Food for a month

I love cooking. And I love eating. But making dinner gets really old.

For a long time now, my strategy has been to make a big "pot'o'something" on the weekend which would provide lunches for the week and fill in gaps of nights when I didn't feel like cooking. That has worked out pretty well. We rotate between chili, Mediterranean stew, tortilla soup, and Moroccan chicken.

I am still tired of cooking dinner. Somehow Mel of "The Clothes Make the Girl" feels the same way.

So I decided to do some batch cooking. Last time I tried once a month cooking, I picked out way too many things and almost all new recipes. It was exhausting and didn't end up feeding us for as long as I'd hoped. This time I'm making double batches of a few big, easy meals. Like the pot'o'somethings we've been happily rotating already. Plus a few new ones for variety.

My wonderful man chopped up almost all of the veggies (for some reason the cauliflower is my responsibility). That meant 11 onions, 17 carrots, 8 bell peppers, 11 stalks celery, and 16 zucchini. It was a lot of chopping. It also made me think there must not be that much variety to our meals.

We made spaghetti meat sauce and paleo lasagna (from Everyday Paleo) after doing the shopping and chopping on Saturday.

Leftover zucchini became a smiley face. It makes me smile when I open the freezer.

 Aaron added some mozzarella to his half

Today we made primal chili (from Mark's Daily Apple), mediterranean stew (from Mediterrasian.com), and chicken. We also ground a bunch of grass-fed beef into hamburger since we don't tend to eat a lot of roasts, let alone 4-pounders. We still have a moroccan casserole, a shepherd's pie, and tortilla soup to make, but we should have about a month's worth of food, not counting the nachos we eat 3 nights a week, lol.

nacho toppings: cheddar, guacamole, tomatoes, onions, olives, and salsa

Assuming I can remember to get stuff out of the freezer the night before.

Why Didn't I Think of This?

One of my favorite books on food is Nina Planck's Real Food: What to Eat and Why. Nina was raised by a mother who had studied and taken to heart the work of Adelle Davis. Adelle Davis showed that if you provide children healthy options and let them eat as much or as little as they want, they will be properly nourished. The key there is healthy options - she wasn't providing any refined grains or sugars, just real, whole, unprocessed foods.

One of the best things I learned from the book is that Nina often eats multiple vegetable sides at a meal. Why this was a revelation for me, I don't know, but it was. I love vegetables yet I had never considered making more than one at a meal. Having two different vegetables makes it really easy to fill 3/4 of your plate with veggies. Add a small pile of peas to a pile of broccoli and you're there.

This also relates back to getting your children, or reluctant spouses, to eat their vegetables. Aaron has a lot of favorites, and since I want him to get enough vegetables every night, it would be tempting to only make those. But if I make a new vegetable (or a new method of preparation) along with a favorite, he is sure to get enough veggies even if he only takes a little bit of the "weird" one. Plus, his exposure to the new vegetable or dish will make it less "new" over time. It can take 8 times of serving something before your family accepts it enough to objectively evaluate it. Having an alternative gives you the freedom to keep introducing things without making a whole dinner your kids or partner won't eat.

So put the Brussels sprouts puree on the table, and let your kids decide if they want to try it without any word of encouragement or discouragement from you, and you may be surprised at how many vegetables your kids really like.

Vegetables

Mmm, vegetables. I mentioned that many nights we cook up a meat and a vegetable with enough for lunch leftovers. I plan ahead on the meats but only kind of plan ahead on the veggies. I think of what kind of side would go well with a particular main, then when we're at the store we get whatever looks good. My meal plan is usually on the back of my grocery list so I can consult it while we're shopping.

Aaron also stops at the produce market once or twice during the week on his way home for fresh produce. When I'm really on my game, I plan ahead for several weeks and buy all the non-perishable stuff at once, which saves us a lot of money because fewer trips to the grocery store means fewer impulse buys.

I do keep a list of vegetables with our favorite ways to prepare them so we don't get stuck in a veggie rut. It's a spreadsheet in google docs with all the veggies we eat in a column, and different ways to prepare them going across.

In this same document, I keep lists of recipes we want to try, our favorite recipes (grouped by type; main, side, baked goods), and meal plans. When we have a week that goes smoothly,  I try to record it so we could repeat it again next year. Eventually, I could have a whole years' worth of seasonal meal plans to consult.

I keep this in google docs so I can access it from home or work, and I have it 'shared' with Aaron so he can look it up too. He's made a couple meal plans for me when I've gotten too stressed out about making them 100% healthy, 100% favorites, 100% frugal, and started losing my sanity. Now I try to focus on making them easy, reasonably healthy, and appealing enough so Aaron isn't tempted to go out instead. When we are both working full time, 'good enough' is 100% perfect.

Here is my veggie list from A-Z:

artichoke
arugula
asparagus
beans
beet
bell pepper
broccoli
Brussels sprouts
cabbage
carrot
cauliflower
celery
chicory
cucumber
eggplant
endive
fava bean
fennel
green beans
jicama
kale
kohlrabi
leek
lentils
lettuce
okra
onion
parsnip
peas
pumpkin
radish
rhubarb
romaine
rutabaga
salsify
savoy
scallion
shallot
spinach
squash
squash, acorn
squash, butternut
sweet potato
swiss chard
tomato
turnip
wax beans
zucchini