I woke up at 3:00 this morning from a bad dream. In the dream, I was in my childhood home with my husband. Somehow, my horse had gotten into the house, and we were trying to get him out but he was stomping around and bumping into the furniture and getting very riled up and upset. In the confusion, a fire started in the dining room. My husband was yelling, in a very loud monotone, “Fire! Fire! Fire!” That’s when I woke up.
My father is a volunteer fire fighter, and he’d told me yesterday about a recent fire that had devasted a dwelling. Plus, my husband and I started watching a new show this weekend and last night’s episode featured an explosion that resulted in a house going up in flames. So I think it’s safe to say that I had fire on the brain.
Nonetheless, it’s easy for a dream like mine to have the weight of prescience, foreshadowing, and I lay there in the dark house taking long deep breaths through my nose, trying to smell smoke, listening intently for the crackle of flames. I finally got up and did a walk-through of my home, which allowed me to fall back to sleep after an hour or so of troubled thoughts about my loved ones and whether the dream fire had escaped into any of their homes.
We’re also about to begin the new school year, and, along with it, a new schedule of extracurricular activities. So perhaps my brain was merely venting its feelings of facing the unknown in an uncontrolled way.
Carla will be doing extracurricular activities FOUR DAYS A WEEK, sometimes five, and that sounds completely bonkers I am aware. But these activities are ones she has been wanting to do for a long time, and we discussed the time commitment at length as a family, and my husband and I think they will be good for her.
But I am fretting, as usual, about dinner. Dinner is a thing I can – usually – control, in a world that increasingly feels uncontrollable, but I haven’t quite figured out how I will make it work with our new schedule, so I am out of sorts. Horse-in-the-dining-room, fire-breaking-out out of sorts, it seems.
Some weekdays will be normal – by which I mean Carla has no commitments after school is out. One day each week, she will have an extracurricular commitment that takes place after school but ends before dinner. I suppose on those days, I will need to have everything prepped and ready to go so that we can come home from the activity and I can immediately get food in the oven. Some weekdays, we will have a couple of hours of free time after school, and then the extracurricular activity takes place in the evening. My plan is to feed Carla dinner before we leave for her activity. But then, it will be quite late when we return, and she’ll need to shower and go to bed immediately upon arriving home. (To accommodate the new activities, we’re pushing her bedtime back a teeny bit to 8:30, as long as she still gets adequate rest.) So… when will my husband and I eat?
(Recall, if you will, that our normal school-year dinner schedule is: Carla eats at 5:30 and is in bed by 7:30-8:00, my husband arrives home between 6:00 and 8:00, my husband and I eat between 8:30-9:00. Thanks, I hate it.)
I wailed to my husband that we might be eating a lot of Lean Cuisine this year, and he very kindly said that that was FINE, we would make it work. But I don’t really LIKE Lean Cuisine (or its brethren), so I would prefer to find an alternative that isn’t a) fast food or b) nothing or c) me making dinner at nine o’clock at night or d) some variation on Lean Cuisine. (Although all of those are options occasionally, I don’t want to do any of them ALL the time.)
Making meals with built-in leftovers sounds like our best option. That’s why I have chicken fajitas on the menu this week. That way, I can eat before the activity and my husband can eat whenever he gets home. But I’m not great about knowing which meals will produce leftovers, and it seems to me that most of them (not all, but a lot of the ones I love: chicken paprikas! pizza! chili! spaghetti and meat sauce! tacos!) are the more decadent, less I’m Trying to Lose Weight ones that I would prefer to be eating lately. Sigh. Maybe Lean Cuisine is the way to go.
Dinners for the Week of August 22-28
- Slow Cooker Chicken with French Wine and Mustard and Green Salad: Maybe this will produce leftovers? Also, the slow cooker is going to be my bestie this year, I can already tell.
- Sheet Pan Chicken Fajitas: I can definitely amp up the chicken and veggie quotient to get at least one, maybe more, days of leftovers out of this.
- Thai-Style Pork Tenderloin with this Quinoa: The quinoa is leftovers-friendly, but I’m not wild about reheated pork. Hmmm.
- Honey Garlic Sheet Pan Salmon & Brussels Sprouts: I’m fine eating leftover salmon, but my husband doesn’t particularly like it even on Day One. Hmmmmmm.
- 20 Minute Korean Beef Sesame Noodles: This doesn’t seem particularly leftovers-friendly, although that could be my own bias against reheating beef, but it sounds really tasty.
What are some of your favorite Plentiful Leftovers meals? Also, your favorite make-ahead meals, quick meals, one-person-eats-now,-the-other-person-eats-later meals?
