex around with oatmeal and sloshy lentils inside isn’t always the easiest and I’ve lost any Tupperware we might have had.

Chocolate oatmeal: hard to carry in a backpack

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Jake:

Having hardly any time to cook this month is what has made this challenge a challenge. Leaving at around 8:00 in the morning and not getting home until 11:00 at night means that I need to have all of my food for the day with me when I leave the house. It’s also been hard because it leaves all of the cooking responsibility to Liz, who isn’t as used to cooking foods from scratch. Even with the lentils, I can get them started and go do whatever else I need to, coming back when they’re done, while she needs to stand and stir, still a little unsure of how long they’ll take or what heat they should be set to. What I can do on my time off is make bread or dosas, so she can at least have something to eat in the morning or right when she gets home before getting to cooking.

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With all this practice, I’m getting more confident in inventing recipes. Since we’re working with most of the same ingredients every week, I’ve watched Jake use them together, and I think I can take what little I know and get creative next week. Creative and quicker.

This week’s recipes are a mix of super-easy and (at least to Liz) slightly-advanced. The collard-cabbage stir fry was something invented out of the fact that Farm Fresh was out of kale when we went, and is way better than it originally seemed like it would be. The bread is something Jake adapted.

Collard-Cabbage Stir Fry

Honey Oat Wheat Bread

For Week 2, click here.