I have been meal planning at least our dinners for quite a while. It has been helpful, but sometimes I become lazy and end up brainstorming what to cook the next day as I'm trying to fall asleep at night.
A few weeks ago I decided to try planning every single meal we were going to eat that week. Writing down all twenty-one meals at once. It sounded very intimidating and ambitious at first, but it has actually turned out to be extremely helpful having such a detailed meal plan.
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| Dried sage and paper snowflakes hanging in our kitchen window. |
This isn't necessarily a "how-to" on meal planning, but rather I would just like to share with y'all what I have been cooking lately.
One of the things I have learned while cooking for our family is to always cook enough so that there are leftovers. You can either eat the same thing for dinner two nights in a row, for lunch the next day, or make a big batch of something that can be eaten for lunch the entire week. Being able to fall back on leftovers is extremely helpful.
We have two adults and two children in our family and everyone eats home cooked food for every meal.
So, let's get started. The first week.
Now that's some high quality photography right there. ;-)
The menu photos I will be sharing with y'all are mostly accurate. Sometimes leftovers end up stretching further than anticipated and I don't bother with editing the menu to show that we actually ate something for three days instead of two. But for the most part, everything in the photo above is accurate.
I think it will be easiest to organize by meal type rather than the days of the week. We'll see how it goes.
Breakfast
This has honestly been the most helpful meal to have planned ahead of time. I am not a morning person. Stumbling out of bed to cook breakfast for everyone in the morning makes me quite grumpy. Having the meal planned ahead of time and getting up a little earlier makes the beginning of the day a lot easier for me.
For Sunday I try to have something leftover from the previous day that can be eaten quickly before we leave for church. Pancakes, muffins, scrambles eggs, boiled eggs, or some fruit. We usually eat leftovers for lunch too on Sunday and then go over to my in-law's for dinner. I always try to cook something to take over to contribute to the meal.
Every time you see OATS written on the menu, it is referring to this recipe:
It is a very simple ratio of one cup of steel cut oats to four cups of water. You can make it the day before, the night before, and top it with whatever you want. It just requires a few minutes of hanging out in the kitchen to watch it come up to a boil, stir it for a minute, and then turn it off and put on the lid. A single batch makes A LOT of oatmeal that will last through the week. I like to eat mine with a fried egg with a runny yolk, a bit of sea salt, and maybe some chopped up ham. (One thing I have learned about myself is that I really need to start my day with some protein or I become sluggish and cranky pretty quickly.) Noah eats his oats with a bit of brown sugar and maybe some nuts. For the kids I'll pull together a variety of toppings. Chopped fruit, shaved coconut, some nuts, and a dollop of homemade peanut butter.
On Wednesday we had waffles. I use the recipe that came with our waffle maker. It turns out just fine, even when I use my freshly ground whole wheat flour. We'll eat waffles with homemade maple syrup, homemade peanut butter, and fruit on the side. I will often cook some eggs to go with the waffles.
On Thursday we had scrambled eggs, likely with some fruit alongside. I like to cook eggs in our 10-inch cast iron skillet. If you get it hot enough, and the pan is well seasoned, I have no problems at all with the eggs sticking to the pan. It was a different story when I used our other metal pans to cook eggs. Junk would stick to it all the time and I would have to clean it after every use. Not so with the cast iron pan. Get yourself a cast iron pan, a thin metal spatula, and you're good to go!
Lunch
On Monday we had egg and cheese sandwiches. Pretty simple. Basically just grilled cheese sandwiches with eggs added. I don't always bother writing down what sides we eat with meals, but I usually try to have one or two sides with every meal, and at least one of them is a fruit or vegetable.
On Tuesday we had tuna salad. I have no recipe for tuna salad. It is totally made by taste and by eye. But I will list the ingredients below.
Diced Boiled Eggs
Canned Tuna
Chopped Celery
Chopped Onion (any variety)
Mayonnaise
Mustard
Salt and Pepper
Use the above ingredients in whatever ratio you desire. I tend to go light on the mayonnaise. You could even use yogurt instead if you don't like mayonnaise. Sometimes I'll add dill or smoked paprika. You could even add relish or shredded cheese. Maybe some bell pepper? We like to eat our tuna salad on crackers or toasted bread.
