Menu, week of 6/26

This week I am focused on greens in the garden. I am sure the kids are going to be thoroughly sick of greens soon, but they are so healthy, and we have a ton of them growing now. I don’t want to waste them.

Tonight:  chili pasta (which is like that boxed helper meal, only made with actual ingredients), broccoli
This was the boy’s suggestion. I haven’t made this in a long time--not since before I started eating meat again.

Monday: Minted lamb burgers with hummus and feta, beef barley soup, sweet potato fries, sauteed greens
I know, two meat dishes is not something I would normally do, but I need to use my leeks, and I would like to have beef barley soup for lunches and stuff through the week.

Tuesday: polenta with sausage and mustard greens
The kids will be at their dad’s on Tuesday, so it is the perfect time to have a dish that calls for hot Italian sausage--something that might cause the girl to spontaneously combust.

Wednesday: beets and greens curry with chickpeas, chicken curry, aloo paratha, basmati rice, chopped salad
I am having my Indian-food eating friend over for dinner this night, which will be fun!

Thursday: layered chicken casserole, rice, broccoli
This is from Cooking for the Rushed, and involves a casserole of pre-cooked chicken, grated cheese and cream of chicken soup. Not my favorite idea, but it involves the girl willingly eating something with a sauce, so I do like that.

Friday: beet green risotto, various leftovers
The risotto will be based on this recipe, but not totally the same-- I am thinking that I will roast some beets to add to the dish. I wanted to make this on a night the kids were here, because they will eat almost anything in risotto, but this is where it seems to fall in the planning.

Overall, this should be good--healthy and varied enough to keep me from being bored.

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Update on writing goals:

Once again, I met my goals at the last minute. Here is my third post, I submitted one Pulp Angels post, and I wrote 1090 words in my fiction story. I even did some work on my statistics on women in SF project. All in all, not bad, but I am thinking I need to do more to really make progress as I would like. It is hard to fit it all in, though, with work and kids and friends and the need for some downtime. I am working on it, though.

Menu, week of 6/12/11

Menu for this week:
Sunday: Gazpacho, salmon burgers, sweet potato fries
I made the gazpacho and the girl did the rest; nice and quick.

Monday: Rosemary Chicken with White Beans, broccoli, Quick Flatbread
I made this last week, and the girl loved it so much that she wanted to cook it for her grandmother tonight. I added onion and carrot last week, and I am going to try to get the girl to do that plus zucchini tonight, because I forgot about the zucchini, and it needs to be used. I made a big pot of navy beans to use in this and other recipes this week this morning.The flatbread batter, made with chickpea flour, is already sitting in the kitchen, waiting for baking time.

Tuesday: French lentils with walnuts and goat cheese, frittata, more flatbread
I didn’t end up making this last week, because I had about 10 minutes for dinner last Tuesday due to a late night at work combined with the need to go to a jewelry party. I love it, though, so I am trying again. The frittata will likely be mostly greens from the garden, because I have a lot of those.

Wednesday: Salmon noodle casserole, peas, unless we go to my dad's house for dinner
The kids’ favorite. Basically a white sauce with curry powder, Mrs. Dash, canned salmon, soy cheese and egg noodles. They eat the heck out of this dish.

Thursday: Beef barley and leek soup
I will probably add a bunch more veggies to this, depending on what I have on hand, including garden greens.

Today I am going to make Cassoulet with a lot of Vegetables for lunch, probably without meat, since I am just throwing this together with the beans I made this morning, and I don’t think I have any meat on hand for this. I feel so healthy!

Quick menu

I have been working on a blog post about cooking and menu planning with past menus as illustrations, but it is taking me forever. I keep not wanting to hunt down the links, and then I don’t want to put up newer menus, because I should catch up first. Today, I just decided to start where I am, so here is a quick menu for this week:

Last night: Grilled goat cheese, arugula, and kalamata olive mayo sandwiches, salad, butternut squash soup
I need to use up the arugula and lettuce in my garden, as we are getting past the spring stage now. The kids will had plain grilled cheese, by my mother and I had the full flavor sandwich, based on this idea I got from Apartment Therapy’s The Kitchn blog.

Tonight Rosemary chicken with white beans
I will be adding sauteed zucchini and carrots to this, and possibly some onion and garlic, because everything seems to be better with onions and garlic

Wednesday: French lentils with walnuts and goat cheese, broccoli and carrot frittata, sliced peaches or apples

Thursday: Meatballs in applesauce with rice and broccoli
We will use about half the amount of beef, but maybe the same amount of sauce; I like the sauce over the rice. We will also probably mix rice and quinoa for the base.

