meal rut

by

Grumble Grumble, Various Forms of Torture, Dinners This Week

We have reached another low point in the energy and cheer I have available to devote to meal planning. Sometimes I just viciously hate everything to do with meal planning and preparing food, and this is one of those times. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that today is YET ANOTHER day off from school. We haven’t even had any snow days, just pre-planned days off. Eight, since the beginning of January. She’s had only three weeks of school with no days off. I don’t know why this is making me so cranky today. Usually, I kind of like a day off from school. We get to sleep in a bit, Carla and I get to chill together or run errands, sometimes there’s a playdate. Today she gets to accompany me to acupuncture though, which sounds like torture for everyone involved. And then we will go to the grocery store, which is agony for Carla. (At least, until we get there. She’s very cheerful about helping and asking to buy a million things; it’s just the anticipation of grocery shopping that makes her wail as though I threatened to incinerate all her toys.) Maybe, to balance out all the suffering, we will make brownies. (Yes, I am still trying to get protein into Carla at every turn – as well as calcium, but that is not going well – and also I am still trying to like baked oatmeal. We WILL be adding chocolate chips to this recipe.)

Anyway, day off or no, meal planning grumble or no, we must eat. I think I will do the thing where I pick maybe three meals and then make black bean tacos the other days. My husband will eat a ham sandwich on black bean taco days. Carla, as you know, eats a stunning variety of foods including and pretty much limited to chicken nuggets, salmon, ground beef tacos, steak, and two very specific types of lunch meat, so she will eat one of those things while my husband and I eat whatever it is I decide on.

For lunches, I can drum up slightly more enthusiasm. I have recently rediscovered how delicious artichokes are. They are currently plentiful and also a whopping $3.99 each, but they are enormous and I find them to be such a delicious and satisfying lunch. I will see if I can buy two this week, and then maybe make a batch of Hungarian mushroom soup to eat on the other days.

Dinners for the Week of February 20-26

  • Miso Ginger Soy Salmon Rice Bowls: For awhile, I felt like I kept coming across yummy sounding meals with miso as an ingredient, so when I saw some miso paste at Trader Joe’s I snapped it up. And then of course I couldn’t find any meals that featured miso. But this recipe does feature miso and it sounds really good. 
  • Chicken and Broccoli Stir Fry: This is technically called “skinny chicken and broccoli stir fry” but that makes me think of anorexic roosters, so I deleted the “skinny.” Despite the ridiculous name, this sounds really delicious and fuels my recent obsession with broccoli slaw. I think I will also throw in a handful of water chestnuts, which I LOVE. (My husband does not love them, so his portion will be water chestnut free.)

Wow, just deciding on those three recipes felt like removing my own fingernails with pliers. Hopefully I will feel more invigorated for meal planning next week. 

Have you tried miso before? What about broccoli slaw? Does meal planning also currently feel like torture for you?

by

Dinners This Week; Banana Problems

Well, I am still hard in the meal-planning slump. BUT I have all your lovely suggestions from last week, so that’s what I’m cooking, folks! Thank you for planning my meals this week!

Dinners for the Week of April 13 – 19

  • Snack Dinner/Fend for Yourself: I bought a loaf of sourdough from the grocery store for those who would enjoy some sour toast. I have cheese aplenty. And olives. And pickles. And sugar snap peas. And carrots. And strawberries. And cherry tomatoes, for those who partake. And delicious Triscuit crackers. If people are interested in adding some protein to their snack dinner – and maybe they don’t care! maybe it’s a carb night! – we have pepperoni and peanut butter and yogurt. We have lots of cereal and milk. Things could change between now and then, but I am planning on a faux-Orange Julius with a side of sour toast for myself. Everyone else can do what they do.
  • Breakfast for Dinner: You will perhaps be unsurprised when I tell you that, like chocolate, I don’t really care for breakfast. Every now and again, fine. Like waffles or pancakes or French toast casserole or strata for a special occasion. My husband made a Dutch baby for Easter and it was delightful. But on the whole… I could take it or leave it. Mainly leave it. And eggs. Pfff. Get out of here with your eggs. Once in a Long While I can stomach a few spoonsful of scrambled cheese eggs (these are scrambled eggs with American cheese, or, better yet, Velveeta) or maybe an omelet, as long as it has plenty of cheese and mushrooms and onions. I do not like cereal. ESPECIALLY if you pour milk on it. Soggy flakes or rectangular prisms of carbs? NO THANK YOU. I am always up for bacon. But breakfast for dinner is EASY. And Carla will usually eat a couple of scrambled eggs if I bribe her with a pancake. 
  • Sheet Pan Cuban Chicken: How have I only made this a couple of times? It is easy and DELICIOUS. Done. On the list.
  • Pizza: I’m not going to lie, I will probably get takeout. But I COULD make it from scratch. If I felt like it. 
  • Crockpot BBQ Pork Tenderloin: Easy. Yummy. DONE. 
  • Crockpot Chicken Tortilla Soup: This is the most fussy, involved meal on the plan this week. But it sounds good, and so few things do lately. Plus, it makes enough for plentiful leftovers which I can eat for lunch the rest of the week. On. The. List. 

