meal-planning – Little House on the Fairy Hill

Cooking and Housekeeping In a Construction Zone

It helps if you trick yourself into thinking you are camping, I’m not gonna lie.

We are trickling into our 12th week with no kitchen, our 13th week of construction, which is long enough that when we borrowed a friend’s house in New Hampshire for a weekend in back in October, I brought all the supplies to make meatballs because I was just so excited at the idea of a sink, a stove and counter space, all in the same place.

Luxury.

Going into this process, we were told we would be 10-12 weeks without a kitchen. In reality, it’s going to be about 20 weeks all in. Straight through the holidays, which is heartbreaking to me. But here we are, and the only way out is through.

The framing is done, the roof is on, and while it is still a shell of a house on the back with zipper walls to keep the front living quarters warm, we are making so much progress.

The construction, excited though we are, is moving along but also is definitely grinding a little on us. For weeks now the driveway and surrounds to the house have just been mud, mud mud.

And we’ve been writing checks, a lot of checks. It’s pretty overwhelming.

Everything everywhere all at once, that’s what this is. Still, we chose this, and we knew that we were going to be walking a line financially to get all of this done.

With some more time to go before chaos of the house being pulled apart ends,and the house starts to be slowly put back together, we’re in it for the long haul because at this point, there’s nothing we can do about it.

We’re trying to just breathe through it every day.

One thing we haven’t done much of is eat out, or switch to paper plates. So far our system of washing things in the bathroom sink and cooking in is working pretty well. While we packed up our crock pot, and it’s pretty good and buried in our storage space, I found an early Black Friday deal at Kohl’s for $17 for a 5 quart crock pot, which is coming in handy as it starts to get colder. While I hate to spend money for a thing we already have, it’s worth it if it means we get through this part without a ton of take out.

My husband has been carrying most of the load of cooking during the week, and I do much of the meal planning and weekend cooking, We’ve’ve been eating pretty well. A lot of one pan meals or food on the grill, of course, and certainly there are some things that are easier than others to do, but so far, so good.

Like Instant Pot Beef Bourguignon – this is a household favorite, and while beef prices are omg high, it makes quite a few meals, and we can freeze a portion or two for later. It’s a cozy treat, and I’ll slice, saute and freeze the leftover mushrooms for a later meal. We had that about 2 weeks ago and it was delicious.

We’ve been trying to carve back on our grocery spending, but it is hard when we’re having to flex our plans for so long.

My sister brought us tons of potatoes, onions, spaghetti and butternut squash and sweet potatoes from upstate NY, so we are incorporating those into our meals. Every now and again I stock up at Costco as well, and add to that the regular grocery shops, our winter share – there’s 2 more distributions – and our meat share, and we’re doing pretty great.

Here’s what we have to cook with right now:

A 2 burner hot plate loaned by a friend. This is a great tool that we use on the daily
A small older microwave that we’re hoping doesn’t die before we get a kitchen back
Grill with a single burner, so if we need something to cook faster or hotter than the hot plate we use that. Downside – on the porch, and it’s November in New England
A rice cooker – this thing is 20 years old, sees use multiple times a week and has for years, and is just absolutely the best kitchen tool. We buy rice in 15-lb bags and eat through it several times a year.
An Ooni pizza oven, a gift to Eli some years ago. While it’s a bit of setup and work, the option to have homemade pizza is lovely.
The coffee pot, without which we would not function.
An electric tea kettle. We love it and use it constantly.
An instant pot. Ours died 2 weeks after our kitchen was demolished and my neighbor gifted us hers for free.
A crock pot – we accidentally packed ours up and can’t find it in storage, so we replaced it with a $17 5-quart version last week

So look, we’re not short of options. While it’s not ideal to be prepping in the living room and washing plates in the bathroom sink, we’re eating pretty well and everything is staying pretty clean. I mean, we’re in a construction zone, so the floors outside of our living spaces, ugh, but otherwise we’re in good shape. I vacuum every day, we try to wipe down surfaces and the 1 sink all the time, and every couple weeks the bathroom gets deep cleaned. The floors get wiped down a lot as well, but keeping them clean is the hardest part. I took some pictures of the living room/pantry/prep area/dining area as well as the bathroom to help show what we’re doing.

