Clean.

Our Meal Plan.

~ { While I leave you for a week long summer break I am sharing with you a series of posts from years gone by. I know you will enjoy them! I'll be back soon with fresh posts and fresh stories from our week. Happy summer, Rachel } ~

Do you create a weekly meal plan? Before motherhood the concept of creating a meal plan (or a weekly rhythm of any kind aside from showing up for work each day) was not my thing. It was too predictable. Too orderly. To much like something my mother might have done. So I avoided meal planning (and other schedules of all kinds) completely.

But now as a mama I don't want to leave dinner to chance. Our days are full and having a meal plan allows me to feel relaxed and organized and in control of our rhythm. Our weekly meal plan has become the cornerstone of having a reasonable and joyful week around here.

This is how we go about it: Once a week I sit down with a blank meal plan, a blank shopping list, and a stack of my favorite cookbooks. (During CSA season I also grab a list of CSA veggies in my fridge.) As I jot down meals onto my meal plan I also make a grocery list. (Mine is a little geeky. I divide my shopping list into four quadrants by drawing a big + in the center of the page. Each quadrant is marked "produce", "bulk", "coolers", or "the rest". Yes, geeky. But I never have to backtrack in the store so it works for me.)

I keep all of these supplies in a three ring binder that I'll tell you about another day. In my binder I also keep a list of favorite dinners and a default meal plan incase I choke and don't know what to make.

I created the meal plan template that is shown above and thought I would share it with you. It is a simple grid with days of the week, meals, and food prep. (Because we eat allot of traditional foods, like soaked/sprouted grains, this section is critical for us. It is also the place to remind yourself to take something out of the freezer the night before or to remind yourself to bake the weeks' bread or make yogurt.).

I saved it as an Excel file (if you want to personalize it with your favorite font) and as a PDF. Take your pick. Just click on one of the links below and it's yours.

Happy meal planning!

Download Meal Plan (XLS)

Download Mealplan (PDF)

The Summer Garden

There are good things happening out there in my weed patch garden. Good things. It has been an unusual spring so the garden doesn't look like I anticipated, but its happening none the less. 2010 will be remembered as the Year of the Sunflower around here. (Now we know what happens six weeks after you let a three year old loose in the garden with a packet of sunflower seeds. A sunflower forest is what happens.)

We're using the sunflower stalks for twining up the pea vines, for staking the tomatoes, and for bean supports. They are everywhere. And I think I've composted nearly a hundred already.

In the garden spirit, we're finding lots of wonderful ways to use of loads of greens, broccoli, peas, and other early season treats. Here's the meal plan for the week!

Download Meal-plan07052010

Summer Solstice Cheer and Meal Plan Monday

Happy Summer Solstice! The magic of summer is upon us here. We're feeling healthy and strong, and we're starting to hit our summer groove.

Last night the kids and I celebrated the eve of the longest day by staying up wayyyy past our bedtimes chasing fire flies around the yard. We caught two and brought them to bed with us in a small glass jar. Before we went inside the kids found the moon and a single star and sent wishes up into the night sky for the coming season. On their wishing agenda was lots of time with favorite friends and so much swimming. In the river. The lake. The pool. Everyday. Sounds like a fine summer to me.

And with summer come the berries.

Viroqua is surrounded on all sides by Amish country. Some farm conventionally, some organically, some a little of both. With work you can ferret out who your favorites are. The berries in our yard are all eaten by the kids within minutes of ripening, so we buy and pick extras to put up for the year. This year we picked up twenty five quarts of berries. Our freezer is now brimming with fruit for smoothies and our pantry is stocked with a wonderful stash of tart strawberry-rhubarb jam, sweetened with just a bit of honey and a little stevia.

Next up are raspberries, then blackberries and blueberries. Oh, how I love berry season.

Below is my meal plan for the week. Have a wonderful Summer Solstice day! 

Download Meal-plan6212010

Monday Meal Plans

SO thrilled with the response to this weekend's giveaway! Clearly this was right up your alley. Thanks again to Jay at Life Without Plastic for the generous giveaway. The lucky winner is Crystal who said:

I'm phasing out our plastic storage containers. We're reusing glass storage jars (everything from tiny baby food jars to massive pickle jars) and I'm slowly collecting other non-plastic storage containers at yard sales and thrift stores. This week I'm picking up oilcloth and will be making some cloth snack bags -- hopefully I can stop buying ziplock bags!

Congratulations, Crystal!

This is a wild week for us at LuSa and Clean. We head to the Midwest Renewable Energy Fair in a few days, so my meal plan this week reflects travel and festivities. I decided to share it just them same. You can edit out my travel meals and plug in your favorites. Do let me know if you're into this as a weekly post so I know if its worth continuing!

Download Meal-plan6142010

This week we'll be eating:

Another chilaquile

Our week shifted and we didn't actually make this last week. So very fast, easy, and delicious!

Beef Stir Fry

Shitake mushrooms, thinly sliced beef, and lots of bok choy on soaked rice cooked in coconut milk.

Slowcooker chili

A double batch of black bean chili with lots of fresh veggies thrown in the mix.

More tacos

This is a weekly standard around here. Homemade cumin black beans and seasoned ground bison, venison, or beef are what they're all about.

Grill out

Venison hamburgers, grilled baby zucchini, and jojos (grilled parboiled potato wedges seasoned with olive oil, salt, pepper, paprika, and chili powder)

Monday Meal Plans

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."

~ * ~ * ~ * ~

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.

Download Meal-plan672101

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.