My husband contributed a dessert idea for the week. If I can track down the special sweet rice flour it calls for (and believe me, the LAST thing we need is another special flour; we have plenty of low-carb flours leftover from our Keto experiment last year), he will be making us Hawaiian Butter Mochi. I am curious but wary.

Now I need to moan a bit about bananas.

This is the current banana situation in our house.

Yes, I did pose the bananas in front of the piano. What? The light was nicest there.

Normally, the bananas live on top of the white cabinet in the hall between the pantry and the laundry room. Should they instead live in the fruit shelving unit I bought specifically for the purpose of holding bananas and other fruits? Yes, they should. But that shelving unit has been occupied by a large bag of clean face masks, the thermometer (which until just this week we needed to use every morning before Carla was allowed to go to school), and other odds and ends that seem to accumulate in the kitchen. Also, tomatoes. That’s where I keep any tomatoes we have in the house. At least the fruit shelving unit is half living up to its potential.

The storage issue is only a small fraction of my problem. The bigger issue is that I can never buy the right amount of bananas. Number of bananas? Amount? Number? Don’t know. It’s one of those words. I either buy too many – as I did, apparently, last week – and they languish, spottening and blackening with each day that passes. Or I buy too few and my family starts making “why don’t you love me?” and “I will surely perish if a banana doesn’t find its way to my mouth momentarily” kinds of noises. 

Let’s be clear here. I DO NOT LIKE BANANAS. I will not eat one. They rank just below tomatoes and perhaps even above eggplant – perhaps, I said, not definitely – on the list of Things I Refuse to Ingest. I don’t like the taste. I don’t like the texture. I don’t like the smell. The only good thing about a banana is that it comes in its own wrapper. Do not tell me to put one in my smoothie; I can taste it and it is Not Pleasant. If I had my druthers, I would never buy a banana again.

I remind my husband we have them. Does he want a banana with some peanut butter as a nice after-dinner snack? No?

I remind my daughter we have them. Still hungry after dinner? Have a banana! Need a little after-school pick-me-up? Banana! Feeling munchy in the hours between breakfast and lunch? Banana time! I bring her a banana in the car nearly every day after school, but more often than not I find the banana several days later when my car starts to emit a sad-banana distress signal.

What do we DO with the excess bananas?

In the past year alone, I have made:

Banana bread

Banana chocolate chip snack cake

Banana muffins

Chocolate chocolate chip banana muffins

Banana cake with maple brown butter frosting

The word banana is now looking like nonsense. 

Keep in mind that, while I enjoy baking, I get a little pouty when I am baking food that I don’t want to eat. And it’s just two people eating a whole snack cake, which means that we often end up freezing some of it or, worse, throwing it away. Which is the opposite goal, here. Plus, it’s hard to be creative about finding new uses for bananas. Plus, while I am dithering about recipes, and simultaneously trying to guilt-trip my family into eating the bananas, they are getting black and soft and smelly. It is a miracle A MIRACLE that we haven’t been overrun by fruit flies.

I have tried freezing the overripe bananas… but inevitably, they pile up. And I cannot brook a freezer crowded with hard, black half-moons when I need SPACE for important things. I have thrown away many a frozen black banana!

This week, I am going to make these banana oatmeal cookies. Or maybe these peanut butter ones, which have neither wheat germ (?) nor the TWO types of oats called for in the previous recipe. Because why not? Perhaps Carla will be tickled at the prospect of parent-sanctioned breakfast cookies. And then I am OUT OF IDEAS. So if you have a non-smoothie banana go-to, PLEASE let me know. Because the only idea I have left is Never Buy Bananas Again.

by

Dinners This Week

Well, I’m a day late and a dollar short and don’t care a WHIT because I am typing this outside in my backyard in the sunshine. It may be – checks calendar – only April 7 but it FEELS like summer, and right now that is a novel and welcome feeling so I’m going to bask in it a bit. There are so few opportunities for good basking, don’t you agree? 