So what are we eating this week in our little construction zone?

Use up: Grapes, Tomatoes, Cucumber, Cabbage, leftovers

Sunday: Skillet Ravioli Lasagna & Fattoush Salad

Monday: Our busiest day, Eli Cooks
Tuesday: TBD, just us

Wednesday: Slow Cooker Sausage and Potato Soup (it calls for kale but we’re out so I’ll add spinach at the end)

Thursday: Rachael Travels, Eli Cooks
Friday: Rachael brings home dinner from NYC’s Chinatown – Mei Lei Wah’s famous Pineapple Pork Buns and some other good stuff. I’ll also bring home some bagels.
Saturday: The forecast says some weather is coming, so of course, soup. Probably chicken tortilla soup in the crock pot – everyone likes it, and add some rice and croutons and it’s a comforting and delicious meal for a cold night
Sunday: Eli CooksMonday: Chili and Eli’s Corn Bread

The First of the Sunflowers

It’s August. While everything is still green and lovely, the prolonged stretches between rains mean that slowly that is changing although we did get a soaking, all-day rain a couple of days ago.

Last week we brought home eggplants and tomatoes from our farm share, along with the greens that have been so prevalent until now. We are officially moving into late summer.
We also brought home 5 gorgeous sunflowers picked by my lovely daughter. I love sunflowers – they are so magical.

We are having waves of heat interspersed with cooler days, with temperature swings of 50s and low 60s overnight to ramping up to the mid-90s occasionally. It’s been an odd summer, but aren’t they all now? One day it was so hot we could barely move, the next I had to change into sweatpants because it was downright chilly.

As weird as it is, we’re enjoying it.

We’re enjoying summer food, too – last Friday night it was too hot to cook so we made a salad and a charcuterie board. Detailed meal plans that make sure we have hot, home-cooked food during the school year begin to degrade at the beginning of summer, and by this point in time we are full-on winging it. The kids can spend extended days at their Dad’s, mealtimes become focused around when they woke up. For my daughter, now 16, this is likely her last summer of idleness before jobs and college prep consume her time. She’s bored now, actually, so that may come sooner than later.

The world seems to be descending into a kind of darkness we haven’t seen in a long time – Gazans are literally starving, the world’s efforts to make a whole people disappear. The war in Ukraine lingers with uncertain (or possibly terribly certain) outcomes ahead, and our own country has built a secret police that takes people away in broad daylight from their homes, cars and gardens. Cuts to food programs have a horribleness I can’t understand – in the wealthiest country in the world, in the wealthiest point in history, it’s shameful.

It has oddly reversed roles for Eli and I – normally I’m the political one but the more things worse, the more he monitors, his protection instincts firing on all cylinders, while I want to close in the walls of our sanctuary here at Sithean, just to keep us all safe. Which, of course, I can’t, that requires engagement.

And I do delight in our sanctuary while I worry. Sitting on the porch watching dragonflies and bees just doing their thing is one of my favorite weekend afternoon activities.

We’re just a couple weeks away from breaking ground in our endless efforts to make our dreams and reality the same for this place. It’s happening, and it’s going to be amazing. But a lot of stress to get there, for sure. Once we break ground, we’re off to 30-week odyssey that includes about 10 or 12 of those weeks without a kitchen. So we’re eating down the pantry and freezers as quickly as I can, as we have about 8 weeks left until we convert to grill, instant pot, rice cooker, air fryer and crockpot. I’m content we’ll figure it all out.

Mostly. I am stressed about it too, but the only way out is through.

Last week we added a second storage space down the road – we think we’ll need 3 by the time this is all said and done, but one thing at a time.. We’re just about done picking everything other than paint colors, with my daughter’s bathroom still the one room that’s forming up. If all goes well, we’ll close and pull the permits this coming week, and start in mid-August.