On Wednesday I made white chili for lunch. This is a recipe Noah's mom gave to me when we got married. It is so good! On Wednesday I also baked a couple loaves of sandwich bread because we had planned to have Reubens later in the week.
On Thursday I made some quesadillas with leftover turkey, beans, cheese, and whatever else was around that I could throw in. Quesadillas are a great way to use up bits of leftovers. We ate them with warmed up green beans from the freezer.
On Friday we had leftovers for lunch. Probably chili and quesadillas. During this week I actually did prepare a lot of different meals for lunch but I typically try to prepare a big batch of something that will last for multiple days so I'm not always prepping something new.
On Saturday we had cheese soup and biscuits. Cheese soup is another recipe from Noah's mom. My version of the recipe is a bit incomplete (it is missing the quantities of a couple of ingredients) but it is quite similar to the recipe below.
We make our cheese soup with ham rather than Canadian bacon. This soup is so delicious!
Dinner
On Monday I cooked a spatchcocked turkey for dinner following the recipe below.
It kind of turned out ok. It took longer to cook than the 45 minutes the recipe boasts. And that was even with my forgetting to decrease the temperature partway through the cooking time. Quite a bit of the meat was dry. To be honest, I don't really like turkey, and every time we cook one I say that I don't want to cook turkey ever again. We had the turkey with some mashed potatoes, gravy, and some kind of vegetable on the side.
On Tuesday and Wednesday we had more leftover turkey and mashed potatoes.
By Thursday it was clear everyone was not that crazy about the mashed potatoes so I turned them into potato patties. I am not sure what recipe I followed, but I think it was similar to the one below. The potato patties were devoured alongside some leftover white chili.
On Friday we cooked corned beef in the crockpot for Reubens. This is seriously the easiest way to cook corned beef. Plop it into the crockpot with the included seasoning, stick in a probe thermometer like this one, and cook it on HIGH until the thermometer reads 190-205 degrees Farenheit. Cooking it to the specified temperature is very important so that you end up with corned beef that is nice and tender to use for sandwiches.
We make our Reubens with homemade sauerkraut (sources linked below), homemade sandwich bread (updated blog post on that subject is coming soon), and Thousand Island dressing (which is store bought). We are big fans of grilled sandwiches around here, especially Reubens.
At the end of the week I also made the multi-bean bake linked below to go with the rest of our meals. I have made it more than once without the called for ground beef and bacon. I have even made it without the pork and beans and butter beans too. Really, you can make it with whatever combination of beans you desire. Just be sure to keep the ratio of sauce to beans the same. I ended up having to make more sauce to go with the beans this time because I over calculated how many beans I needed.
A note about recipes calling for beans: It is actually quite easy to cook beans at home without babysitting them on the stove. I can typically cook 1-2 pounds of beans in my crockpot on HIGH in 3-4 hours. (This cooking method works whether or not you soak your beans beforehand.) Pour in your beans, fill the pot nearly all the way with water, and let it do its thing. You can check it periodically to make sure there is still enough water, but it should do just fine. Once you hit three hours, pull out a couple beans and taste them. If they still feel hard or gritty, even just a little bit gritty, put the lid back on and keep cooking. Check them again in 20-30 minutes. You want them to be soft and easily chewable, but if they cook too long, they will turn into a starchy, mushy mess. Kidney beans and white beans seem especially prone to turning into mush, so I make sure to keep a closer eye on them rather than black beans which hold together well and pinto beans which I'm probably just blending into refried beans anyways.
To prep for the multi-bean bake I cooked a crockpot full of beans three days in a row. First white beans, which I also needed for the white chili, then black beans, and lastly kidney beans. Whatever beans ended up being leftover I stashed them in the freezer. It might sound like a lot of work, cooking so many beans in one week, and it certainly would have been easier to use canned beans, but cooking dry beans is healthier, cheaper, and I have saved myself some time later on by having cooked beans waiting for me in the freezer.
Well, here we are, at the end of this blog post. It definitely turned out longer than I anticipated, but I guess I just have a lot to share about food.
If we count up every time I cooked or prepared a new meal during this week, we'll end up with fifteen different meals or components of meals. That number is a little high, and it's mostly due to the many different lunches I planned. But you'll see in the following week that I became much more efficient in my meal planning.
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