Time to Plan the Meals

Yup, its our Saturday Morning Meal Planning, edition 1,243,572.  Give or take.  This is one of those repetitive domestic tasks that I largely enjoy, but good golly.  Imagine, waking up on a Saturday and not having to sit right down and plan meals (and start a load of laundry, empty the dishwasher, etc. etc.)  Sometimes during the workweek the day gets to 5:30pm, I am racing home from work thinking about the fastest way to pull something together for everyone to eat quickly before baseball/homework/bed, and feel like this:

As it turns out, they do want dinner every night, and breakfast every morning, and multiple meals/snacks in between.  I live with hobbits, and so I must make a grocery list that accounts for breakfast, elevensies, luncheon, 2:00 tea, 4:00 tea, dinner, supper, and all the other meals around and in between, and so here we are spending Saturday morning doing what we do.  Which is planning meals.  Roll up your sleeves and tie on your aprons, brothers and sisters, because here is the latest Family Dinner Plan:

Butternut Squash Mac and Cheese.  Firstly, every time I type butternut I type it as buttnernut.  A superior word, in my opinion.  Second, I am think I will actually make this as a scalloped potato dish (basically replacing the mac with cooked slices of potato), because I have a half dozen potatoes in the cupboard growing eyes that I have to use up.   Oooh, it could also work on quinoa (but I have another quinoa dish this week).  We will add a green vegetable, and I think this is hearty enough to satisfy sans meat.

Cuban chicken/bean/quinoa bowls with fried bananas.  This one is a multi step event of a meal, which means I have to make it today or tomorrow and not on a workday, but doesn’t it sound delicious???  Half-baked harvest is one of my favorite recipe-creators/aggregators out there, she and I are no the same wavelength.

Broccoli cheese soup and pesto grilled cheese.  I never made last week’s spinach soup and grilled cheese – turns out the spinach quiche needed all the fresh spinach I had.  This week I’m going with a soup recipe emailed by the Professor’s aunt – it’s copied below if you want to try it.

Spaghetti Bolognese.  We have this almost once a week because it’s easy and still nourishing – I make the sauce on the weekend and just reheat in the week, and cook the pasta fresh.  Brown some ground turkey (or beef, or chicken, or whatever you please), remove the ground meat to a plate and use the same skillet to cook onions and carrot slices (green pepper?  zucchini?  again, whatever veg sounds good), once they’re soft throw the meat back in along with accumulated juices from the plate, stir in jarred pasta sauce and heat it up together for a few minutes, then throw it on top of spaghetti.

Two blue apron meals: tandoori chicken and brown rice; and BBQ salmon and mashed sweet potatoes.  We haven’t done blue apron in a couple of months and it’s time to treat yoself, and these two meals sounded taaaaaasty.

There you have it.  Meals PLANNED, like a boss.  Below is the broccoli cheese recipe (it calls for gluten free flour, but obv you can use regular as well):

• onion – 1 medium – chopped (approximately 1 cup)
• garlic – 1 Tablespoon (minced)
• GF flour mix – 1/4 cup
• vegetable broth (may use chicken broth, if you prefer) – 4 cups
• milk (of your choosing) – 3 cups
• cheddar – 3 cups (grated)
• salt – 3/4 – 1 teaspoon
• pepper – 1/4 teaspoon
• olive oil, grapeseed oil, or another – 1 Tablespoon
• broccoli – 1 lb. (cut into small pieces)

Instructions: 

Measure 1 Tablespoon oil into a soup pot. Add the chopped onion and garlic. Saute until onion begins to turn translucent (just a few minutes). Sprinkle the GF flour mix over the mixture and stir together, cooking for an additional minute or so. Add the broth and the chopped broccoli and simmer on low for about 15 minutes. Then add the milk and cook for another 5 minutes (or until the broccoli is tender). Stir the grated cheese into the soup. If it’s too thick, you may add a touch more milk or broth. Season with pepper and salt. As the cheese already contains salt, I recommend adding 1/4 teaspoon at a time until it’s to your liking.