Our weekends are buried in preparation, planning, sketching every room and every floor. It’s very much fun and also mentally tiring, but in the end our art project of a home will come to life. And we’re ready, after all the long years of hoping, planning and thinking, it’s here.

Last weekend we finally took a day off and rested from the house planning We took the kids to the movies. It’s some of the last expensive fun we’ll have for a while.

And as we eat down the pantry and the freezers, I imagine meals will get more creative, but that will be fun.

So what are we eating this week?

Use up: lettuce, mangoes, peaches, cucumbers

Monday: Dinner out, a small celebration

Tuesday: Just Eli and I, so we made Jose Pizarro’s zucchini gazpacho – pretty good, I added ½ an onion. Liked it, probably won’t make it again. https://www.theguardian.com/food/2025/jul/08/courgette-almond-gazpacho-recipe-jose-pizarro

Wednesday: Garlic chicken, rice pilaf, salad

Thursday: Chicken Kebabs, rice, roasted broccoli

Friday: Just E and I, so bowl food

Saturday: Just E and I, tbd
Sunday: E’s enchiladas, refried beans, salad, mango and regular salsa

Monday: Chili & macaroni salad

I expect it to be a delicious week, busy in preparation, but also one of the last few of quiet before the transformation begins. Happy August!

November Stockpile

About 5 minutes after I published my last post, our schedule changed. I had managed to prep the refried beans and made some hard boiled eggs, but I didn’t get to the cookies, and we punted on the Onion Pakoda, as badly as I wanted them, because we ran out of steam, substituting some samosa from the freezer instead.

And then the kids schedule changed around as well as their Dad had to delay time with them. The good news is that we were able to shift our plans and still cook in. Well. One night we caved and bought pizza dough and cheese because we had no plan whatsoever, but we managed otherwise.

I wrote last time about spending an astounding amount on food this month. Every November, our food spending skyrockets. My total for the last post was $805, but if I subtract the non-food items, it was more like $645. But then it went a higher still. Our Walden Local Meat share was delivered, we project to spend about $18 on milk for the rest of the month (a little over a gallon a week is what we use most of the time), we’ll need a few more groceries – and then there’s the Thanksgiving cheese.

All in, our current tab was $939, and I expect to close the month out over $1500.

Zoinks. Not going to lie, that gives me the shakes.

But. Reasons.

First – a disclaimer. We are blessed as heck and able to invest in our bellies, not everyone is. My endless gratitude for our ability to stock up every November.

Second – a disclaimer. This is food we will eat for quite some time, not just this month. But the deals are now, so into the pantry and freezer it goes.

Also, this includes some more expensive event food. I’m on for a bunch of items for a 30+ person Thanksgiving dinner. And at this time next week, we’ll have every piece of our Christmas dinner other than greens and potatoes. Turkey, cranberries, stuffing, you name it – in the cabinets or the freezer, because we are having a turkey dinner, and the time to buy that stuff is now.

I do not shop like this all the time.

For the first 3 months of each year Eli and I cut back pretty hard – pantry eat down, and only buying what we need for the week. I expect my grocery bill for January-March, including our meat share, to run $1800 or less for the 3 months, or an average of $600/month, loaded towards the back. I will caveat that by saying we may pre-pay for our Walden Local share this year, which affords us a discount overall, which would be $1800 up front. That’s a full year, and it would reduce our meat bill by over $600 for the year.

Third – a disclaimer. I didn’t do a great job of tracking our costs or using things up in 2024. We started 2024 with Eli gravely ill, me juggling work, kids, house and animals and we ended it with me juggling the equivalent of 2.5 full time jobs as the division I work in got sold, and I have been overseeing the transition, a 537-person team, and my day job. Add to that our house and 2 busy kids, family, friends, the fact that both our refrigerator in the house and the one in the garage died this year and had to be replaced, and I feel lucky this year to have a handle on anything.

Despite that, we’ve done better this year on food management than in several of the past years.

