SUGAR!! Oh, and getting things done

Yesterday I had a bit of sugar, made my teeth hurt and I felt like I had a long drawn out sugar crash through the evening. So I'm going to work hard to cut as much sugar out of my diet as I can. I've found some chocolate bars I can make that use cocoa powder and agave nectar (though from the Amazon preview of the cookbook Practical Paleo Agave is suggested to be avoided). I think I eat too much fruit. I've slowed down on the fruit smoothies since I first got the Blendtec blender. I need to suck it up and go without sugar for a while to get it out of my system.

I've cut out soda and I feel good about it. I still have some hard cider and beer on occasion. I love Crispin Cider so I'm fine not really having beer and just having cider.

Last night we watched Ratatouille. I love that movie. It makes me so excited about cooking, and plating and trying new recipes. Last weekend I spent some time prepping foods (pressing garlic, chopping onions, making Pad Thai sauce) so that we'd have food ready to go for the week. The prepped food lasted about 2.5 days. So this was brilliant to do but I need to do more! As much as I enjoy cooking, when I get home from work or the gym, I hate that we don't eat dinner until about 9pm because prepping food takes a long time.

One part of this is when the kitchen isn't cleaned up the night before, if I leave a few pans in the sink after dinner and get home the next day from work and want to make dinner but first have to do dishes it makes me procrastinate. This leads to an even later dinner. I have a 7 minute commute! I used to have this problem when I had a 45 minute commute and I thought "oh, if only I had a shorter commute, I could eat dinner earlier!" This is not the case I am learning. I need to keep the kitchen ready to go for whenever I want to cook. There was actually a Good Magazine tip about this in 30 days of home cooking.

Looking up "clean kitchen" I found this article from The Kitchn about how to keep your kitchen clean by doing a little something everyday. This is a concept I have been planning/thinking about incorporating into my life - the only want to build a stone wall is one stone at a time. So the quilt I am working on, I'm going to start by gathering the fabrics, then cutting the pieces, then slowly assembling quilt blocks.

I downloaded a desktop timer program to use the Pomodoro Technique to try to focus more on work when I'm working and also in seeking things to help me not only study for my exams but also get things done like chopping up veggies on the weekends, cleaning the house/my woman cave, etc.