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!