In 2025, I’m going to track my food costs by category rather than overall to see if that helps get our costs down. We’ll have a few savings, in that it’s our neighbor’s turn to pay for the summer CSA ($675 annually spread over 2 families and 20 weeks, which works out to $16.88 per family per week for tons of produce and flowers). For example, I put the dog’s food and treats in our grocery budget right now, but not chicken feed or bunny food and treats. So I’ll carve that out.

I also want to know what we really spend and use.

We have reason to believe that we’ll finally be renovating in 2025, which we’ve postponed for 4 years because of a) a pandemic b) a monstrous tax bill from closing down my business that blew a hole in all of our plans for almost 2 years and c) some real job instability on my part and that meant I would much rather postpone than be in a bad financial position.

That means that we’ll need to eat down literally everything in the house, something that makes my ‘a stocked pantry is an emergency fund you can eat‘ wiring get a little anxious. So planning our grocery bill for next year is a little wonky in that I know we’ll spend less, I’m just not sure exactly how it’s going to play out. I literally hate running out of food, but I’m going to have to learn to live with it.

Oddly, eating things down initially puts more stuff in the freezer than it takes out. An example is those refried beans I made last week. While it did get rid of 2 mason jars of dried beans on the counter and give me 5+ meals worth of refried beans, it added them to the freezer, which got much more full as a result. Similarly, I periodically batch roast, skin and freeze acorn and butternut squashes so they don’t go bad, but that too is freezer space.

So, with all that said, why November for a stockpile?
1. Our winter share typically has 4 pickups starting in November and the volumes are pretty high for veggies. Some of the items last until early spring. Also, while this year we got our farm stock up in late September, most years we go around now. So we are inundated with winter veggies such as squashes, sweet potatoes, beets, carrots and onions.
2. Food prices are often rock bottom for the holidays. This is the time to buy sugar, flour, and other baking ingredients. I buy stuffing mix and other Christmas turkey dinner accompaniments now, because the discount won’t be as good in December when I need these things.
3. I’m a squirrel. There’s something about November that makes me want to tuck food into cabinets like nobody’s business

So we go into the winter like the pioneers of old, with a larder stocked with all the things, and then eat it down. Unlike them, if I run out of wine or coffee, or II lack something, I can go get it. I live in the country but there’s really good sushi about 1.5 miles away. Deprived, we are not.

But then it’s time to eat it all, and eating things down through the winter feels good. I delight in it, actually. It’s fun to work our way through that 50-lb bag of onions. It’s fun to meal plan starting with ‘Ok, so what do we have?‘. It’s marvelous to pull pesto out of the freezer to top our homemade pizza, and smell summer, knowing it will come again.

Some people shop and cook weekly and that really works for them, or even shopping and cooking more often. Others cook once and eat all week. We’ve tried both methods, and neither works really well for us – we just are always on the move, and because of that, having a very stocked house helps.

As the day wound down, I had prepped bulgogi for the freezer, made a double batch of turkey meatballs for Monday’s, our Sunday dinner, and taken the mushrooms I didn’t use and sliced and sauteed them. Once that was done I popped them in the freezer for later use.

A note about those sauteed mushrooms. I used to never use up mushrooms fast enough and ended up composting one too many of them. Then I started buying frozen sauteed mushrooms because I didn’t want to waste any fresh ones, but there are some recipes that previously frozen or dried mushrooms won’t work for. Then one day I was looking at some unused mushrooms and had an aha moment. Now this is how I deal with excess mushrooms.

So what are we eating this week?

Use up: cantaloupe, strawberries, beets, a random rutabaga I have, salad veggies
Lunches: LEFTOVERS, baby. All the way.

Sunday: Instant Pot Beef Bourguignon, a house favorite, warm naan, and salad with lettuce that miraculously came with our winter share. I almost left out the potatoes, but at the last minute I remembered. Whoops.

Note how I cleverly crammed the potatoes in the over-full pot.

