Planning Your Meals and 3 Recipes!

When doing strict Paleo, planning your meals becomes crucial to your success. Not only does it help you have food ready to cook or eat, but it also helps financially. The last thing you want to do, is waste food because you didn't plan right. As time goes on, and you get more familiar with your favorite recipes and Paleo cooking, you'll get better at the planning part.

My planning got better a few years ago when I bought Sarah Fragoso's Everyday Paleo Cookbook. Her meal plan helped me to realize that the best way for me to plan my family's meals was to cook enough dinner to have leftovers for lunch the next day. Making sure there are 4 good-sized servings in every meal I make (sometimes 5 if I think my son might eat what I'm making), has gotten easier and easier as time goes on.

Friday night, we decided to try a new taco salad recipe from The Food Lovers Kitchen. This specific recipe called for a homemade Buffalo Sauce to drizzle over the top. It was fantastic! Of course, I made enough salad and meat for lunch the next day. I just kept the meat separate from the salad so we could reheat the meat and toss it in last.

Each of the following recipes were tweaked a little to our liking.

Taco Salad

Ingredients
1 lb Grassfed Ground Beef
1 tsp Ground Cumin
1 tsp Penzey's Chili 3000
Sea salt and pepper to taste
1 whole Avocado, chopped
1 Red Bell Pepper, julienned
1/2 cup Cilantro
1/2 cup Red Onion, julienned
10 Cherry Tomatoes, sliced in half
8 cup Spring Mix Salad Greens
1/4 cup Buffalo Sauce
1 Lemon, juice

Preparation
Brown beef in a large skillet over medium heat.
Once beef is no longer pink, top with seasonings and stir until meat is evenly coated in spices.
Remove seasoned meat from heat and allow to cool slightly.
Rinse, dry, and prepare all vegetables.
Plate 2 cups lettuce per serving, and top each plate with red bell pepper, red onion, cherry tomatoes, ground beef, avocado, cilantro, freshly squeezed lemon, and a drizzle of buffalo sauce.

Buffalo Sauce

Ingredients
1 cup Apple Cider Vinegar
1/2 cup Yellow Onion, chopped
1/2 tsp Coconut Oil, Organic
1/2 tsp Sea salt
10 whole Fresno Chiles
3 cloves Garlic, chopped
3 cup Water

Preparation
Remove stems from chilies, and slice peppers.
Sauté onion, garlic, and peppers in 1/2 teaspoon of coconut oil for 3 minutes on high.
Add 2 cups of water, and cook on high stirring occasionally for 10–15 minutes.
After 10–15 minutes, add an additional cup of water.
Turn heat to medium, and continue to cook until all the water has evaporated and the peppers are soft.
In a high-speed blender or food processor, blend the sautéed peppers, onion, and garlic.
Add 1/2 teaspoon of salt, and slowly add in 1 cup of apple cider vinegar.
Blend until smooth.
Serve.

The Buffalo Sauce made enough to store extra in a small jar in the fridge for a few days so I could figure out what to do with it. While we were eating the taco salads for dinner, my husband had the idea of trying to create a Paleo Buffalo Chicken Salad. He had Chili's salad in mind, specifically. It didn't take long to find a recipe online, thanks to the growing popularity of Paleo.

Buffalo Chicken Chopped Salad by The Clothes Make the Girl

Ingredients
Chicken
4 boneless skinless chicken breasts
1 1/2 cups Buffalo Sauce
Salad
1 head iceberg lettuce, shredded
1 large cucumber, sliced very thin and quartered
2 stalks celery, sliced very thin
1/2 medium onion, sliced into very thin moons
1/2 cup fresh parsley leaves, minced
*I only used 1/4 of an onion and left out the cucumber.
Ranch Dressing
1/2 cup homemade mayo
2 clove garlic, minced
1/4 teaspoon paprika
4 teaspoons dried chives
1 1/2 teaspoon lemon juice
Sea salt and black pepper, to taste
*This dressing recipe is doubled from what the originally called for. It worked perfectly this way for us.

Preparation
Chicken
Place the chicken and Buffalo Sauce in the slow cooker, cover, and cook on high for 2 hours or low for 4 hours.

Salad
Slice all the salad ingredients as thinly as possible. If you have a mandoline slicer, all the better. Toss everything in a very large bowl and refrigerate until it’s time to assemble.

Dressing
Place all ingredients in a small bowl and mix with a fork until blended. Taste, then season with salt and pepper.

We were both pleasantly surprised how good this salad turned out. It was so simple, that we underestimated how it would turn out. My husband actually said he liked this salad better than the salad at Chili's! Score!

I was super proud of myself for using the rest of the Buffalo Sauce instead of letting it go bad in the fridge! Yay! The moral of the story is, save money and get creative in the kitchen!