When the husband’s away…

 meal plan monday  No Responses »
May 162011
 

the kiddo and I will live on fruits, veggies and cheese!

My husband is going to be out of town for his job this week so I opted to skip cooked meals and will be eating raw fruits, vegetables, cheeses and some nom-tastic ‘gourmet’ crackers instead. Basically, I’m being lazy. I don’t see the point in preparing meals for just Avery and I; she hardly eats any of it and I’m not going to cook for myself. I still had some prep work to do: washing, drying, cutting, packaging, etc. Whatever one does to ensure that ones produce will remain fresh after it’s been chopped into pieces.

I also picked up some corn on the cob (two ears – one for me and the other for me) and will be roasting them this week if I feel like it.

This sounds like a recipe for disaster, right? WRONG. I have actually eaten an all-raw vegan (which means no cheese and crackers) diet before and it’s pretty easy to stick to as long as you don’t go out to eat. Avoiding lunch with my coworkers is a battle I face every single day but dinnertime should be a breeze. We don’t eat meat so it’s not like we can just hit up the drive-thru. Besides, we don’t eat that crap anyway.

I’m hoping to lose a couple of pounds this week and do a little detoxing but that isn’t the main reason why we’re going with a plan like this.

We’ll be back on track with a real meal plan next week and maybe I’ll remember to share how this week’s un-plan went!

SO over fish.

 meal plan monday  4 Responses »
Apr 252011
 

Cooking two weeks’ worth of meals at once is a bad idea. On Friday we had tilapia and I couldn’t finish it. Jacob and I were forcing ourselves to eat it but gave up. Even Avery knew it tasted putrid. I think that we might have left the skin on it which caused it to be extra-fishy tasting. Either way, I’m sick of fish.

The following is this week’s plan. We are detoxing today (ate too many Cadbury eggs over the weekend) so we pushed everything back a day which eliminates Friday’s originally-planned meal (which was, coincidentally, tilapia so we will be spared from eating it this week).

 

 

Thankfully we will only be eating fish twice this week and both meals are tried-and-true fishes that we know will taste amazing. Unless we left the skin on those too.

Meal Plan Monday (Except that it’s Thursday. Get over it.)

 meal plan monday  3 Responses »
Apr 212011
 

Yesterday I shared why I prepare meals in advance (you’re welcome) and today I will share the what. The menu, in all its wrinkled-up olive oil-dripped scratched-out revised-to-death glory was the smartest thing I have done since taking on this role as domestic, um, engineer? HOUSEWIFE AND MOM. There. I said it. If you work full time (or part time or hell, even if you’re lucky enough to stay home) creating a meal plan will save your life. How many times have you come home from work, unloaded the kids in front of the TV and stared blankly at the contents of your refrigerator? I would do this every single day; it was as if I was waiting for inspiration to hit or a can of beans to come flying at me screaming COOK ME!! I WANT TO DIEEEEE!! And of course neither scenario would happen. My family eats a lot of stir fried vegetables and udon noodles because of my lack of preparation. That is the easiest and fastest meal ever (not to mention cheap!) but it gets boring. Eating the same thing, even your favorite thing, five nights a week gets monotonous and will have you reaching for the phone to order pizza.

For our foray into meal planning Jacob and I opted to do two weeks’ worth of meals. We are still in week one so I don’t know if this was a good idea or not. I’ll let you know how that tenth meal tastes at the end of next week.

The following is our meal plan for the first week (this week); what we did was pair a protein with two vegetables. You will notice that there are no meals with pasta or rice (except for the stir fried noodles in week two). We are trying to reduce our intake of simple carbs. Anyway, I have kept you waiting long enough:

 

You probably noticed that there are a lot of fish in our menu and WAIT A DAMN MINUTE! LAUREN, AREN’T YOU A VEGETARIAN? I want to address this. Absolutely. Just not in this already way-too-long post.

Friday evening I will be uploading and posting this week’s meals’ photos with recipes, tips and tricks. Hopefully it will inspire you to give extreme meal planning a try!

I may have bit off more than I can chew but that’s okay because it’s labeled and in my freezer.

 meal plan monday  4 Responses »
Apr 202011
 

In an attempt to make our (my) evenings less stressful Jacob and I decided to create a meal plan and then COOK IT ALL AHEAD OF TIME. Genius, right?

Let me start from the beginning which is really about six weeks ago.

My family’s entire world was turned on its head when I got a full time job outside of the house. I would be working a traditional 8-5 schedule which was a relief because I’d have the evenings to spend with Avery. However, this meant that everything I would normally do throughout the day I had to accomplish in the two hours between coming home from work and putting Avery to bed. This doesn’t give me a lot of time and even though Jacob kind of does some house work in the morning his main focus is getting Avery up, fed, dressed and entertained until it’s time to take her to her nanny’s around noon. Avery is not a demanding toddler but mornings are for cuddling and it’s hard to vacuum and put away laundry when the world’s cutest little time suck is curled up on the sofa in her footie pajamas. Since I know that this is his predicament (Oh, the tragedy! Snuggling with a presh two year old while watching Mickey Mouse and eating oatmeal and eggs! His life is so! Fucking! Hard!) I am somewhat lax about him doing housework. Sometimes it annoys me when there are OBVIOUSLY tasks that could be done but often it is a lost cause to nag him about it.