Friday: pizza
I am going to use the Easy Whole grain flat bread recipe from Food Matters as the base, and make a couple of different kinds of pizza--maybe one pepperoni and one goat cheese with veggies.

Nothing too exciting, but it should get us through the week...

A new menu pannning challenge

I am officially done with vegetarianism.

As you may know, I decided not too long ago that the whole vegan thing is not for me. That led me to read about Tasha over at what used to be Voracious Vegan and is now Voracious Eats, and that led me out to a whole world of ex-vegans on the internet. I have been on the internet regularly for over 14 years now, so I shouldn't be surprised that there is an online community for practically anything you can think of, but I hadn't even thought to look for this before.

I have been looking at reducing the amount of carbs that I eat for a while now. I am not looking to be super low-carb, but it seems clear to me that grains are not the best foods for health and weight maintenance--even when they are whole grains. I can't even point to everything I have seen to lead me in this direction, it's just something I gradually seemed to see everywhere. I am not interested in policing the carb level of all my foods, but I have been trying to eat less grains, getting rid of as much refined grain food as possible, and limiting whole grains to smaller portions. This is somewhat hard to do on a vegetarian diet, even if you do eat eggs and fish, but I was trying to avoid that. I wasn't interested in eating meat.

Then I started reading through the interviews with ex-vegans over on Let Them Eat Meat. I was astonished to find how many of them referred to dental problems associated with veganism! I have all the dental problems I was seeing mentioned, from brown spots at my gums to soft, easily broken teeth. In fact, one of my front teeth has completely broken off, and now I have to go to the dentist to get an implant to replace it, something I am not looking forward to doing at all. Now, I am the first to admit I am not a particularly good flosser, but I have always had good strong teeth, so I did not understand the problem. I had read all about the evils of calcium-leaching animal proteins over at Not Milk, so I could not figure out what was going on. Reading these interviews, seeing how many of them mentioned dental problems was really all I needed.

I wasn't really excited about it, though. I had a lot of my self-image tied up in being vegetarian, which seems kind of silly when I think about it. As I kept reading, I began to be more worried about my overall health. For a couple of months now, I have been feeling more sluggish and even dizzy, which was kind of frightening. I was so careful to eat healthy, I thought. But I was becoming more and more convinced that I have been wrong about the health benefits of a vegetarian diet all along.

Even when I ate meat as an adult, I still thought it would be healthier to be a vegetarian, but I am now thinking I was a victim of extreme thinking. I thought you either ate a high meat diet or a high fruit and veggie diet. I mean, I obviously know that it is possible to combine these ways of eating, and even that many people do it successfully, but it wasn't something I did very often. Although, as I thought about it, I realized I did do that one time in my life--eat meat, but also eat lots of healthy fruits and vegetables. That was back when I lost a lot of weight a few years ago--something like 40 or 50 pounds over the course of a year or so, without really trying that hard.

So, the evidence was becoming clear. I was wrong about meat eating, and my health was suffering because of it. It is time to be done with it.

My children are thrilled. Fortunately, they never completely stopped eating meat. They ate it with their father, and at my parents' house, and when we would eat out at restaurants. They are glad that they will be able to eat it here now, too.

It took a long time to make a menu today, though! I had to find some new recipes, and get back into the habit of including meat in the plan. I am a little bit nervous about my grocery store bill coming up, but surely it won't be too bad since I am doing the list and trying not to overbuy. Here is what I came up with:

Saturday: Amazing chicken stew on rice (The Healthy Family, p. 114)--this has a lot of veggies in it, and the boy says he is very excited about it, so I am sure this will be a winner

Sunday: Salmon patties, creamed corn, steamed green beans--this is the recipe I learned from my mother as a teenager, so it is comfort food for me

Monday: Pork tenderloin with artichokes and capers, mashed red potatoes, steamed broccoli--as I started thinking about eating meat again, this recipe popped to mind, because it is so delicious; I didn't even know I missed it

Tuesday: Chicken and Biscuit (Rachel Ray's Big Orange Book, p. 210)--from the cooking for one section, again with lots of veggies, and quick and easy in one pot

Wednesday: Gnocchi with fresh chicken sausage and broccoli rabe (Rachel Ray's Big Orange Book, p. 179)--the kids love gnocchi, so I am hoping this will help them to reconcile themselves to combined foods and flavor and all that (by which I really mean the girl--they boy likes flavor)

Thursday: Hurried goulash with egg noodles and peas (The Healthy Family, p. 106)--the girl is cooking this, even though it has a sauce!

Friday I have belly dancing, and I am thinking there may still be some leftovers, so I am not planning a meal. I hope this goes well!