Monday: Spaghetti and turkey meatballs, homemade bread, roasted broccoli

Tuesday: Kids are with their Dad, Eli and I have what we affectionately refer to as Bowl Food, usually a piece of salmon over a salad, or couscous, or cauliflower rice with some veggies mixed in. I love, love bowl food.

Wednesday: We have a lot of Thanksgiving food prep, so Eli will cook something simple. Could be as simple as Trader Joe’s Orange Chicken and rice, we’ll see.

Thursday: Thanksgiving. ALL the foods. All of them.

Friday: Recovery from all the foods, the kids are with Dad and Eli and I often go out on a date rather than cook. Possibly my pants still fit me, possibly not.

Saturday: Roasted beets and maybe bowl food again. Or soup.

Sunday: Chicken Souvlaki Bowls and probably I’ll start baking cookies. I bake a lot of cookies in December.

And then it will be Monday again. And so it goes.

Spring Arrives

Spring finally arrived at Sithean after a cold spell following the Easter holiday, complete wtih forsythia, tulips and daffodils. Even the myrtle and the apricot tree astarted blooming. everything turned green all at once.

It’s been raining a lot, so Eli and I have only been slowly able to do yard cleanup. Still, it’s coming along – and hopefully by early May it will be mostly done. I’m regretting not cleaning out the big garden last fall, but I also find it peaceful to be out tidying it up. I started a few seeds, but not enough and not early, so I’ll be getting some plant starts from family and maybe buying a few seedlings for the garden this year, but I’m just not stressing about it. Whatever happens, happens.

This year has moved at breakneck speed, and the fact that it’s already two-thirds through April is a little shocking to me. Some of that was the series of crises that hit and absorbed the first 3 months of the year, and the rest was general busyness – work, kid activities, life in general.

I managed to take a 5-day weekend off, and started knocking away at my to-do list, which included yard work, some appointments, house organization, and rest. The kids needed warm-weather clothes, my son needed a haircut, the yard needed work and the house was slowly being overtaken by laundry mountains. But also I needed a few days away from my laptop, and I was recognizing the start of burnout in myself.

So the kids and I trekked off to the mall while Eli worked – it’s nice to get some time just the 3 of us occasionally, and he is working to finish his book, which sometimes means the fun stuff has to be put aside. We grocery shopped, they worked on projects, we went into Boston with Eli and their Dad for fancy Afternoon Tea.

Now that the crises – and there were 3, stacked up on one another – were past, we started once again to work on eating down the pantry and freezer with some simple meals. I did a Trader Joe’s shop, and then we decided to do a 3-week, $100 food challenge. Everything we needed for $100, shopping first in our house. Our pantry eat-down in the winter had been blown up by medical events, and in April I was just too tired and burned out to do the planning required. We had also had some unexpected expenses – my car’s radiator blew, the kids and Eli needed some clothes, a few things cost more than planned by a fair bit. So it was time to tighten our belts and use what we had.

Also there was a frozen turkey taking up way too much space in the freezer, and I needed a plan to get that sucker out and eaten.

First though, I had to make sure there was enough wine, fruit and snacks to get us through. I’m nothing if not practical, and I know when to expect a rebellion based on a lack of snack options.

So what are we eating?
Use up: Mangoes, sweet potatoes, kale, lettuce, eggs and I realized we have both regular and pearl couscous, plus fregola so we need to eat up a lot of tiny round pasta in the near future.

Meal prep: Bulgogi for the freezer, meatballs for Monday, egg muffins for breakfasts*

