Real Food Meal Plan: Week of March 31st - April 7th

I've gotten a lot accomplished today including finishing my taxes.  Since I'm in the mood to cross things off my to-do list, I figured I'd share my meal plan for this week with you.

Last week was a meal planning fail.  We went out three out of seven nights.  Not sure what's wrong with me, but the thought of cooking just seemed so totally overwhelming this whole week.  We would have gone out a fourth night, but Reid saved the day on Thursday by offering to cook.  He's a whiz in the kitchen, and if he weren't a philosopher, I'd say he'd make a pretty good chef.  Lucky me! It was our 2nd anniversary this week, so I'm feeling extra grateful to be married to him!

Barring anymore of the too-overwhelmed-to-cook feelings this week, here's what will be on our plates:

Saturday: We ate leftover Chicken Fried Steak and mashed potatoes.  We cooked this on Friday, and it provided dinner for Saturday and lunch for Sunday too!

Sunday: Black Bean Quesadillas (didn't get made last week, so it's back on the menu this time)

Monday: Roasted Chicken** & potatoes (see recipe for slow-roasted pastured chicken below)

Tuesday: Crockpot Chuck Roast Supreme! This is by far one of our favorite (and easiest) recipes! I saved money by using the dry black beans that I cooked in the crockpot to make the Black Bean Quesadilla's above.  I saved time by making a double batch.  I'll use the second half of the batch to put in this dish on Tuesday night.

Wednesday: BBQ Chicken Pizza (with leftover chicken from last week and any leftover chicken from Monday, a little caramelized red onion, BBQ sauce, and mozzarella)

Thursday: Fettuccine & roasted cauliflower

Friday: L.O. (the chuck roast feeds us for four meals.  I'm expecting enough left overs to make it through Saturday)

Slow-Roasted Pastured Chicken

If you've never had a pastured chicken, you have to try it.  You won't find them at the grocery store.  You'll have to go to a farm.  If you're an NC friend, check out Ray Family Farms. They raise pastured poultry, hogs, and cows.  My Texas friends can find pastured chickens at Gramen Farm or the Houston Farmers Market.  They also sell them at Whole Foods, but I don't know much about the source. If you're not in NC or Houston, go to www.localharvest,org to find farms in your area.

Anyhow, the trick with pastured chicken is that if it's cooked the standard way it tends to be tougher than a regular grocery store bird.  The solution is slow-roasting, and I promise you that you won't regret it.  The end result is fall off the bone delicious chicken! It's also a very frugal way to use your chicken which I'll tell you more about soon.

Here's the recipe:

•  1 whole chicken

• Veggies for roasting (potatoes, sweet potatoes, radishes, turnips, rutabaga, squash, and onion are good for this purpose...don't use things like broccoli or other greens)

• 1.5 tsp salt* (*I really don't know the actual amount I use. I just sprinkle it all over the bird)

• 6 turns black pepper (6 turns of the pepper grinder...again, I'm not a precise cook)

• 1 stick o' butter (Just call me Paula Dean. You can get away with 3/4 of stick...but that's just no fun) 
• 1/2 cup chicken broth or water (or 1/4 cup white wine)

• Any other spices you like (optional)

Preheat your oven to 275 degrees.

Cut up your veggies into bite sized pieces.  The best combo I ever made was potatoes, onion and squash.  Throw all the veggies into a dutch oven or a baking dish. Pour the chicken broth or water in over the veggies. Cut a few half-inch pats of butter from your stick o' butter and thrown them on top of the veggies.

Put the rest of the butter (about half a stick) in a small sauce pan to melt (don't use the microwave).  Once the butter is melted, put the chicken (breast side up) into the dutch oven on top of the veggies.  Pour the melted butter over the bird, making sure to cover all of the skin.  Then sprinkle your salt and pepper all over the bird.  If you like other spices, sprinkle those on too.  Thyme, basil, paprika, etc are great choices.  You could even do cumin and chili powder if you wanted a more tex mex taste.  It's up to you! It tastes great to me with just plain ole salt and pepper though.

Put the lid on your dutch oven (or cover the baking dish with foil, making sure the foil is not touching the bird).  Cook the bird at 275 degrees for 3 hours.  Then remove the lid and bake for another 30-45 min at 375 or 400 degrees depending on your oven until internal temperature reaches 165 degrees and the skin is golden brown.  We bake at 400 degrees and get that nice rotisserie chicken look after 30 min (it actually gets even darker than the picture below. This is from many months ago, but it's the only pic I had).

We eat this roasted chicken almost every Sunday. To change the flavor profile you can also add some white wine into the baking dish.  You could squeeze a lemon in and put the squeezed halves inside the bird's cavity while cooking.  Try zesting the peel over the chicken for an extra zing. The skies' the limit!