/tangent.

Basically there aren’t enough hours in a day to do the bare minimum in order to keep our house relatively tidy and our stomachs full. This is where our meal plan comes in.

On Saturday I sat down and Googled recipes and viewed  sample meal plans. I have never prepared meals in advance so I wanted to make sure that I did it right lest we fill our freezer with inedible sludge. Once I finalized our meals for the next two weeks (minus weekends which are less structured and often involve pizza or take-out) I made a grocery list. I love making lists. It gets me high. Well, if I’m using a Sharpie it does.

Because Jacob is truly a good guy and knows how stabby I get at Walmart on a Saturday (it’s really the worst time to go and I don’t know why I do it) he opted to stay at home with Avery while I did the shopping. Smart move. Besides, shopping alone is therapeutic and, above all else, faster. So, so much faster than dragging those two along. You have no idea.

In addition to buying food I also purchased some aluminum baking pans with plastic lids. I don’t own ten casserole dishes with lids so I opted to go this route. That way, I can stack the meals in my freezer and when it’s time to cook one of them I just have to take off the lid and throw the pan into the oven.

I would love to make some joke about how it seemed like a good idea but ended up being a waste, or a mess, or my kitchen caught on fire. But I can’t. This was literally the best plan I have ever executed. The cooking went smoothly. Jacob grilled the fish and vegetables on the patio while I baked lentil burgers and sweet potato fries in the oven. We were cooking machines; after four hours of cooking we had so much food that Jacob said that he felt like we cooked too much. Au contraire, I told him, it looks like a lot but once we put it into the pans it will all make sense; trust me. We set the pans out on the kitchen table and, using my meal plan as our guide, put the foil-wrapped grilled noms into the pans. Some adjustments were made but for the most part we stuck to the original plan. Once the meals were in their respective pans I labeled them and put all ten into the freezer. It was a beautiful sight. Sure, we cooked our asses off but now all I have to do when I get home from work is preheat the oven, toss the pan into the oven and cook that bitch for thirty-ish minutes. BAM. Dinner. No cookware to wash, no stress.

So far it is working perfectly and I couldn’t be happier with my reclaimed time. Instead of cooking dinner when I get home from my hour-long commute home I get to focus on what’s really important- LAUNDRY.

And she can cook!

 meal plan monday  4 Responses »
Apr 172011
 

Today hubby and I cooked; we: grilled, roasted, baked, sauteed, steamed, boiled and pureed our meals for the next two weeks. There are ten hard-boiled eggs peeled and waiting for me to pop into my lunchbox and take to work every morning. There are portioned-out containers of tuna salad and baggies with lentil burgers and the more exotic salmon burgers (I am going to either love or hate those). Every dinner is in its own aluminum pan ready to be put into the oven when I get home from work. I will not have to do any cooking.

Hubby also made hummus. It’s garlicky as hell so if you are a vampire do NOT let me breathe on you. We will eat the death-by-garlic-breath hummus with baby carrots and celery sticks (not pita chips, wah wah).

I am excited about this week. I won’t feel stressed out about having to hurry home to make dinner so that we can eat by 7pm in order to stay on our earlier-than-normal-but-now-it’s-the-new-normal bed time routine. This? Is exhausting. It’s draining to work all day, spend over an hour in the car, come home and try to entertain the toddler while cooking dinner. Last week we ended up ordering pizza one night and there were a couple of nights where I cut up some fruit and cheese for the toddler and didn’t even bother to eat or feed my husband. He’s a grownup and can fend for himself but I ended up not making anything for myself because I was just that tired. On those nights my dinner consists of coffee and bites of whatever I give Avery. It isn’t satisfying in the least but hey, I didn’t have to turn on my stove!

Since the weather has turned warm I have been craving grilled fish and vegetables. Since I don’t know how to operate the grill and don’t care to learn that means that it’s all up to Jacob to do it. His work schedule doesn’t exactly allow for him to take time out of his evening to work the grill so by having him do the grilling now instead of later I get all of the grilled tuna and salmon I can stand without having to do it myself. Win!

Since we usually buy groceries every two weeks we decided to prepare two week’s worth of meals. Thankfully there is enough room in my freezer for eight of the ten pans (tomorrow and Tuesday are in the fridge, ya know, just chillin’) along with my containers of tuna salad and boiled eggs.

I will not be going out to lunch this week or next week. Restaurants kill my diet and I have been backsliding HARD. To say that I’m disappointed would be an understatement but rather than dwelling on it I’ll just move on and focus on the positive changes I’ve made. I will get to eat freshly prepared foods without having to do any cooking (just reheating in the oven) or cleaning. Not only will I be less stressed out but I can spend time with my kiddo instead of cleaning up the kitchen. Bonus!

If you are curious about this process fear not! I will be posting my meal plan, recipes, photos, etc., all this week. For those of you who are interested in the nutrition information I will share that as well. You know I count calories so I may as well include it, right? I’m here for you, readers. All four of you.