Saturday: Instant Pot Carnitas sliders, Fattoush salad, sliced veggies, mango salsa
Sunday: Trying something new – Crispy Pesto Chicken with Whipped Feta and Tomatoes and a favorite, Harvest Moon Kale Salad. I had frozen some delicata squash rings in the winter, and I pulled them out to thaw and roast.
Monday: Spaghetti and meatballs, popovers, roasted broccoli. There were some extra meatballs from making them on Saturday, so I put those in the freezer for a future meal.
Tuesday: Eli cooks for just the 2 of us
Wednesday: Eli cooks for all 4 of us
Thursday: Typically it’s just Eli, I and my son for dinner on Thursdays. Since my daughter doesn’t like salmon it’s a great night to pull some out of the freezer and thaw it. We’re going to try Sheet Pan Honey Mustard Salmon with the fingerling potatoes I got at Trader Joe’s and some of the 2 lbs of brussels sprouts we have in the fridge
Friday: it’s just Eli and I, so we’ll make something with part of a bag of shrimp in the freezer and pick a theme for flavor. Using one of the tiny round pastas, whatever veggies are in the ‘need to use up‘ category, it will be a quick meal after dropping the kids off at Dad’s.
Saturday: We have a busy day, so we’ll likely prep something in advance
Sunday: Top your own pizza night, made in the Ooni oven, one of our favorite things.
Monday: Chicken and Rice circa 1975, one of the house favorites. I saute 1 medium onion and garlic, add in 2.5 cups of rice to saute for a couple of minutes (stir constantly) then move it to an oiled 9x`13″ baking dish that’s on a jelly roll pan in case of leaks. I put 4-6 chicken leg quarters on top, add a quart of chicken broth, then sprinkle the top with salt, pepper and garlic powder.

Happy Spring!

Flexibility: My Secret Weapon

(For meal planning and life in general)

It is rare that our meal plans work out exactly the way we plan it. As the kids get older, their preferences for whether they spend the night with their Dad or Eli and I play out differently, and we are, and have always been pretty easygoing about the co-parent schedule. Life happens. No one feels like cooking what we planned or we run out of time.

I have learned over the years not to view meal plan changes as failures of my planning skills. They are simply a part of the mix – we end up needing to use something up, we have less or more people at the table than we though we would. Or something. The ability to be flexible is really, really important, as important as having the meal plan itself.

So when we got to Friday the 2nd week of February with chicken broth for chicken soup with rice in the crockpot, pizza dough cold-proofing, and the kids deciding that they wanted to hang with Dad for the weekend, in no small part due to a game they wanted to play there, I mixed it up. We postponed the soup and pizza to busier nights with kids and I pulled out my list of recipes.

Pizza dough and broth both freeze well.

We had skipped our meat share delivery in January for our planned pantry and freezer eat-down that never happened because life did, so when it showed up early in February, we were still bursting at the gills. And honestly when I take something out these days, I seem to put something in – this alone week I added butternut squash and sauteed mushrooms to the freezer, despite removing meats for meals – so it’s still pretty full!

I took out a pound of chicken and decided we should try a modified version of Crispy Chicken Ceasar Salad – modified because I neither had anchovy paste nor cabbage, but I did have a bag of slaw mix and lots of kale. I also added a whole avocado and some fresh basil to the dressing, because I could. And we didn’t have any bread so I toasted walnuts instead, with a little oil and Everything Bagel seasoning. I substituted fish sauce for anchovy paste at a ratio of 1:1.

It was honestly one of the best dinners I’ve made in a while. And listen, while it was not super frugal, it was decently frugal - because you slice the chicken breasts really thin, I got 8 cutlets of varying sizes out of it. The slaw mix was $3.49, the kale $1.40 (I used half a bunch and massaged it with a little olive oil and lemon juice to make it more tender, next time I would use the full bunch at $2.79) and the chicken was the splurge at $8/lb for our meat share. Call the dressing ingredients $3.50 and we’re talking about $16.39 for a meal we could not stop eating and left us with a teensy bit of salad, some more dressing, and 2 small chicken cutlets left over. I used all things I had.

But did I go get more slaw mix so we could eat it again? Yes, yes I did.

So what are we eating?

Use Up: avocados, sweet potatoes, squash, eggs

Lunches: Tuna Salad, Leftovers

Earlier this month:
Sunday: Baked Sage Chicken Meatballs with Parmesan Orzo. Except with ground turkey, and using mostly dried herbs rather than fresh because that’s what we had. Recommended by Ross Yoder over at Buzzfeed, who also recommends that amazing Chicken Ceasar I was raving about. I really like most of the things he recommends.

