buffalo wings recipe: Menu Plan Monday: Week of December 31st, 2012 (Happy New Year)

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It is a new year, it is time to get your resolutions ready! What is on your list? Many of us add dieting to our resolutions and fail miserably at it. It takes a lot of passion to accomplish dieting right? How passionately do you want it? Fact is, I did not need much passion to accomplish my weight loss goals. Since I was already gluten free, this paleo diet was so easy. I have been on many diets in my life. I am a lifetime Weight Watcher! I was so into Weight Watchers that I have retyped all of their diet materials into my computer. Fact is, nothing worked quite as nicely as going Paleo. At this stage I can eat the occasional bag of (not really paleo) Potato Chips and still be steady with my weight. It was easy, I ate as much as I wanted of the allowed things. I was never left to feel hungry and the weight still rolled off. If you are interested, here is a great 30 day to Paleo Intro book you can look into. As for us, I think we need to participate in the 21 Day Sugar Detox! Way too much sugar snuck in our diets over the holidays. I think any time you are detoxing from something there is going to be a challenge. I expect that detoxing from sugar will be EASY for us this time because when we are not cheating (say Monday through Friday) we tend to follow more of a stricter Rosedale Diet. When we did cheat (say Saturdays and Sundays) we were leaning towards the less strict Paleo side. So on the sugar detox we will eliminate things like winter squash, all potatoes, all fruit, cashews (which we were using in our granola), dairy. Beans and peanuts are on the no-no sugar detox list too but we never at those anyway.

What are my new years resolutions? I would like to tighten up this jelly belly of mine. Yea, I am much thinner now, but not tighter. There is where I would like to go next. I would like to clean up my financial act this year too. I have a few financial goals planned for myself. Every year I set out this same financial goals and fail miserably at them. THIS is were I would like to place my passion this year and I have a few fail safe's set in place to assure I reach these goals.

So I did not follow my meal plan last week AT ALL... LOL. First for Christmas I made a Ham at Brunch and a Turkey at Dinner. I ended up not having as many guests as I anticipated so the leftovers were abundant. It was necessary for me to re-purpose these leftovers into new meals. So, with that in mind, the next day I decided on Pub Style Ham, Potato and Cabbage with the leftover ham and hambone. I had MORE than my share of sides so I combined gravy, dark turkey meat bits and veggies and topped with the leftover mashed potatoes and made a leftover style Shepherds Pie. Still with a leftover turkey breast I sliced it thin and used more of that gravy (is it only me or does everybody get so much gravy from one turkey?) and served it over top of a slice of fresh baked Honey Oat Bread. What is next after all these leftover dishes? Leftover Turkey Chili of course!!! I used some pantry canned goods along with some of those turkey bits and voila an incredible meal. Next instead of soup my children asked for Turkey and dumplings. Following the linked recipe, I boiled the turkey bones and made the stock. Once the stock chilled overnight I dumped in all the remaining turkey. Don't you just LOVE repurposed leftovers? I only spent money on the first meal, the rest was free! :-)

Now onto our New Years menu plan.....

Monday (New Year's Eve)