I plan to post later this week about how making chicken this way can really save you money.  Stay tuned!

Real Food Meal Plan: Week of March 25th - 31st

Sorry this post is late!  I'm not doing anything new for dinner this week - just sticking with old favorites. 

Sunday: Third week in a row of oven fried chicken (see below for recipe) with roasted potatoes and kale

Monday: Crockpot Chicken Quinoa

Tuesday: Salmon Cakes with roasted beet salad and goat cheese* (Our Anniversary)
 *I'm pretty much changing this recipe so much that only ingredients that are the same are the beets and goat cheese.  If it's good, I'll try to remember what I did, and I'll try to measure.

Wednesday: Clam Chowder (I have a printed recipe.  Sorry no link.)

Thursday: Chicken Fried Steak (with spelt flour and lard instead of canola oil)

Friday: Black Bean Quesadillas

Reid and I have come to LOVE the oven fried chicken we've been making on Sunday.  If you'd like to enjoy it too, here's my recipe.

Ingredients:
1 whole chicken (pastured or organic if possible)
1 cup spelt flour (or another favorite flour of your choice, sprouted if possible)
1/2 t. garlic powder
1/2 t. onion powder
1/2 t. salt
1/4 t. pepper
1 t. paprika
1 egg
2 T. lard or beef tallow (optional)

It's cheaper to  by a whole chicken and cut it up yourself.  Just google "how to cut up a chicken" if you don't know how.  That's how I learned, and it's easy.

Pre-heat the oven to 425 degrees. Combine the flour and spices in a bowl.  In a separate bowl whisk the egg with 2 T. of water.  Dip the chicken pieces in the egg wash then dredge each piece  in the flour mixture.  Place the floured chicken pieces in a baking dish (they shouldn't overlap) and bake for 45 min or until internal temp reaches 165 degrees.  Flip each piece about halfway through the cooking time

I like to cook my chicken in a 12-inch cast iron skillet.  I melt about 2 T. of lard in the bottom of the skillet then I put the chicken pieces in and put the skillet in the oven.  We get the crispy, most delicious chicken ever!

Real Food Meal Plan: Week of March 17th-23rd

Today was a fun day! Not because it was St. Patrick's day but because Reid and I vowed not to do ANY work.  We checked out the Farmer's Market, bought some sheets at Bed Bath & Beyond (our current set is literally threadbare), took a walk in the Heights, and had some afternoon dessert. 

Whole Foods was selling $3 bison burgers when we stopped in, so we got a cheap lunch as well. 

We found an awesome place in the Heights called Revival Market! They have REAL sourdough bread, low temp pasteurized milk, AND lard from grassfed cows! Woohoo!  We stopped there today to stock up :)

Needless to say, I'm excited about the menu this week! First I'll share what I got in my CSA box, and then I'll tell you where I'm going to use it.  Gotta get those veggies in!

CSA Box contents: strawberries, cabbage, kale, swiss chard, micro greens, spring salad mix, leeks

We already ate the strawberries like this:

Saturday (today): Southwest Casserole (with leftover pinto beans, rice, and half of a salsa jar from last week)

Sunday: a repeat of Fried Chicken this time with sauteed chard

Monday: Cornbread Casserole

Tuesday: Sundried Tomato & Spinach Mac & Cheese (except I'm substituting kale for spinach)

Wednesday: Ground Beef & Cabbage  (Gotta use that big ole head of cabbage somehow!)

Thursday: Spud Special Soup with leeks (so this will be more like a potato and leek soup...I'm improvising!)

Friday: Barbecue Chicken Pizza** (remember, the pizza I made last week? Well the dough recipe yields 4 crusts, so this is a second go 'round.)

I cooked pizza this past Friday, then I froze the other balls o' crust to be use for the next 3 Fridays.  And...the crust tastes like honey wheat. yum!

**Money saving tip:  if you notice, the Cornbread Casserole recipe calls for half a bottle of BBQ sauce.  So I decided to do BBQ pizza this week in order to use the other half.  This way I don't have to purchase ingredients to make regular pizza sauce. All I bought was a little red onion and a chunk of mozzarella!

The Cornbread Casserole is a new recipe, so I'm looking forward to checking it out.  I'm using Stubbs BBQ sauce.  It's not totally real food friendly (contains corn syrup and trace amounts of a few other suspect ingredients), but it was the best choice I could find without paying $6 for a bottle of sauce.