I really like meatball dishes, and I especially like it when I can make a double batch and freeze them for later. Which is precisely what I did. I’ll be honest. Good, but not to so good we’re rushing to have it again

Monday: Chicken soup with rice and popovers, the inevitable gift of the roaster chicken we had the prior week.

Tuesday: Just Eli and I, so salmon, roasted sweet potatoes and sauteed spinach with garlic, olive oil and salt.

Wednesday – Valentine’s Day: I found fresh heart-shaped ravioli and heart-shaped macarons at Costco, and what can I say, I’m a sucker. I made a meat sauce and a salad to go with.

Note: I used to be somewhat cynical about Valentine’s Day, but then Covid happened and now I am all in for all the celebrating. Go ahead, make up a holiday, we’ll celebrate it here.

Thursday: Thursdays my daughter had her riding lesson, and then usually spends the night with her Dad. Since it’s just Eli, our son and I, we went for super duper simple, Trader Joe’s Orange Chicken, Dumplings, Edamame and Rice. Total prep time – 5 to 7 nanoseconds. Especially good because Thursday was the stop between 2 celebrations/major dinners that week.

Friday: My daughter’s birthday, we got Sushi for dinner and had cheesecake

Saturday: The kids were with us last weekend, so I went heavily to their preferences. On Saturday we had the crispy chicken Ceasar again, but I made butter noodles and some sliced veggies for my son.

Sunday: Beef Bulgogi that I had marinated and frozen earlier, rice, roasted broccoli

This week

Saturday: My son had a friend over, and we had Instant Pot Beef Bourguignon, a house favorite (it’s even better as leftovers the next day), and popovers with some sliced cukes, tomatoes and avocados. While I don’t make this recipe often, as it’s not a very frugal meal to make, it’s really good, and one of the more-requested winter meals.

Sunday:

Breakfast was our favorite pancakes, bacon and strawberries

Chicken Souvlaki Bowls with Garlic Fries only I’ll use both sweet potatoes and potatoes. And I’m going to make this salad for Monday night so I peeled, cubed and roasted some butternut squash in preparation.
I’ll roast some broccoli to go with tonight’s dinner, since we have lots. I made tzatziki as well.
To help with meal prep, I’ll make some barbeque sauce, pickled onions, and maybe some kind of sweet for my son’s lunches.

I started prepping food and the meal plan and realized that the grocery delivery folks had brought me split chicken breasts instead of the boneless skinless variety. I had an emergency stash of boneless skinless chicken tenders that I had been saving for a larger meal – Costco packages being enormous – and took those out to thaw, and changed up my menu. As I also peeled and seeded the butternut squash for Monday’s salad I realized I was only going to need a little less than half, so I sliced the rest and put it in the freezer.

Why do I do so much cooking on the weekend? Because if we didn’t, we wouldn’t have lunches, snacks or sweets.

Monday: Mondays are busy – the kids go back to school after vacation, my daughter has her skating lesson, and there’s not a lot of time to cook. I had been planning sliders, but instead we’ll have have Chicken and Rice Circa 1975 with the split chicken breasts, the Ina Garten salad referenced above and sliced avocado and cukes.

Tuesday: it’s just Eli and I we’ll make Lentil Sausage soup with leftover homemade bread. Leftovers keep me fed during the work day for a few days, after the beef stew and leftover chicken run out.

Wednesday: Another busy day here, but we have some pizza dough in the freezer, so BBQ chicken pizza and cheese pizza in the oven. I reserved a couple of chicken tenders from Sunday’s meal to go on the pizza.

Thursday: Salmon bowls over the last of the Fregola pasta (this stuff is not super frugal but it’s so good) with spinach and whatever other veggies we have.

Friday: the kids will likely go to their Dad’s, so Eli and I will try Crispy Black Bean Tacos with some guacamole

Saturday: If no kids again, we’ll make a Massaman Curry Stir Fry over cauliflower rice. Usually we use chicken, but we might switch to shrimp, since i have some in the freezer and we’ll have had a lot of chicken this week.

