What makes meal planning even MORE fun? Meal planning when you have a brand new afterschool activity to adjust to, and a time change to adjust to, and semi-surprise houseguests!
Dinners for the Week of March 8-15
Oven Roasted Chicken Shawarma: I often feel like I need to come up with something new! and different! for people who’ve eaten at my table before. Well, I don’t think I’ve served this to guests before. I plan to serve it with broccoli and couscous, which are my favorite accompaniments.
Slow Cooker BBQ Pulled Pork with Coleslaw: And then again, sometimes I just make things we’ve all had so many times we’re well and sick of them. But I NEED a crockpot meal one night this week, and this one is easy, and we haven’t had it in awhile. Maybe I’ll grab some green beans to amp up the veggie quotient?
Yes, I realize this is only three meals. But we didn’t eat the chicken paprikas last week, so that’s up for grabs again this week. And we’re going out for dinner one night. And I am hoping we have at least SOME leftovers.
Well hello there, we have apparently reached the time of year when I have small freak-out about breakfast. Join me, won’t you?
The issue, in a nutshell, is that I continue to need quick weekday breakfast options for my child. Ideally, they would be portable and at least semi-nutritious. This is Quite Challenging, because a lot of breakfast foods do not appeal to my kid. I am and have always been a Very Picky Eater, so I get it; it’s not always a matter of “just eat it because it’s good for you.” Sometimes the preferable option to a food you don’t like is simply not eating. As a Very Picky Eater, I understand. As a Tends-Toward-Fretful Mother, I want my child to fuel her body before school.
The bacon and egg sandwiches I mentioned here are fine, but they are not an everyday desire. The French toast muffins I mentioned in the same post were fine, but I think Carla got sick of them. However, muffins do seem to be a well-received mechanism for delivering calories and (modest) nourishment to my child, so I think I’m going to make some apple cinnamon muffins and some pumpkin cream cheese muffins in the hopes that they do the trick.
Speaking of calories and nourishment, I haven’t done a great job of planning meals this year. I am, however, less great at winging it. So let’s get back to meal planning, at least for today.
Dinners for the Week of March 2-8
Slow Cooker Korean BBQ Chicken: I am in need of some slow cooker meals this week, and this sounds yummy. I’m using breasts instead of drumsticks, and I’ll shred the chicken and use it to make some rice bowls.
Lemony Garlic Butter Shrimp Orzo: My husband and daughter got me a new cookbook for my birthday, and I love it. It has many, many recipes I would love to make and eat, including this one. My husband doesn’t normally care that much for shrimp, but he said he’d be happy to try any recipe from the book and I’m taking him at his word.
Ramen: My daughter is into ramen lately, and I like ramen well enough. My favorite way to make it is with shrimp and edamame, but my husband would prefer chicken. Hopefully we’ll have leftover Korean BBQ chicken he can add to it.
Chicken Paprikas: This meal doesn’t necessarily scream “spring is on the way,” but it’s tasty, simple to make, and usually produces enough leftovers for another meal.
Stephany! Woo hoo! Your copy will be in the mail asap.
Mystery Item
It took until Saturday for me to remember the mystery item I’d been meaning to order last week. (By the way, I loved Kate’s suggestion that it might be chipotles in adobo, which I’d previously blogged about running out of in a previous post! Good eye, Kate – fortunately, it’s on my grocery list, although my store was completely out of chipotles the last time I looked.) The mystery item was Loop ear plugs. Not a kitchen item AT ALL. I keep meaning to get Carla a pair of these ear plugs because a) I think she could use them during in-class study time, when her teachers discourage the use of headphones and b) I know she could use them when we go to noisy restaurants, which tend to make her feel unbearably overstimulated.
Things I’m Making
Speaking of Carla: she is going through another phase of not being particularly amenable to eating. She eats a decent enough variety of things, I think, but she gravitates toward easy foods which are often less nourishing and/or nutritious than I’d like. I would especially like for her to have easy foods to grab for breakfast a) because she often skips lunch. (We have discussed this with her doctor, we are on top of it, do not worry.), and b) because I want her to be self-sufficient in the mornings.
One food she has been into lately is the Starbucks bacon, gouda, and egg breakfast sandwich, which she gets without the cheese. I am having a strange and intense aversion to Starbucks lately, which isn’t the worst thing for many reasons. But this means I am less open to taking Carla to Starbucks. Also, Starbucks costs money and I am not eager to spend money on fast food breakfast more than once a month (outside of extenuating circumstances). Anyway, this is to say that I gave in once last week and took her to Starbucks for a sandwich with the caveat of using that sandwich as a prototype from which to make our own homemade breakfast sandwiches.
I made these bacon and egg sandwiches on ciabatta bread and froze them. (I added about a quarter cup of cheddar cheese to the egg mixture, because my kid likes cheese mixed in to her scrambled eggs, she just can’t abide it melted on top of things.) The finished product seems a little dry to me (no butter? no mayo?), and Carla has yet to try one, so please cross your fingers on my behalf. I will be quite irritated if she doesn’t eat them. (I eat very few sandwiches and also dislike eggs, so I will not be eating them. Maybe my husband will eat them.)
While I was cutting up the loaf of ciabatta bread, I made a miscalculation and ended up trimming the ends off of all eight sandwiches. Which gave me an excuse to make French toast muffins, a thing that seems delightful and which I have never tried before.
The French toast muffins needed to sit for two hours, so while they were sitting, I made a batch of homemade granola. I love granola, but it’s spendy. This batch called for coconut oil, which I don’t love, but it turned out okay. I used chia seeds, which is what I had on hand (because I purchased them specifically to make granola), but I would like to try adding flax seeds and/or hemp hearts and/or puffed quinoa to future batches. I suspect it will take me a long time to make it through this batch, though – I really only add a few tablespoons to yogurt.
Things I’m Planning to Make
I suppose while I’m making things, I might as well make a meal plan for this week.
Dinners for the Week of February 2-8
Slow cooker Mongolian beef: This sounds good and slow cooker meals are always appealing – especially when it’s so enduringly chilly outside.
Cream of mushroom soup: This sounds luxurious and warming. I will have to make some sort of protein for my husband to go along with his.
Ramen with shrimp and edamame: My husband wanted to try the squiggly noodles from Trader Joe’s, and I am always a fan of ramen with shrimp and some frozen edamame. Easy peasy.
Chicken paprikas: Yes. We haven’t had this in a while and it’s the perfect cozy comfort meal for winter.
Something But Not a Lot
In a rather drastic tone change, sometimes I feel so keenly the exhortation to say something that reaches beyond my little cozy corner. I have sat at my computer, many hours and many days, trying to find the words to express my despair and disappointment at the state of the world, to articulate the scale of my love and hope for all of us. Maybe it’s ignorance or delusion or cowardice or all three, but again and again, I find that I don’t know what to say or how to say it. I continue to read and listen to voices stronger and braver and more knowledgeable and more eloquent than I am. (The fragment “Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse” keeps looping through my brain.) I continue to seek out blog posts, fiction, essays, and poetry to make sense of things, to offer comfort, to provide distraction, to inspire, and to organize the complicated tangle of emotions into words.
