Saturday Morning Meal Planning

Hello friends. How’s tricks?

I do not leave my house, except to drop my littlest boys off at school in the a.m. (masked, I stay in the car), to pick up my oldest kid from school in the p.m. (masked, I stay in the car), and to pick up contactless delivery groceries (masked, I stay in the car). If the weather is passable, I will sometimes take a walk outside. I have gone to the gym twice and felt fine about it – the space where I work out is three stories high (a basketball court with a walking track suspended above it, although the court is now covered in machines), there are never more than 5 people in there, and everyone wears masks even while working out. However, since we plan to travel for Thanksgiving, I’ve cut that out too. This means that I don’t have much to talk about here. Life has been curtailed, like for everyone.

So what the heck, I’ll share some recipes, just so we can stay connected.

Breakfast:

One of my issues during this period of WFH has been breakfast – I can’t eat breakfast upon waking up because I have to take a thyroid pill on an empty stomach and leave the stomach empty for a half hour at least (ideally an hour). That means sometimes I forget, and then comes 10:00 and I am knee deep in emails and calls and suddenly starving, and so usually eat a string cheese and an orange or some weird, easy-grab combo. So, I made a bunch of healthy muffins and quick breads, and froze them. These are definitely an acquired taste – I like the cranberry orange best, because the zest of the cranberry really livens up the dense, chewy muffin base. I used WW flour and oats, and yogurt and a bit of honey instead of sugar, and coconut oil instead of butter. They are, predictably, not very sweet at all, but really amazingly filling. Once we run out I’ll make more again for sure, though I may experiment with using applesauce instead of yogurt.

Healthy Cranberry Orange Oatmeal Muffins

Healthy Yogurt Oat Blueberry Muffins

Healthy Banana Bread

Dinners

I’ve started making pizza from scratch. We occasionally get pizza delivery and occasionally have frozen pizza, but my freezer is not large and frozen pizza takes up So. Much. Space. And pizza delivery is just so darn salty – I end up waking up in the night dying of thirst. Because this dough is easily put together in my Kitchenaid, it’s not much work – and we can each pick our own toppings. And all this stuff is generally in my pantry, so I can make it off the cuff any time. I use crust from this recipe, and make the sauce from this one.

These Unstuffed spicy tomato basil shells with whipped ricotta were fine, but my kids scraped all the ricotta off, and ricotta is expensive, so I was annoyed.

I made these crispy chipotle chicken tacos, and they were excellent. I forgot that the chicken was supposed to be ground, and I defrosted whole breasts, so I looked up this way to “home-grind” meat without a grinder. It worked just fine – it was actually perfect for this recipe, as the pieces were a bit bigger then if it had been commercially ground in a machine and the texture worked.

My sister made this stuffed acorn squash at one point and I thought it was delightful, so I made it too. Neither of us actually stuffed the squash rind – just put the stuff straight in a casserole dish covered with foil.

This Sunday night stew froze really well and was excellent. I also made and froze PW’s potato soup, this quinoa fiesta enchilada bake, red beans and rice (far too spicy, I had too free a hand with the Tony Chachere’s), and this instant pot spaghetti. We will make all of these again!

I need to plan meals for the upcoming week, but I’m kind of sleepy today. I did 60 hours last week and it wore me out, so today is an exercise and snooze day. Football on the tv, the husband doing various house chores, the children snappish and occasionally elated over the golden glow of their screens. A good Saturday, friends.