Sunday: the kids will come home again, and we’ll make homemade bolognese and have a pasta dinner. And we’ll prep something for Monday.

Do I think we’ll hit every meal I plan? Nope. But that’s ok. We’ll adapt.

A Year of Abundance

I learned from my friend Melissa years ago to choose a word to frame each new year. New Years is her favorite holiday – full of possibilities and fresh starts, and I love that outlook. This year my word is Abundance, and I do feel abundant in every area of our life.

On New Year’s Eve the kids came back from their grandparent’s house exhausted and with nothing left in their social batteries after a week of solid events.

I made Beef and Broccoli from scratch – total winner, and a smashed cucumber salad that was good but not so good I would make it again and we ordered a bunch of takeout. Eli made a fire in the wood stove, and he and I watched Barbie, while kids did their thing. It was quiet but very nice with everyone taking the time to restore their energy in their own ways.

I meant to make Chinese Chive Dumplings for dinner as well, but I forgot to get wheat starch to make the dough, and while I could have substituted wonton wrappers, it wouldn’t have been the same. So instead, I chopped up the chives and froze them for a later meal. Honestly, you really can freeze almost everything.

I’ve been really trying to preserve things lately and avoid waste, even slicing up and sauteeing mushrooms and then freezing them if we have some we aren’t using. I had some of our last apples that were starting to get a little mealy, so I turned them into cinnamon applesauce for our big family brunch too – just peeled, cored, and popped the apple bits in the crockpot with 2 tablespoons of sugar, a decent slug of cinnamon, and a little water. It was really good, and I sent most of it home with my sister since we had so much food.

And here we are in 2024, entering it softly, and with optimism. We put the last of the tax impacts from 2022 to bed in December, and so we’re walking into the new year with a level of freedom from financial burdens we haven’t had for a while.

Interest rates are very high, so we’re not sure exactly when the renovations will start, but it’s likely to be late this year or early 2025 because we want to be thoughtful about how much we spend and commit to spending. It’s hard to keep waiting, but we also know in our hearts it’s the right decision. It will happen, and in the meantime we’ll do some small-ish improvements that give us some quality of life, like replacing a few windows and finally bricking the walkway, and a few other things.

But despite having to keep pushing off the renovation, we’re very much at peace. Everyone got things they needed and wanted over the holidays. We got to spend time with family. January, despite a couple of work trips, is going to be relatively peaceful, and we deliberately kept the first weekend open other than one errand that will take a couple of hours, because we all just need a break.

We are slowly de-Christmasing the house, and I find the lack of ‘stuff’ in it refreshing. And what’s nice is that we really do have everything we need and then some. I’m grateful for the bounty in our lives and that we’re able to share it with others.

And we’re having a very frugal month – eating down the pantry, focusing on our financial future. We do have a ski weekend planned, and a dinner at the end of the month with my parents, but those are budgeted in.

This week we’re eating simple and healthy. To kick off the new year I made the Green Goddess Salad that is making it’s way around TikTok. It’s really good, especially after it sits for a little bit for the flavors to blend. Also, it makes a metric pantload of salad (this being the technical unit of measure), so you might want to consider making it for a party or as I did, give some away.

Use up: We have a lot of green veggies to use – spinach, baby kale and lettuce, brussels sprouts as well as tons of root veggies.

Monday January 1st, 2024: Homemade chili, cornbread, green goddess salad, guacamole

Tuesday: Just Eli and I, salmon over cauliflower rice with veggies

Wednesday: Grilled chicken wings that were in the freezer, couscous, roasted brussels sprouts and onions

Thursday: Eli cooks with a protein from the freezer

Friday: Homemade pizza with various and assorted veggies and toppings

Saturday: Baked sage chicken meatballs (only we have ground turkey, not ground chicken) with parmesan orzo & roasted vegetables

Sunday: Clam Chowder and homemade bread

Monday I’ll travel for the first time in 2 months, so Eli and the kids will have a few days of their own meal plans before I come home and we start the meal planning again.

Happy New Year to all.