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!

Gettin' Around

Just an update on how we're getting around these days... This Wednesday Reid had a five week follow up on his ankle.  According to x-rays it's healing nicely.  He has physical therapy ahead to slowly begin putting more and more weight on his left foot. The great news is his cast came off and he's in a boot.

Trying not to freak out about the circular saw being used to cut the cast off.  My physician's assistant sister assures me it doesn't cut skin.  I don't buy it.

Free at last.  He had some cuts from the original fall that didn't really heal completely while in the cast.  He's lost a lot of muscle mass as well.

He's happy because the cast was getting itchy.  It's much nicer to be able to take the boot off now and then for his skin to breathe.  In addition after four weeks of waiting, we finally received a temporary handicap parking tag from the state.  It's made trips around town much easier.

In the mean time Reid's come up with some pretty interesting ways to carry things and maneuver around:

Reid sleeps outside the covers with his leg propped up and covers up in his favorite quilt my mom made for us.  He left his quilt in the living room one night, and this is how he brought it back to the bedroom while on crutches.

 The greeter at Sam's offered Reid one of these motorized carts.  He heartily agreed.  He's been talking about riding one since he first got the cast. Dreams really do come true ;)

Making breakfast and packing lunch is a breeze rolling around the kitchen in a office chair! :)

Just Keepin' It Real

These past two weeks have been a whirlwind, and yet more evidence that life is what happens on the way to your plans.  I certainly wasn't expecting to receive a phone call on September 28th from my husband asking me to take him to the hospital to see if his ankle was broken.  I certainly wasn't anticipating the 9 hours it took to be seen in the ER.  I definitely wasn't prepared for his fractured fibula. And I certainly was unprepared for the serious adjustment it takes to getting used to life without a mobile husband.

So this week my living room looked like this:

And the kitchen, like this:

And this:

What you can't see are the three bags of trash that are just sitting by the door because, well, that's the husband's job.  I honestly have never been to the dumpster in this apartment complex before. 

In these past several days, I realized just how much Reid does around here.  He wakes up early and cooks breakfast for us while I get ready for work.  He washes almost all the dishes for the day, and  cleans out the dishwasher too.  He helps with cleaning and sweeping and mopping.  And even makes the bed according to my ridiculous OCD standards. And while I don't expect him to help as much as he does, it is always a blessing.

Now that he's got the cast and his ankle is more stable and protected, he's been attempting a lot on his own.  He uses this green chair to roll around the kitchen making breakfasts or lunch (I leave much earlier than him, and he's on his own for most of the day when he's not at school).

For the past two weeks I've been adjusting to life without Reid's help, and I know it sounds like complaining because let's face it it could be worse, but it's been kind of tough.  And some times I don't want to do it.  Work is busy (but good) and I'm behind in school.  In addition to his broken ankle, Reid is going through some hard things with school, and it just seems like things don't come as easy as they used to.  But Reid and I know that this situation is not out of the hands of our loving and sovereign Father, and we know this is in fact an opportunity to walk in faith.  I was listening to one of my lectures tonight (yay for getting homework done!), and the professor said, "Faith is acting on the truth that God has revealed to you."  God usually doesn't show us the whole picture of how things will turn out.  Instead He asks us to take the step we can see in front of us.  God has graciously and clearly shown us what's in front of us.  Reid will continue to work hard at school and trust God for the result, and I'll keep on doing what I can to care for Reid and our family even when some times it feels like too much.


I suppose that means I'll be taking out those three bags of trash :)