Happy Monday!  Actually, it’s more of a Grumpy Monday for me, which probably has everything to do with this whole holidays-are-over, work-a-full-week thing.  But, I’m drinking tea and listening to Iron & Wine, so maybe things will turn around.

In other news, I’ve decided not to bore you with a play-by-play of my weekend.  Mostly because it went like this: cook, eat, watch The Godfather, repeat.  I’d never seen any of The Godfather movies and figured a cold snowy weekend without any plans was the perfect time for a little movie marathon action.  Verdict: the first two movies = thumbs up, the last movie = thumbs down.  I do, however, have a new understanding of that one scene in You’ve Got Mail.  C’mon, you know the one.

As for all that cooking and eating.  It’s the 5th Annual Bon Appétit Food Lover’s Cleanse and yours truly is participating for the first time!  If you’re unfamiliar, every January for the past four years, BA has put together a 2-week menu that includes breakfast, lunch, dinner, one snack and dessert.  The meals are meant to be a restart button and help you reconnect to mindful and simple eating.  Though that doesn’t mean anything restrictive or lacking in flavor <– I can personally vouch for that.

I follow BA on Twitter and was totally taken with all the delicious looking meals that were part of the plan last year so this year there was no way I was missing out.  We headed out to the store on Friday and loaded up on groceries and I think we bought one of everything in the produce section — seriously, our fridge is just about to explode!  The cashier who checked us out seemed only slightly frazzled by having to correctly identify and ring up everything we got.

We’re on Day 4 and so far, so good!  I’m not going to lie, all the prep work is pretty time-consuming — especially today, our first full day away from home — but the trade off is lots of fun kitchen time, a gentle nudge to cook things I normally wouldn’t (hello, full turkey breast!) and best of all, some seriously amazing food.  Oh, did I mention Joey is joining in on the “cleanse”?  I think the chia seed parfait we had for breakfast this morning was just a little different than the Santiago’s breakfast burrito he usually eats 🙂

Here’s a quick glimpse of the meals we’ve made so far.

Between Friday’s fish packets, Saturday’s turkey (you don’t even want to know what we went through to get that turkey), Sunday’s salad and last night’s tofu and Brussels sprout stir-fry, I don’t think I could possibly pick a favorite.  I’m loving that the plan is made for those of us with real jobs and like Sara Dickerman, creator of the cleanse, says “in real life, people eat leftovers,” so lunches make use of dinner leftovers from the day before.  It’s very full-time-job-friendly.  There’s also a few “big batch” recipes that we made this weekend and get used through the rest of the week.

P.S. There’s nightly dessert.  Nuff said!