Clean Eating Week: Food Prep Sunday

Okay, so everyone was much amused by my buzzfeed Clean Eating challenge, and although I didn't make it to the second week, I'm surprised I made it as far into the first week as I did.

But, as I mused on my summary post, the worst part about the clean eating challenge (besides surviving without coffee) was how much work and cooking time was involved. Not very practical or realistic for a working girl who hates cooking.

I have my own version of clean eating that is both reasonable and affordable.  It's basically an example of 'if I can do it, you can probably do it better'. Because I'm lazy.

So. My typical week of clean eating usually involves $50 or less of groceries, and 3-4 hours of food prep (per week, NOT day! That would be ridiculous!)

In a nutshell, I try to do all the food prep on Sunday, divide it up into containers for each day, and then I'm done with cooking for the week! Huzzah!  The downside is, if I don't prep everything on Sunday, I'm much less likely to do anything until the next week, and my diet completely derails. D'oh.

I usually get 90% of my food from Trader Joe's but this weekend I wasn't able to make it over there, so I got everything at the local grocery store in my neighborhood (so it was a little pricier than usual, but still under $50)

Grocery list for the week:

Breakfast:

32oz plain non-fat yogurt - $4.99

Bob's red mill honey oat granola - $3.99 (won't use the whole thing this week. I usually get TJ's praline granola)

6 oz Fresh blackberries - $2.50

1 lb Fresh strawberries - $2.50 (I never find strawberries that don't look like a mushy hot mess. These looked spectacular, I couldn't not get them!)

Snacks:

2 apples - $1.85

2 pears - $2.75

2 forelle pears - $2.54

Baby carrots - $1.50

8 oz Hummus - $2.79

5 Bananas - $2.04

Lunch:

Small Lettuce head - $1.00

Nappa cabbage - $4.96

1/2 lb Sun dried tomatoes - $3.68 (I used half, save the other half for next week)

2 sweet potatoes - $1.52

3 limes - $.75

Dinner: 

1 lb Frozen mixed veggies - $.99 (there was a sale, so I stocked up on these for the month)

2 broccoli stalks - $2.49

Things I already had:

quinoa

Frozen chicken breast

Almonds

Spices, oil, etc...

Storage containers

Not too shabby, and easily carried home by myself.

It took about three hours to prep all my meals for the week.  I'll try to write up the prep guide and recipes for what I did with all that food!

(Here's a sneak peek):