Avoiding Frozen Foot Syndrome

Black and Blue--Sunday, 1/17/16

You can count on Katie to go big with Colts blue--aka cobalt blue to the rest of us--and it's very cute with a flippy skirt and a button up shirt underneath the sweater.

From styleontarget.com

I had been planning on a more faithful interpretation of this outfit, but then (1) winter finally arrived with a vengeance (today's temperature? Low of -17 F and high of -2 F!) and (2) I got a new 88 cent blouse I wanted to wear for the Work the Wardrobe Challenge.

Black cargo skirt with peplum hem (Royal Robbins/REI), $3.57/wear
*Teal/purple/black floral blouse (thrifted, JNY), $0.88/wear+
Cobalt blue pullover sweater (Macy's), $8.00/wear+
Chunky aqua double strand necklace (Kohls), $2.50/wear
Black leggings
Fuzzy black boots (Walmart), $6.67/wear+

Outfit total: $21.62/wear

It is hard for me to express how much I love this blouse.  It fits like a dream, layers beautifully (unlike most stiff cotton button up shirts), and has such a nice set of colors.  I cannot believe I got it at the 88 cent sale!  It's not even one of those situations where the item was tagged with the wrong size or somebody dried their clothes on too high a setting so it shrank down two sizes.  I guess it was just meant to be.  (I realize this is not actually a great photo of the blouse but consider it a sneak peek.)

I can't remember if I've ever shown these boots with the fuzzy (faux furry) tops on the blog before.  I had put them away at the end of last winter and only unearthed them very recently.  But expect to be seeing more of them as the cold weather grasps us in its frozen fist.

In other news...Tomorrow Robert has to go to work but I have the day off for MLK Day, so I'm staying home and cooking--a beef stew for Robert (is that perfect for the weather or what?) that takes a long time to cook on the stove and a beef/sweet potato hash for me.  The hash will be the second "recipe" I am making from the Whole30 book. 

I'm not doing the Whole30 but it has an eating style that is a subset of my own (they don't eat sugar, for example), and I recently re-discovered (having read the book some time ago but not really looking at the meal plans) that they have some great suggestions for meals that are variants of my own go-to lunches.  I typically cook up a bunch of ground beef with onion, top it after heating it up with either guacamole or cheese, and eat that with some kind of veg (lately roasted bell peppers or Dad's carrots).

They have a section of the book that gives little "recipes" for how to combine your meat of choice (cooked like I do my beef) with veg and spicing.  Last week at work I ate (a slight variant on) their cashew beef recipe--my usual ground beef/onion with some spices and soy sauce, topped with cashews, eaten with bell peppers.  (Their recipes call for mixing it all together but I prefer to keep the meat and veg separate despite my historical preference for the one-dish meal.)

I have not been able to get into any kind of serious cooking of complicated recipes while on this paleo-esque diet.  But new ideas for variants on my meat/onion topped with something tasty and eaten with some veg are very welcome.  I've been doing the beef/onion thing for a while, but I like the looks of some of their other meat options so perhaps I'll do something crazy and branch out to, I don't know, chicken some time!

As for not doing the Whole30....one reason I picked the book up again is that I've been thinking about doing it as the elimination stage of an elimination diet.  I haven't done an elimination diet since I was in college (ahem, over half my life ago) and I've been wondering whether my mental model of my food sensitivities is up to date or whether there have been changes I'm unaware of.  For example, I've been tolerating (reasonably limited amounts of) wheat lately better than I did in the past.  I'm definitely still in the contemplation stage where this is concerned, but it's at least on my radar.