Clean Eating Detox: Day 11

We are nearing the end of our two-week clean eating challenge! For info on days 0-10, click here or use the "Clean Eats" label to the far right.

Each day of the challenge we receive breakfast, lunch, a daytime snack, dinner and a nighttime snack. Today we ate:

A kale and banana smoothie. In the Buzzfeed article this has a vibrant green color and what looks to be the consistency of juice. I tried to blend this for a super long time and make it more like their product... it didn't work. But luckily, we're both quite happy with the way this turns out every time.

Tuna salad in romaine cups. This was delicious! The big draw of this tuna salad is that there isn't any mayo in it. Instead you add just celery, boiled eggs and a dash of olive oil; and honestly you don't miss the mayo. I will say though, that despite this tasting great, it wasn't very filling. I thoroughly enjoyed the flavors but I was hungry within a few hours (which is part of clean eating - you should eat every 2-3 hours) but then we followed it up with a not-so-filling snack and a useless dinner. I'd make this again but pair it with more filling meals later in the day.

Banana avocado pudding. Again, Buzzfeed takes some creative license here with calling this a "pudding." Have you ever watched cooking shows like "Chopped" where some panicked contestant introduces their dish with some fancy name and the judges just shoot them down? "This isn't a pomegranate gastrique! It's just juice!" Yeah, this is nowhere near a pudding. The only similarities between this and a pudding is that you could eat both with a spoon. But honestly this has the consistency of a smoothie, so I drank mine through a straw; while I was hoping for a fluffy, creamy mousse. Despite my aggravation with their word choice (ahem false advertising ahem), the flavor was great. I think of bananas as fairly mild - seeing how you can swap them in recipes in place of eggs and 1. never realize the eggs are missing and 2. never taste the banana; but, mixing them in all of these breakfast dishes, I'm seeing just how flavorful bananas are. They really hold their own and contribute a wonderful flavor to everything they're paired with.

Pea salad with feta, radishes and boiled eggs. So, let's be real about this salad. It's not awful and as a lunch salad, in a smaller portion I could probably enjoy it. However, this really left dinner lacking and here it is 2 hours later and I'm starving. The pairings of ingredients in this salad were weird, like most salads thus far, but they didn't quite work here. You had peppery, spicy arugula with a bunch - no not "whoa that's a bunch of cookies" but the literal grouping they grow in, meaning 5+ radishes - of spicy, peppery radishes. And then you add tangy dressing with tangy feta. Everything was over-the-top which made the first few bites (to me, not J) okay but it got old fast. And lucky us, we get leftovers of this for lunch Friday. Woot.

1 ounce of dark chocolate was on the menu - but because we're famished we are pseudo cheating. We had an oz. of chocolate and also 1 T raw pistachios and 1 T raw almonds. We are only cheating in that we are eating "more" (technically not since 50+% of our salads went to waste) than prescribed, but we're not cheating because everything we added in, is clean.

Day 11 synopsis: I'm hungry. This is the first day I've been even slightly annoyed about being hungry. And if that's the worst of it, so be it. I think we've done really well so far and I've been impressed with the recipes and the detox. In our hangry fits tonight I've had to remind myself that we are only three days away from completion and have a very successful run! This minor bump in the road (or rumbling in my belly) won't deter me from continuing to eat clean.

Rest assured, this Buzzfeed is highly inaccurate. I'm not feeling that funky and/or awkward.