The reason I am late with my dinners this week is because I have hit my semi-annual Dinner Wall and hit it hard. Nothing sounds good. I cannot bear to think of food. Not a single food sounds remotely edible, not even my one true love: tacos. Perhaps I have overdone it on the Easter candy. Although I don’t really think so, because even that sounds repulsive at pleasant. I tracked down a bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs at Walgreens (thanks for the recommendation, NGS!) and I have not opened it. That’s how dire things are, people.

Of course, we are once again confronted by the undeniable fact that we must eat to survive, and therefore I need to plan something. (Even takeout sounds unappealing, which is an indication of where I am, food-ily.) (I am feeling, temporarily I’m sure, wary of takeout because I had a Bad Experience at a new pizza place we tried over the weekend. Super crowded, like an endless line of people going in and out; MULTIPLE staff members wearing their masks around their chins; at one point, ten entire customers packed into the narrow vestibule together; MULTIPLE customers not wearing their masks properly. I waited outside, which helped – I could feel aghast without feeling personally at risk. But then I also saw a person pick up a stack of boxes, leave the pizza place for an undetermined amount of time, return with the boxes, and hand the boxes back to the checkout person, and then the checkout person put them back in the warming cupboard. One of the customers said something about the returned boxes, and a different staff person removed them and, presumably, threw them away, while telling the checkout person that you can’t put food that has left the premises back in the warming cupboard and return it to circulation. A learning experience for all. But I think you understand why I am feeling a bit skittish about takeout after that. SADLY, the pizza was really good.) 

In times like these, when NOTHING sounds good, not even cheese and crackers or nachos for beets’ sake, we turn to things we know we enjoy, no matter what. And yet… every single one of my tried-and-true, easy breezy go-to meals sounds revolting and vomitous. Okay. So we shift to meals that provide nourishment only, and don’t worry about the taste as much. And yet… contemplating a plain Jane meat-plus-veg formula makes me want to violently fling a chicken breast into a broccoli patch.

Nonetheless, after much feet dragging and moaning, I have dug up some recipes that don’t make me want to throw poultry. Plus, I badgered my husband into contributing two meal ideas. Let’s ignore the fact that one of those ideas is a food I refuse to eat and the other is out of season.

Dinners for the Week of April 6-12

  • Beer Braised Chipotle Chicken Tacos: Tacos have yet to fail me. And this is a new-to-me recipe, so it has the novelty factor.
  • Grilled Thai Pork Tenderloin with Soba Noodle Salad: This sounds interesting and summery. Let’s give it a shot.
  • Southwest Salmon Salad: I can almost get a little excited to eat this. 
  • Fake Shack Burgers: The restaurant food I have missed the most during the pandemic has been A Really Good Burger. We have tried making burgers on the grill and in the instant pot, and – while both have their merits – they just aren’t the same as a thick, greasy burger from my favorite burger place. (Shake Shack, which I am sure is lovely, is not the place to which I am referring.) I just can’t see getting a burger as takeout. I think it would ruin the burger. So when I came across this recipe I thought maybe it would be The Secret to getting the burger I’ve been craving. We’ll see how it goes.
  • Baked Feta Pasta (for my husband) and Gigi Hadid’s Spicy Vodka Pasta (for me): Who am I to deny my husband the experience of a TikTok fad, and myself a meal of delicious, delicious pasta?
  • Persian Pomegranate Chicken: This is my husband’s other contribution to the meal plan. It does not sound appealing to me, but it does sound DIFFERENT, and sometimes different is just as good as appealing. Plus, I am all in favor of encouraging my husband to take part in the meal planning process. The thing is… pomegranates are not in season right now. And also this is a FALL meal. Even though I already said nothing sounds good and so this next bit might sound contradictory: I don’t want FALL meals, I want salads and things we can grill. But! Nonetheless, if I can track down some pomegranate arils and some pomegranate molasses, we will be giving this a shot this week. If there are no pomegranates to be found at this time of year, we will have, instead, Szechuan Stir Fry.

What do you provide for dinner when nothing sounds good?