To say that the days fly by with an infant, a child no less, is a complete understatement. Everyday I wake up at 5am, I blink and it’s 6pm. My day starts and ends with feeding, burping, pumping, changing diapers, take the dogs out, calming down baby, repeat. Notice, no real significant breaks. Having a baby that despises day naps severely puts a cramp in my capability to do a lot of extras. Including trying to fit in a quick workout and making AIP/Paleo grabbable food.
Out of all of the sports played, football and hockey are definitely my favorites. However, I LOVE going out or staying in and watching football, specifically my Patriots. Now that I permanently live with a Steelers fan, clearly there is a perpetual household rivalry. Luckily there’s something we agree on, delicious game day food.
This isn’t the second year that the hubs and I “escaped” our normal family gathering. Although we would have LOVED to go back to Plymouth, MA like last year, we moved to Denver and flights aren’t exactly cheap. In an effort to remain healthy, I had been fiddling with ideas on how to make an AIP stuffing with items I had on hand and after many attempts, stumbled upon a legit recipe.
Since Just Be Kitchen opened in the spring of 2017, I’ve been so envious. At that time, we didn’t know that we’d be moving and becoming residents of Denver three short months later. However, we planned to visit JBK while in Denver for my birthday in August. Needless to say, now that we are full blown residents, I forced the hubs to come with me to JBK for our first weekend brunch.
Growing up in the middle of siblings made celebrating personal milestones hard because of the lack of recognition. So when I was finally old enough to drive, I gas’d up my car and decided to make a celebration of my own, Birthday-palooza. Instead of celebrating my birthday for one night, why not celebrate it for an entire month? Whether it means traveling somewhere, going out to dinners, bar crawling, trying new things – the options were endless. As long as I was surrounded with my people, I felt special and celebrated.
PSA ALERT FOR ALL PALEO/AIP’ers: A dairy free-clean ingredient ice cream shop exists!!!!!! Stumbling onto this ice cream shop was seriously the BEST thing that happened our last California trip.
As you know, we live in a world where using shit ingredients like canola oil (in almost EVERY good on the shelves) , aspartame (in gum), food dyes, sodium nitrates (in normal bacon, sausages, etc.), and man-made ingredients is socially accepted. Why? A part of society doesn’t 1. read the ingredients, 2. doesn’t care about the ingredients, or (and the worst) 3. can’t afford to eat better. Sure, all of these foods in grocery stores AND in the majority of restaurants have super tasty food, but are they beneficial for our current and future health? EFF NO. Okay, I’m done ranting about the foods in our country (for now) and am veering back to the true purpose….
Although Chicago has started to jump on the clean-sustainable-ingredient-restaurant wagon, the gears are still slowly turning. The main struggle I (and everyone else with food issues) have is finding places to eat out where you can trust the quality. Unfortunately, I can count the places where I can “safely” eat in Chicago on one hand — which is extremely sad. However, after much research, I learned that I can now add Range Chicago in Lincoln Park to my inventory.