Not wasting food

After purging my refrigerator this weekend, I came across this article on Planet Green. I do hate wasting food, and I was really feeling the need to plan ahead better after tossing so many leftovers and condiments, so I was ripe for the ideas on this page.

I have a very bad habit of buying all kinds of produce with no plan in mind, then throwing a bunch of it out at the end of the week. I have been working on this for a while now with menu planning, and trying to get better about substituting what I have on hand in recipes to make sure that things get used, but I definitely could use some improvement in this area.

Here are some things I have done to lower my food waste:

1) Composting.

Yes, this is still food waste, but at least it will be used for something and it isn’t going into a landfill. I have two compost bins in my back yard. For the first year and a half or so that I lived in the house, I used one bin almost exclusively to dispose of my food waste, then I switched over to the other one. I haven’t done any turning of the compost to help the breakdown, although I did occasionally add extra brown matter when the compost looked particularly wet, and my gardeners tell me we can now use the compost in that first bin when we are setting up my garden this year. I am hoping we can speed up the process going forward, so that we always have a bin ready to go in the summer. We are better about composting everything now, since I had a friend give me a big plastic kitty litter bucket with a hinged lid to use in the house each time we have something to compost, so that we don’t have to choose between multiple trips a day to the bin and leaving rotting food on the counters. That will help to increase the amount of compost available, but I may have to start thinking about getting a compost turning fork or shovel and mixing it up to hurry the decomposition process along.

2) Menu planning

I have gotten a lot better about menu planning in general, and consulting the fridge and pantry before writing the plan in particular. A quick look at what we have on hand really helps to make sure I don’t buy veggies that we already have waiting to be used. Having a definite plan also means I am more likely to actually cook dinner each night, because I don’t need to stand in the kitchen, looking in the fridge, then looking in the pantry, then looking in the freezer, then back to the fridge, etc., just to decide I don’t have everything to make anything, and so we might as well just eat peanut butter sandwiches or go out. I just come home, go in the kitchen, and start making dinner. The area I really need to work on here is breakfasts and lunches. I often end up buying a bunch of random foods to make sure we have something to eat, and we end up with too much of some things and not enough of others. I do not yet have very detailed breakfast and lunch plans, but at least I am thinking about it more before I get to the store. Some key learnings in this area:

• When I have bell peppers or cantaloupe for healthy snacks, I need to actually cut them up and have them ready to eat if we are actually going to snack on them
• I need to start looking at the entire menu for the week to see what I can prep ahead on the weekend, or when I can work ahead throughout the week (slicing peppers when I am chopping another one for a recipe, for instance)
• When I go to the grocery store, the list isn’t quite enough—I need the menu, too, so that I can make suitable substitutions if I see something on sale, or cannot find something on my list

3) Using leftovers

 

I hate it when I make something really good, and forget to eat the leftovers. Or, I make too much, and have more leftovers than I really want to eat. I like having some leftovers, because it makes lunch the next day easy, but most of the time, I don’t want to eat a meal more than twice. One dinner, one lunch, and I am good. I am also guilty of planning a bit too well for my cooking, and not accounting for leftovers, but I am getting better. The last few weeks, I have had lima bean and Brussels sprouts curry on my menu for Tuesday nights, when the kids are at their dad’s. This works well because the kids hate lima beans and Brussels sprouts, while I love them, and the girl isn’t too fond of curry. However, it also works well because my veggies are frozen and my sauce comes in a jar, so I can put it off if I need to, like this week, when I looked at all the leftovers in my fridge and decided to eat some of those instead. I still need to do some tweaking, though. Some lessons I learned on this topic this week:

• If I make a sloppy joe pizza, I should freeze half of the joes; I don’t need leftover pizza and sandwiches
• Combining the third tip to eat reasonable serving sizes and the fourth tip to eat the leftovers can be problematic at times; I need to get better at estimating how much of a certain food to make
• The girl doesn’t like fried rice/quinoa/whatever grain, so it isn’t always an ideal way to be creative with leftovers
• I really should consider writing down all that we eat in a week to help with more accurate planning sometime
• Clearing out the fridge really does help me to see what is in there and available so that things get used up; I need to be careful not to let it get cluttered

4) Not eating out

I decided to conduct an experiment in the month of April—no eating out for the whole month. I saw a chart somewhere recently—probably one of those USA Today snapshots—that compared the average number of times that people in various countries eat out per year. Japan was the highest, but the US was right behind them, at 100 meals out per year. I thought about how I have really cut back on eating out in the past few years since I bought the house and thought, “Wow, that is a lot of eating out!” Then I thought a bit more deeply and realized that is just under twice per week, and I totally still do that, if not more. We go out with friends on the weekend, or I don’t plan ahead for lunches and have to head out to a restaurant, or I buy some eggs down at the cafeteria when I get to work. This puts me in a position where I am spending money at restaurants at the same time I am throwing out food at home, which is just crazy. So, I decided to just say no to eating out for April, and see how that goes (one exception: if I go shopping on a Saturday with my mom and aunt and grandmother, and my grandmother wants to buy me lunch like she always does, of course I will go). So far, it has been a lot easier than I thought it would be. I made a big batch of cole slaw at the beginning of the week to make sure I had a veggie side every day, and I only spend a few minutes in the evening making sure there is something to take for lunch the next day. It has really helped to get the leftovers eaten, too.

