Welcome to a week where we didn't eat oatmeal almost every day for breakfast!
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| One of my favorite mugs. |
Contrary to what you might think, I don't plan a perfect menu every single week when I first write it down. I know this kind of defeats the purpose of planning so much ahead of time, but sometimes I'm tired, all of our recipes sound boring, and nothing seems very appetizing to me at the moment. I just stare at those little squares on the whiteboard with absolutely no idea what to write.
What do I do when I'm struggling to fill out the menu? I pick easy things, even if they're just a placeholder for something else I'll write in later on. (I even created a "Stress Free Meals" category in our Paprika recipe app to help me out on days like this.) Eggs are easy to whip up for lunch. Roasting a whole chicken is simple and the leftovers last for days. Not to mention you can simmer the carcass for stock after you've eaten all of the meat. Noah had been talking about some kind of sausage and potato dish that his parents used to make so I wrote that down for later on in the week. I wish I had taken a picture of the original menu just so I could show you how much it changed throughout the week.
Meal plans don't have to be set in stone. You wrote it down, you can change it if you need to.
Breakfast
Like I mentioned earlier, I wanted something besides steel cut oats for breakfast this week. On Monday we had yogurt with toppings and some eggs I boiled the night before. After breakfast I baked two loaves of oatmeal bread from The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book to have around for breakfast that week. This is the cookbook I use for nearly all of the baking I do with my freshly ground flour. I found my copy on Thrift Books.
For the rest of the week we had toast, eggs, yogurt, and fruit for breakfast.
Noah has been asking if we could use my babka recipe to make French toast for breakfast someday. So on Friday I made the babka and we somehow managed to save it for Saturday. This babka is soooooo good and it made the best French toast I have ever eaten!
Lunch
Do you remember those "brothy beans" I made last week that were kind of bland? I repurposed them into lunches for this week. We try really hard to not waste food, even if we make something that doesn't turn out very well. On Monday I mixed up the beans with some cooked quinoa and shredded Mozzarella cheese, and then baked it in the oven for a bit. It improved the beans quite a lot and the kids actually ate some of them. On Tuesday I used the bean mixture paired with some chopped fresh spinach as a filling for quesadillas. Crispy tortillas make everything better. :-)
Lunches for the rest of the week were a combination of dinner leftovers and some quesadillas I made on Friday because I just did not have the energy to make soup like I had planned. I threw some cheese and black beans into some tortillas and grilled them in a skillet. We added spinach and avocado to them and enjoyed a quick and tasty meal.
Dinner
On Monday we had falafel wraps for dinner. This is one of the more intensive meals in my recipe collection because I make the falafel and flatbread simultaneously so everything is fresh for dinner. You could use store bought tortillas or flatbread to make this meal easier.
The first time I made falafel I tried baking them in the oven as the recipe says to but they turned out quite dry and not very crispy. Since falafel is traditionally deep fried I thought doing a sort of shallow frying would work better. So I end up making little falafel patties and cook them on the stove in a little oil. This helped me achieve the crispy exterior and moist interior I was looking for.
We eat our falafel wraps with spinach, yogurt, green onions, and whatever else we have around that would be tasty. Tomatoes and feta would be yummy too.
There was quite a bit of flatbread leftover from the falafel wraps so on Wednesday I made what were basically homemade chicken tenders that I baked in the oven and we ate them as chicken wraps. My chicken marinade didn't add much flavor to the chicken and then the flour I dredged the chicken in didn't turn crispy in the oven like I thought it would, but it was still a tasty dinner.
On Thursday I roasted a whole chicken for dinner. I know it sounds intimidating, roasting an entire chicken, but it is actually pretty easy. You prep it, throw it in the oven, and bake it. That's it.
I like to prep my chicken the day before I'm planning to roast it. I take it out of its packaging, drain off any extra liquid, sprinkle salt all over the outside and inside the cavity, put it in a deep pan, and put it back in the fridge. There always seems to be some small bit of the chicken that hasn't thawed out quite yet so unwrapping it the day before gives it a little more time to thaw out. The next day there will be more liquid in the bottom of the pan and if you pick up the chicken and tip it over even more will come out of the cavity.
If you want to get fancy, turn your chicken over so that it is breast side up and slide your hand in between the skin and breast meat so that the skin becomes loose all over the top of the chicken. Don't rip the skin, just make sure it's loose and detached from the chicken. Now you have a place where you can introduce flavor. Stick some herbs under the skin, some butter, salt and pepper, whatever you desire.
You can learn even more about roasting chicken in the video below.
In the past I have roasted my chicken on a bed of vegetables but found that the underside of the chicken took a lot longer to cook than the top of the chicken. So this time I lined my baking sheet with foil, crunched up a few balls of foil, and set a cooling rack on top of the foil balls. This raised my chicken up off the pan even more and helped the air circulate all the way around the chicken so that everything cooked much more evenly this time. (Though I am curious to try the cast iron pan method from the video above next time.)
We also had green beans that I had stashed in the freezer from our garden, salad, and what I dubbed "miso potatoes". Quite a while ago I saved a recipe from Half Baked Harvest that was basically cooked ramen noodles swirled around in some garlic miso butter with some zucchini added in. When I went back to the website so I could send the link to my mom, the recipe had changed! I ended up sending her screenshots of the saved recipe from my Paprika app. I will share them below.
For the miso potatoes, I boiled some small potatoes cut in half and then drained and set them aside while I prepared the butter. I put the butter and garlic into the same pan, waited until it melted and started cooking the garlic, and then added the miso paste and mixed it all together. I poured the butter on top of the potatoes and made sure it was evenly distributed. These potatoes were so good! I need to make them more often.
On Friday I made Chicken A La King with some of the roast chicken. It is basically a white sauce/gravy with chicken and mushrooms in it and you eat it on top of biscuits. I'll link to the recipe below. It's one of Noah's favorite meals.
This was our second full week of Noah being gone all day working at his new job and I was feeling pretty burned out by Thursday evening. I managed to get dinner made on Friday and Noah helped me make dinner on Saturday. I filled up two baking sheets with sweet potatoes and cabbage and roasted them in the oven while Noah cooked some smoked sausage and onions in a skillet on the stove. We had some leftover green beans and salad on the side. It was an easy meal that everyone enjoyed and where I had to do very little cooking.
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