We have a book winner. Congrations to Lisa who said: "would love this book! not a fan of cio, and not sure how much longer i can handle being a snack bar all night every night."
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You talked me into it! I've added a category to the blog of Meal Plans to make it easy in the future to sift through and find a meal plan from a different week.
A quick bit of explanation before I dive into our week: we strive to eat primarily traditional foods. My boys are prone to low blood sugar type sweets cravings, so we're protein heavy. You'll find meat in most of our dinners. Lupine and I don't need so much protein, so we can lean more heavily on the other parts of the meal (veggies and grains).
Lupine experienced some profound early childhood tooth decay as a toddler so we eat loads of bone broth around here. Any savory recipe that calls for water or vegetable stock we use 24-72 hour bone broth. Rice, beans, soups, stews… all in a bone broth base.
Here is this week's meal plan as an excel spread sheet. Let me know if you need a different format. I would love to know if this download is helpful, or if the info below (a list of dinners) is plenty good. I'm happy to do both if they are useful.
This week we'll be eating:
Lasagna with rice noodles
This is Pete's department. He makes it with a ton of greens, ground venison or beef, red sauce, and various other vegetables. He never precooks his lasagna noodles, but instead adds a bit of extra sauce and extends the cooking time a bit. Such a simple, time saving step.
Lettuce wraps
Beef, seasonings, and leaf lettuce – similar to this recipe.
Venison stir fry
Thin strips of venison, broccoli, bok choy, pea greens, carrots, onions, and garlic or brown rice.
Tacos
Homemade cumin black beans from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything is our base, ground seasoned meat is an option, and lots of chopped vegetables. We always make a triple batch of the beans and freeze the extras. Leftover taco ingredients become breakfast with eggs the following day or burritos at lunch.
Slow cooker chicken with root vegetables
As I said, we're seriously into bone broths. We make chicken just to get the bones to make stock from. The stock from last week's chicken appears in the the rice on Wednesday, the beans on Thursday, the soup on Saturday, and the beans on Sunday. Our goal is bone broth everyday.
Slow cooker lentil soup with Italian sausage
There is a recipe we like in Apples for Jam that I have adapted to our slow cooker. For a slowcooker specific cookbook I love this one.
Black bean Chilaquile
This recipe found in various Moosewood Restaurant cookbooks.
Bone broths and slow cookers…sounds like our kitchen! 🙂 Yummy list.
Both are vital around here! ~ Rachel
thanks for sharing! i love to read what other folks are cooking…we’re prone to falling into ruts around here, what with the picky eaters and all! the spreadsheet is a great idea — i might just be utilizing that one! i need to start a “database” of recipes/ideas to help me out on those *stuck* kind of days. i’m baking bread today, so we’ll be having sandwiches for dinner!
Okay, I’m really intrigued by the Chilaquile! I am going to try that next week!
I was very inspired by all of this talk last week and decided to get serious about a meal plan as well as just basic weekly time organization. I designed a weekly calendar that can be printed out on an 11×17 sheet and stuck to the side of our fridge. Here we can write down not only our meal plan, but also, what lessons the babies are doing on what days, when the teenager has to work, misc family chore due dates, etc. It has just begun this week. I am hoping that everyone gets on board in the house! It’s my way of simplifying things with graphic design…lol!
Here is a link (I hope) to a jpeg of my calendar. Flickr doesn’t seem to let you attach pdfs (bummer) so it is sort of low-res. But you can get the idea:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/24778795@N07/4678612685/
This is a comment related to the previous post – missed it by one day! I was just wondering about the comment you made about ‘What to Expect…’. I never put that together with ‘cio’ type stuff, I was just wondering what the connection is? I’m a new mom so I’m learning a lot of this stuff as I go! 🙂
Yay for another omnivore! I try to make several non-meat based meals every week solely because I’m having a hard time getting local, organic, grass-fed meat and I figure it’s probably better to avoid meat if the only kind you can get is the regular grocery-store version! Thankfully, a new farmer’s market is opening up down the street from me (4 hours a week) and one of their vendors is a local meat vendor – YAY!
I’m just reading Nourishing Traditions now and it’s completely changing the way I think about food. I’ve been making yogurt the past 3 weeks (in the crockpot. So easy.) and have both a crock of yogurt AND a crock of bone broth on the go right now 🙂 Thanks for the reminder that I should be cooking my rice, pasta, beans, etc. in the broth!
Cassandra,
We love the Chilaquile! So quick, easy, and yummy for one and all under this roof. Glad you are getting organized and finding your groove with your meal plans! Your calendar looks AWESOME!
~ Rachel
Kim,
As a long-time vegetarian, the bone broth journey has taken me far from my roots. But truly back to the roots I think my ancestors had. Its been amazing. We have a weekly pot of broth and its in everything. Its funny because when I cooked grains in water I fussed less over wasting them. Now they are like gold and go into some other meal if we have leftovers. Precious broth!
~Rachel
Michelle,
What to Expect has nothing to do with CIO – its just a fear-based book in my opinion. I had a copy given to me by a friend when I was pregnant. She said it should be titled What to Fear When Youre Expecting. I believe books like that serve only to make us worried and therefore dont help us staying in control of our birth or parenting experience. It out-sources the expert from you and your gut to a book and your MD. I just dont dig it. A book series I love for pregnancy, birth, and parenting is the Dr. Sears books. Amazing, empowering, and safe-feeling.
Peace,
Rachel
Sarah,
We rarely do bread and right now were officially on a candida-bread-break… so you have no idea of yummy sandwiches for dinner sounds over here! Enjoy.
xo
Rachel
Wondering where to find rice lasagna noodles? Can’t find them anywhere here in BC Canada. Does anyone make their own? Sounds like a yummy week of food!
Emandeli,
We use the Tinkyada brand. We buy them at our coop. They are so amazing. Here is a link to their website. http://www.glutenfree.com/index.cfm?dsp=public.products.search_resultsby_fixture=-1by_style=1437by_brand=132gclid=COXqiby5kKICFWEd5wodoCUEbQ
Blessings,
Rachel