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I’m finally getting around to post what we actually ate last week. My internet was down for the entire weekend (not fun at all when I usually work my bookkeeping job-over the internet- on the weekends). We also had quite a busy weekend processing a big batch of chickens. It took us both Saturday and Sunday to process 47 chickens. Saturday night we took the kids and our extra helper out for pizza as a thank you for all of their hard work. We all had a terrific time, it was almost like a celebration dinner. Saturday was the day Sierra also left to go back to college for her senior year. It is hard for me to believe she is old enough to be a senior in college.
I really didn’t enjoy not having some sort of menu plan in place last week. Over the summer when Joe had a vacation week, I had done a bit of precooking and used those components for meals. That worked good since I had a bit of a loose plan. No plan at all does not work nearly as well for me. Here is what we ate from Tuesday dinner on.
Tuesday
Dinner: Elk Steak, Sauteed onion, carrot, celery and cabbage with coconut milk and seasoned with garam marsala
Wednesday
Breakfast: Antelope Steak, biscuits, eggs
Christopher’s First Lunch: Cheese chunks
Lunch: Sourdough Crepes with peanut butter on one and Pate on the other, Apple slices
Dinner: Beef with gravy (stew meat and onions, bone broth and coconut milk with a bit of nutritional yeast), boiled red potatoes, leftover veggies from Tuesday night, Mother Earth Bread
Thursday
Breakfast: Antelope Steak, bread, eggs, banana
Christopher’s First Lunch: Scrambled egg
Lunch: Beef with gravy and boiled potatoes (leftover) or fried potatoes or eggs (Sierra and Rico went out to celebrate Rico’s birthday)
Dinner: Pease Porridge (a cross between this recipe and this one called Low Cost Pease Porridge which you have to scroll down to find), battered and fried (in coconut oil) zucchini and ice cream.
Friday
Breakfast: Eggs and potatoes.
First Lunch: a donut. Sierra brought us donuts home. They were quite tasty.
Lunch: Scrambled egg
Dinner: Sushi/Kimbop night. We had quite a variety of very good fillings. Shrimp, steak, tuna salad, flaked salmon, egg, cucumber, red pepper, and daikon radish
Saturday
Breakfast: donuts 🙂
Christopher’s First Lunch: Cheese chunks and apple slices
Lunch: Sandwiches
Dinner: Pizza
So this week, I need some sort of a plan in place. In my last post, I mentioned that I am looking for some quick and easy real food meal ideas. I’ve recently signed up to work with a couple of temporary agencies in town and need some ideas for days that I work away from home. I sort of do batch cooking now but think I need to step that up a bit and have one day where I can prepare enough basic meal components to be able to assemble things for the week. I think back to the time when we were living in our camp trailer and were just starting to eat real foods. We ate ALOT of skillet type meals. In fact, we ate so many then that I rarely cook like that now 🙂 But for getting a good quality meal put together in a hurry they are an excellent idea (see this information from Wardeh on skillet dinners and she has an entire lesson on it in the fundamentals eCourse) and one that we should probably utilize. The girls can and do help with the cooking some (more during the summer than during the school year) and Joe can ‘sort of’ cook but the bulk of the meal prep will still be on me. And I’m okay with that. Most days I actually enjoy cooking and baking.
When I get a temp job that I know of in advance I can prepare for it, but sometimes I might get a call in the morning for a job that day. For those days I think I need some cooked at home ‘fast food’. Provided I have things prepared the skillet meals will work for that but I’d still like some back up ’emergency’ foods. I would love for these emergency meals to be something that I can have prepared from start to finish in 15 to 30 minutes.
So far my list of emergency meal ideas is rather short. It consists of Salmon Patties and Scrambled Eggs. I will definitely be looking for other things to add to this list.
For this week, instead of doing an actual menu plan I’ll be testing out some of my make ahead meal ideas and see how that works. Today I’m cooking a chicken in the crock pot (and then making chicken broth) and making yogurt in the other crock pot. Tonight I’ll soak some beans to cook tomorrow (in the crock pot). I also started a batch of No Knead Sourdough Bread (from the Sourdough eCourse at GNOWFGLINS) which I’ll be testing today. This bread is based on concept of “Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day” but uses sourdough. I have my ‘bucket of dough’ in the fridge ready to make my loaf of artisan bread to go with our dinner (I’ll also make a couple of loaves of sourdough sandwich bread). I’m thinking a double batch of rice will be a nice addition to my meal components and I do have some fresh veggies in the fridge along with some of my lastest ferment experiments (kraut, red cabbage kraut, cortido, and kimchi) to round things out. We have eggs (not many with the chickens molting) and we are once again getting milk (yippee for the cows no longer being dry!) so I’m thinking I have some good things in place.