I like cooking up a bunch of chicken breast one night. Have with rice and some veg. Then next night chicken fried rice. Precooked chicken breast can be made into chicken tacos, chicken stew, parmesan,.sandwiches,.. and a lot of these are quick to make and can sit on the stove for someone to get later.
(I am not a fan of spices and flavor so you might be more adventurous. But a little oil, a little sauce, and chicken stir fry comes together quickly.)
Dreams are so weird. I mean, sometimes you can – kinda – make a connection to things that have been going on in your life, and then sometimes… you wonder if your brain is on crack or something.
Re: the dinner conundrum, are you at all into meal prep? (I am not, but I know some people swear by it. They cook a bunch of things on the weekends – grilled meat, roasted veggies, chop salad items), so that they can throw together a meal on a whim during the week. I know that will likely take some practice, too, but it would help you to not have to cook every night, when your schedule gets crazy.
I have dabbled in meal prep a few times, and it DOES make things easier… but sheesh it is so hard to gear myself up to do the prep work. Maybe there’s a way I can do *light* meal prep and fill in with other things.
I absolutely think the slow cooker is your friend. I also think it’s worth considering meal prep on the weekends (I know, I KNOW) that would allow you to put things in the freezer so you can kind of DIY Lean Cuisine with things you’ve made.
I’m sure this is just a variant of your fajitas, but chicken breasts in the slow cooker with some version of a sauce makes tons of shredded chicken. You can then eat this chicken in salads, tacos, sandwiches, etc.
But I’m a big talker and we end up eating scrambled eggs for dinner a lot.
LOL I’m a big talker too. Sometimes the easy option is the best option.
I love chilis and soups. They are easy to prepare ahead, can easily be dished up and heated in single serving increments in the microwave, and generally freeze like a dream.
I also enjoy eating the same meals over and over. I’m not overly creative with our menu and we have a lot of things on repeat. I make a soup (or stew or other one-pot meal filled with veggies and flavour) each Sunday which provides supper for Monday and Tuesday night. Wednesday is a one-off meal. We really like baked rice with steamed broccoli on the side. Thursday I make something quick like scrambled eggs and bacon for wraps. Each Friday night is waffle night (we’ve paused this all summer and I am SO EXCITED to have my homemade waffles back – which I also make ahead and freeze!).
The weekend evenings we feed the kids separately for at-home date nights and my husband mostly handles the food for these evening.
My Mom had recurrent nightmares about house fires as a kid. She still talks about it! Just last night our favourite restaurant in town caught on fire. I’m so devastated for the owners; they have young kids and this is such a big time of year for their business with students returning to the university in our small town. I try to keep anxiety at bay (and always have up-to-date smoke detectors), but it is definitely something I think about regularly enough. Fires are scary and I have definitely done a middle-of-the-night house walkthrough to check things!
Welcome to my dinner dilemma. The best advice that I can give is to make the most of the nights when you don’t have activities and don’t feel bad about compromising on quality on the nights that you do. No matter how much I complain about dinners on my blog, the boys have gotten so much out of their extra curriculars that it is well worth it. I love leftovers but hate reheating meat so that’s why a lot of my picks skew vegetarian.
THIS. I think you know I only cooked maybe once or twice a week the entire spring semester last year (maybe even the whole schoolyear); with a senior and an 8th grader both in activities, and me on some volunteer boards FOR those activities, it just wasn’t feasible. We made do and it turned out fine, and now I’m enjoying NOT being tired of all our usuals, because I haven’t made them in so long. My “want to lose weight” feeling was that I would just do my best at bfast and lunch, and whatever happened at dinner happened. I maintained. Didn’t lose, but didn’t gain.
Also yes on the crock pot.
“Horse in the dining room, fire breaking out out of sorts” made me laugh out loud and I immediately filed it away for future use!
I think your best bet here is either meal prep, batch cooking (making double or triple portions to freeze for later), or figuring out what you can do ahead of time to make life easier come dinner time.
The Husband will lean on pre-prepared, non-processed foods (like a rotisserie chicken) when he’s in a hurry. He can then bring it home, cut it up for chicken salad, fajitas, etc. without having to actually cook a chicken.
And give yourself grace – some nights dinner may just be a bowl of cereal or canned soup with a salad from a bag. It will be fine. This is a busy season in your life.
I like an assisted sheet pan dinner in a hurry; we had trader Joe’s Mandarin orange chicken with broccoli, brussel sprouts, and sweet potato tonight, all on the one pan. “Assisted” because the veggies were fresh but the chicken was frozen, and all of it cooked the same amount of time on the same pan. Sometimes I’ll do frozen veggies onto the pan, though tonight they were fresh.