 

I know I am still going to throw out some foods this week. This morning when I was packing my lunch, I saw a container of leftover spaghetti that I can’t remember exactly when it was new, but I do know I have already eaten from more than once. I suspect there are a few other things I won’t get to as well. But, I am paying closer attention now, and it will be getting better. Progress not perfection, right?

What I got done this weekend

• Blog redesign (technically, I started this Thursday, but it was something I have been meaning to do for a while now, and I did more work on it this weekend, so I want it on my accomplishment list)
• Wrote a blog post on cultural attitudes toward fathering
• Massive refrigerator purge—I could not believe how old some of those condiments were! Or, how much room I had to put my groceries away
• Wiped down fridge shelves
• Made a menu ( I only went through Thursday, because the weekend will be a daddy weekend, and I expect I will have leftovers to get me through Friday)
• Saturday: Cheese pizza, Italian sausage pizza, sloppy joes pizza, baby carrots, sliced red bell peppers, mini cucumbers, sugar snap peas (S had two friends over for a sleepover, hence the three pizzas)
• Sunday: Stir-fried quinoa, pan seared cod (cooked with some of the Island teriyaki sauce I used in the quinoa), steamed sweet potatoes
• Monday: The girl is making Chickpea Noodle Soup from Veganomicon, I will probably make a salad for my mother and me
• Tuesday: Lima Bean and Brussels sprouts curry, with either brown rice or quinoa, depending on my mood
• Wednesday: Chickpea Cutlets, a frozen potato/green bean/mushroom mix I got from Trader Joe’s, steamed broccoli
• Thursday: Scallop Risotto, salad
• Lunch stuff: Muffalletta sandwich (from Veganomicon again), light and sassy slaw with maple sesame tempeh
• Bought all the groceries, except the scallops, which I will get closer to the actual day I use them, and eggplant, which was inexplicably absent from both grocery stores where I went to shop
• Put away all the groceries—easy in my cleared out fridge, a bit of a jigsaw puzzle in my freezer, which needs its own clearing session
• Cleared out the area behind my couch in the living room; in theory, this is a launching pad for things that need to go to the car, or that will be donated when someone calls up and offers to take stuff off my hands, and even come to my house to do it, in practice, it is that plus whatever the kids dump there, and stuff rarely makes it out to the car
• Attacked the bathtub, got a lot of caulk stripped, thought I was done, but I will be doing a bit more stripping today before recaulking
• 4 loads of laundry
• The girl trimmed the ornamental grasses, and we all helped bag up the resulting straw, or take it to the compost pile out back—about half went into bags, and half on the compost pile—I am not convinced this straw actually breaks down in a timely manner, but I didn’t have enough bags to put it all at the curb 
• Both the girl and I did dishes, but there are somehow still lots of dirty dishes; stupid entropy
• Made cappuccino chip muffins from Vegan Brunch; they were very popular, and are almost all gone now
• The boy cleared sections of the family room floor underneath the couch and the chaise; his normal cleaning style is to shove things under furniture in the hopes that I won’t see them, so there was some corrective action needed
• The girl spent a lot of time re-cleaning the family room after the sleepover; the girls stayed in there because of the fold out couch, the tv, and the ability to stay up far too late by not being in the room right next to mine
• Cleaned the downstairs half bath
• Finished a book (Unnatural Causes, by P.D. James)

Looking over this list, it looks like a lot, but not as much as I thought it would be. I feel compelled to add that last weekend, I finally got new batteries for my cordless phones, a task I had been needing to do for literally months, just to convey the sort of catching up on responsibilities I have been doing lately. But really, I was busy all weekend, and so was the girl. The boy is only 8, he can only tolerate so much busy-ness, but he did work, too. The girl owed me extra chores, thanks to her habit of putting away only some food when she is sent into the kitchen to clean up (as I tell her, when we eat it, it is food, when I throw it away, it is money), and I feel like she delivered. It just kills me how much time it takes just to stay standing still in house cleaning, much less get ahead.