Thoughtful Kitchen

Happy 2011! It’s the time for thinking back on the past year and looking forward to the next, usually with a few goals in mind. I have yet to sit down and really do this wholeheartedly, but I do have a few things in mind that are food-related. The first would be to stay within our monthly budget of $325 for groceries (just food, not toiletries and other items, but including the $67 each month for our vegetable farm share) every month, unless specifically planned otherwise. For our family of four, it’s actually quite a challenge when we are trying to eat real, natural and some organic food. I’m not exactly sure how I’m going to do it when I need to buy meat again (our 1/4 beef is almost gone, and we are purposely trying to use up all the chicken in our freezer). And did I mention that, at least in the last couple weeks, the almost-one-year-old and the three-and-a-half-year-old seem to be out-eating my husband and me? I’m pretty sure the baby had eaten five good-sized meals today by 4:30pm. Oh, and we almost met our under-$90 budget for December (we were over by about $5), so I’m calling that a success.

The second thing I would like to do this year is to continue to challenge ourselves in healthy, nutritious eating habits. In the last four or five months we’ve pretty successfully managed to kick our cracker habit. Packaged crackers had previously been a staple, a go-to snack that at least one of us ate daily. Now they are a “treat” that we might munch on once a week or even less and that we mainly use for snacks in the car or when other options are limited. We snack less now, and when we do it’s often nuts or fresh or dried fruit. I want to continue to make small changes like that one in the coming year.

By the way, my menu plan for last week got a little rearranged (it happens every week in some form, this week was a little more), so I haven’t tried the crock pot brown rice pudding yet. It’s on the menu for tomorrow, though, so we’ll see how it goes! Also, the Black-Eyed Peas in a Spicy Goan Curry (scroll down to the third recipe) were fabulous (we used garbanzo beans instead of black-eyed peas since that’s what we had on hand). My baby girl loved them, too, though she pretty much scarfs down everything these days (reference above).

(For reference, B is for breakfast, L is for lunch and D is for dinner. Links are to the recipes we’ll be using.)

Wednesday
B: leftover steel-cut oats with dried fruit and nuts or seeds
L: hummus with tortillas or crackers, fruit
D: roasted chicken, spinach salad with cranberries, nuts, apples and balsamic vinaigrette (recipe to come!), crock pot brown rice pudding

Thursday
B: baked rhubarb oatmeal (making changes to this recipe)
L: everyday yellow dhal, leftover brown basmati rice
D: with family

Friday
B: leftover baked rhubarb oatmeal
L: leftover yellow dhal and rice
D: leftover roasted chicken, spinach salad and rice pudding

Saturday
B: leftover baked rhubarb oatmeal
L: chicken sandwiches (using leftover roasted chicken), fruit
D: vegetarian enchiladas (using filling from the freezer), simple spinach salad

Sunday
B: whole wheat buttermilk pancakes with rhubarb or strawberry sauce (from the freezer) and maybe some blueberries, too (also from the freezer)
L: PB&J, fruit
D: leftover enchiladas, simple spinach salad

Monday
B: leftover pancakes
L: clean out the leftovers in the fridge
D: spicy chili (add in some cooked, finely diced liver and see how it goes), cornbread, simple spinach salad

Tuesday
B: cold cereal with milk or any remaining leftover breakfast food
L: PB&J, fruit
D: leftover chili, cornbread and spinach salad

We’re all feeling much better around here and are back to eating regular meals and menu planning (hurray!), so we’ll be making some of those lentil and squash recipes we skipped from the last menu plan. This is my husband’s last week of break before classes start up again and we’ll also be busy trying to organize, clean and plan (as much as possible, at least) for the upcoming year. All of his doctorate applications are submitted (as of today!), and now we wait. I am actually excited, though the amount of work that needs to be done between now and when we will move is daunting.

I’m going to attempt to make rice pudding for the first time ever. The trouble is, though, that I want to make it with brown rice, and I want to use my crock pot instead of going through several steps on the stove and then in the oven, but I couldn’t find a good recipe online. Usually when I try to make something entirely new to me and then fiddle with or half-make-up the recipe, it ends up either decent-but-not-fabulous or terrible. If you have any suggestions, please let me know in the comments! I’ll let you know how it turns out. Continue reading →

This week’s menu centers on what’s in abundance in our pantry: lentils, beans, rice and squash. I’m pulling out the beans and lentils for two reasons – one, we have a lot of them and might as well use them, especially since we’re on a tight food budget this month (<$90); and two, I’ve been craving a burger for several days now, most likely because I need the protein and iron, but we don’t have any ground beef and I don’t want to spend our entire (tiny) eating-out budget on a boring burger, and a cheap fast-food one wouldn’t be worth the money I would spend on it, nutritionally or taste-wise. So anyway, here’s our vegetarian menu for the week. I’ve been hoping to try several of these recipes anyway, so I’m glad to have an opportunity to do it! Continue reading →

Last week and this week are a bit of crunch time here. My husband just had finals on Tuesday, is working several full days this week and has his doctorate program applications due next week. And we are also thinking about Christmas and trying to make Advent meaningful for ourselves and our three-year-old. We don’t have too many vegetables this week that have to be used right away despite the fact that we got a “double” basket yesterday, which is at least partially due to our very cold snap and a little snow just before Thanksgiving. Add all those things to the fact that I’m trying to spend less than $90 on food this month (thankfully not including our farm share vegetables, which are a little less than $70 per month), and you can see why we are pulling lots of things out of the freezer! Continue reading →

Happy December! It’s the month of Advent, and for our family, that means preparing to celebrate the birth of Jesus. With the extra activities making our schedule a little more full, we are planning to use lots of food from our freezer this month, since there are quite a few already-prepared meals or significant portions of meals sitting in there waiting to be reheated or put right into the oven. We still have to make sure we don’t waste our farmshare vegetables, though, so I’ll still be doing a good bit of cooking. Last week, we made a huge pot of chicken/turkey and dumplings last week with homemade chicken broth and the leftover Thanksgiving turkey and will still be eating leftovers from it this week. (We also made turkey broth from the turkey carcass but ended up freezing it in smaller portions and using the slightly-older chicken broth for the soup.)

By the way, you might be wondering how a food blog managed to mention what might be the biggest, or at least the most-discussed, meal of the year – Thanksgiving – pretty much only in passing. Well, first of all, I do like to make sure we truly celebrate Thanksgiving by giving thanks and not  by being gluttonous. And second, it’s been a little crazy around here lately. My husband is applying to doctorate programs, so I’ve been helping him with writing the essays. Plus, our 10-month-old daughter has just finished (I am hoping!) over a month of waking up 3-6 times a night about a third of the time, and she wakes up twice a night normally, which isn’t all that restful to begin with, so my body has kicked into the oh-dear-I-am-soooo-sleep-deprived-and-I-need-to-remedy-that-NOW mode. Hopefully recipes will be coming a little more often in the forseeable future. Continue reading →