I don’t write much any more about what I’m cooking. There are lots of reasons why, but one is that I don’t feel like I have much that’s interesting or useful to share. I rarely cook on the weekends, and I try to decide on and plan for the upcoming weeknight dinners on the weekend, and once the weeknight arrives, I’m sort of on autopilot trying to get dinner on the table as quickly as possible. Or I’m working/entertaining my son/doing other household tasks while my husband does it.
But I am still eating, of course. And cooking. And every weekend, I am suddenly struck anew, like it’s never happened before, that I need to plan for dinners that week. My mind draws a blank. So here – documentation of my weeknight dinners as a resource that I – and possibly you – can come back to to get the planning juices flowing.
I think one of the challenges of planning for weeknight dinners is having to marry different inputs: what meat do we have in the freezer (mostly from Butcher Box, so I didn’t choose the specific types/cuts myself with a particular plan); what vegetables do we have on hand (mostly from a farm delivery CSA, so again, I didn’t choose them with a specific plan); what do we feel like eating. I’ve shared before that this is why meal planning programs don’t really fit the bill for me. What I want is a tool in which I can plug in what I have (meat, veggies), and it will spit out a plan for me based on the groceries I already have. Alas, I have not found such a tool yet (though have settled on Paprika as the best recipe collection tool that does allow me to filter on each of these things or search for recipes with a particular ingredient).
But I digress. Given the many inputs I mentioned above, I – and probably you – will never be able to look at these entries and say, yep, that’s exactly what I’m having this week. But it will hopefully just help with the blank-mind thing. (Side note – Fed & Fit provides a much more professional weekly dinners newsletter. I’ve used it as inspiration plenty of times. The challenge for me is that I’m not immediately familiar with the recipes or able to marry it to what I have, so it takes more cognitive effort. I imagine you’ll have the same challenge with my lists, but I won’t, so. Well. There you go. I encourage you to look at Fed & Fit instead/also.)
Without further ado, here is what Gabriel and I ate a few weeks ago when Dan was out of town:
- Monday: went out to eat with Dan’s mom and sister and Gabriel for my birthday
- Tuesday: homemade pizza (I forgot to start sourdough pizza dough the day before, so we went to the store after school pickup and bought store-bought fresh pizza dough) with mozzarella, pizza/pasta sauce, basil (leftover from pizza the previous week), prosciutto, red pepper, red onion, and arugula. We cooked the pizza with all the toppings except basil, prosciutto, and arugula. We added those after it was cooked and while it was resting for about 5 minutes.
- Wednesday:
- Protein: shredded pork (made previously in the slow cooker, frozen, and reheated), Noble Made mustard BBQ sauce
- Starch: mashed butternut squash (adapted from this recipe) using up the last of the butternut squash chunks and pumpkin puree that were frozen in the freezer
- Vegetable: steamed broccoli
- Thursday (Dan’s parents joined us):
- Protein: Baked white fish (I used the recipe from @thesassydietitian ‘s Clean Eating cookbook)
- Starch: more mashed butternut squash and homemade sourdough bread
- Vegetable: roasted green beans (from farm box) and leftover broccoli
- Friday: ate out again
Sorry! No pictures.
she eats and other things 