I also like a “one pot meal” deal when we’re busy, like cooking chicken and veggies in summer sauce, then adding extra water and rice or noodles to the very same pot and cooking until the river or noodles are done.
I’m also a fan of cooking chicken in the crock pot with basic spices and then using it different ways — some with barbecue sauce, some as chicken salad, some sliced up into a sandwich, etc.
We are also returning to the busy season of children doing all the extra curriculars all the different days and times and the scheduling Tetris of who can drive whom where and when. It will feel more settled in a couple of weeks, I’m sure!
Welcome to the late elementary child-level of busy schedule! It gets hectic to run here and there every weeknight and we often eat late or on a disjointed schedule. As you eluded to, leftovers are your friends! As for quick meals, salad with salmon or veggie bowls with __ fill in the blank protein are some go-tos. e.g. make a big batch of quinoa and have easy to prep veggies on hand helps. Salad kits work well. I freeze portion-size chicken/fish pieces to thaw quickly and then put in air fryer.
Oh my gosh this is a puzzle I have still never solved. We are also busy at night, and sometimes we all eat separately and at weird times, and I don’t love it. A friend of mine makes casserole-like food in a bunch of ramekins instead of a big dish since everyone is going to be grabbing and going. I use the crock put a lot and do a lot of grilling a bunch of chicken and then making wraps and salads for a few nights and then grilling some more. None if it is ideal.
*of, not if
I remember late elementary school as being the busiest time for North when it came to extracurriculars. They just wanted to do everything. Eventually their interests narrowed.
Soups and stews are easy to scale up. Or a big casserole or lasagna.
Can you involve Carla in ahead-of-time meal prep on the weekends? It might make the task less overwhelming if someone else was helping with the chopping, etc, and at that age I found my kids were more interested in chores and feeling helpful than they are now (though they still do them).
Oof this is a tough puzzle to solve. But I’m also gasping at the thought of eating dinner at 8:30-9!!! I am so tired, maybe because our days start so early that I am usually in bed reading at that time! But my husband and I get home at the same time and eat w/ our kids at 5:30. But, we have very little time to get dinners on the table. When I go into the office, we get home around 5 and ideally need to eat around 5:30. It’s easier when I WFH but that will only be happening 2 days/week starting in Sept. So I tend to use the “prep dish” approach to meal planning. They advertise on lots of podcasts so you’ve likely heard of them. I tried their program for a month but it wasn’t a good fit since the meals were too “fussy” for us – like scallops… I need more basic things. I think they’ve changed their plans up since then, so I could try them again someday. Anyways, what I like about their program is that you get a grocery list and a task list. You do the task list on the weekend so that the meals come together quickly on week nights. Like you chop all the veggies and protein for the stir fry – and obviously store them separately. That way most of the manual labor is done ahead of time and things come together more quickly. We also live on leftovers. I only make about 3 meals/week and the boys maybe eat 1 thing I plan and then I make something different for them when I know they won’t eat what I’m making. My husband is slim and eats as much as I do, so I can get 3-5 meals total out of a recipe, sometimes more. I also like to cut up a bunch of stuff for salads, so you could have a big salad for dinner on nights when you won’t have time to cook a meal for yourself. And then your husband is on his own which it sounds like he’s totally ok with! So just keep reminding yourself that it’s ok to not make dinner for everyone. Something has to give when your schedule is as busy as it will be, and this is probably just a season of life?
Your schedule sounds so busy! We just got back from Mexico and everything is CRAZY. My older son got his first job, yay, my younger son starts school next week. His first semester is brutal but the wrestling season doesn’t start until…November? Late October? I can’t remember but at least we have time for him to adjust before that starts. Also he’s testing for his driver’s license on Monday and that will be so helpful – last year he did club wrestling as well as school wrestling and although we live very close to the university where he wrestled, it was still A Lot.
Within the past seven or so years the house across the street from us AND the house across the back yard from us have burned down. My daughter said it felt like God was playing tic tac toe, and if he won we were next. The kids’ rooms are both really cold in the winter, and the first night we used a space heater I went in to check that it wasn’t setting the room on fire every fifteen minutes.
Between both kids there were a lot of extracurriculars, but my husband isn’t a doctor, so when he was in the country he did most of the sports stuff. It does make life hectic, though.
I tend to cook one or two night and do something on the stove, something in the oven and something in the crock pot because I just can’t cook a proper dinner every night. Good leftovers meals for us (depending on how hungry my son was that night and how much he ate at first and second suppers), hmm. Pulled pork, peanut chicken, chicken curry, noodles, fried rice.