Real Food Meal Plan: Week of March 11 - 16

Here's a picture of last week's delicious quiche.  I didn't have quite enough frozen spinach so I cooked up some broccoli left over from the CSA box the week before (In sad news, we totally forgot to pick up our box this week.  They don't do reschedules.  FAIL.)

The black bean quesadillas were a HUGE hit, so we're doing them again this week.
Here's the plan:

Sunday: Oven "Fried" Chicken and garlic mashed potatoes
Monday: Ground Beef & Cabbage
Tuesday: Black Bean Quesadillas
Wednesday: Pasta with Tomato Cream Sauce
Thursday: Chicken Taco Salad
Friday: Homemade Pizza

The fried chicken turned out great tonight, and it was nice comfort food for us.  Both our teams lost their conference tournament championships today.  But the Heels and Cats are both top seeds for the NCAA tournament. We have lots to look forward to! March Madness has begun!

Real Food Meal Plan: Week of March 3rd-9th

This week we're keeping it simple (thus we have grains in almost every meal).  We received brussel sprouts, snap peas, broccoli, cauliflower, turnips, lettuce, micro greens and strawberries in our CSA share this week.  Here's how we're using it all for meals:

Saturday: Spaghetti and roasted brussel sprouts

Sunday: Roasted chicken with turnips, potatoes and onions

Monday: Ginger Orange Beef Stir Fry with soaked rice

Tuesday: Fried (leftover) Rice (with left over chicken from Sunday)

Wednesday: Spinach & Mushroom Quiche with roasted cauliflower

Thursday: Black Bean Quesadillas

Friday: Left overs!

We'll eat left overs for lunch each day with a salad. I'll also be soaking some pancake batter tonight which will provide enough for breakfast for the next week and half (we eat eggs every day for breakfast too).  This grocery shopping trip I decided to cut out bacon because it isn't organic/pastured and still contains some additives I'd like to be rid of.  In the absence of this breakfast staple, Reid requested that we have some more snack food.  I'm attempting homemade hummus using soaked chickpeas with homemade tahini to be eaten with carrots.  Whole Foods also had a nice sale on organic potato chips (only three ingredients), so he's happy to have that too!

The Black Bean Quesadillas is a new recipe, so we'll see how it goes!

Real Food: My Saturday Strategy

I love Saturdays.  It's a quiet day when I can catch up on my personal life and wind down from the week.  The irony is that my favorite task on my day off is similar to what I spend lots of time doing at my job during the week.  I spend time each weekday morning planning and prioritizing my tasks so that I know what I need to do and when I need to do it to get the most important tasks done first and in the most effective manner at work.  Type A personality that I am, this kind of planning is downright fun for me. 

Recently I've honed some areas of household management in the same kind of way.  Reid and I are on  a tight budget.  There are things we're doing now that I would have once described as drudgery and kill joys like calculating expenses and meal planning.  However, I've found that spending 30 minutes to an hour of time planning each weekend can really save me A LOT of time and stress during the week.

Our Saturday mornings begin with a strategy session where Reid and I eat breakfast, update our budget, and my favorite part of all, plan the weekly menu.

We have a small white board on the fridge with a space for each day of the week (we found said white board out by the dumpster, but that's another story).  After we go shopping for groceries, I write the week's plan up on the board, and add any notes about prep work I need to remember to do days in advance.  Reid helps with some preparation too, and so his notes are starred. As a result of my meal plan, I'm never at a loss for what to cook each night, and I stay ahead of the game the night before to make sure I've thawed, soaked, or otherwise prepared for the next day's meals.  In a real food kitchen, planning ahead is a big key to success.

A lot my of Facebook friends have been asking about recipes I've posted.  So I've decided to share my meal plans here and update throughout the week with information about recipes that were particularly successful.  I'll also share my little tips and tweaks for saving money, improvising on ingredients, and saving time.

So, here's this week's plan. Many of the recipes I'm using are linked below:

Saturday: Creamy Fennel and Greens Soup  with bread
Sunday: Roasted Chicken with potatoes
Monday: Ginger Orange Beef Stir Fry with carrots, snap peas, and broccoli & sprouted rice
Tuesday: Crockpot Chuck Roast Supreme with left over rice from Mon
Wednesday: Crockpot Chicken Quinoa & Roasted Cauliflower
Thursday: Salmon Cakes with Sauteed Kale & Garlic
Friday: Left Overs :)

We just finished the Creamy Fennel and Greens Soup for dinner.  Not my favorite but it filled us up and was a good use of the beet and turnip greens we had left over from our CSA order last week.  The fennel was something I'd never cooked with before, so trying it in a soup was a good start. 

My only other new recipe this week is Monday's stir fry, which I'm sort of making up myself.  So we'll see what happens!