Mayhem, Summer, and Dinners This Week

I know it’s such a cliché, but WHERE DOES THE TIME GO? This week marks the beginning of May. MAY, people. May is going to be utter mayhem, that’s for sure, and I am already bracing for impact. Carla has so much going on. Three performances, a school presentation, a school trip, a fifth grade “graduation” ceremony, TWO class parties. On top of all the normal day-to-day chaos, of course, with three extracurricular activities that each meet twice weekly. And then BAM!, it will be summer break.

I tried to plan this summer so that it would be easier than last summer. Last summer, of course, we both bought and sold a house, so at least we won’t be dealing with THAT nonsense again. But I think we also over-scheduled Carla last summer. She had summer camp, plus she continued her music lessons through summer. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but I felt like we were constantly on the go – like there was no “break” from the busy schedule of the school year. 

This summer, I want time to relax by the pool and have friends over. But… Carla still wants to do summer camp. I am FULLY in favor of camp. While it sounds restful and decadent to spend the summer doing nothing by the pool, I feel like our days would end up being filled by a lot of screen time. And how many playdates can I really handle? Not enough to give Carla the same kind of social interaction she’ll get at summer camp, that’s for sure. So. Summer camp it is.

Okay, so summer camp by itself still gives us evenings and weekends to play and relax. But… Carla is considering trying out a new sport and maybe a new musical instrument. On top of that, we have two other commitments that will take place weekly after camp. Ugh. Now summer is sounding just as hectic as the school year! 

Maybe this is simply a busy season of our lives and I should learn to lean into it, instead of trying to force things to slow down? (Note: I realize that, once again, these are the Champagnest of “problems.”)

One thing that’s always constant: the need to plan and prepare meals. Once again, we’ll have two nights of takeout. I am ready to be done with THAT aspect of this school year. Takeout is fantastic once in awhile, but I am weary of it by now. And the annoying thing is, no matter how much I try to pack my day with nutrient dense foods, by the time dinner rolls around, I am so ravenous I scarf down a bunch of fries or chips. I love fries and chips, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t want or need to be eating them twice weekly. Well. Just a few more weeks of this nonsense left. 

(You may be thinking, Suzanne, simply DON’T ORDER the fries or chips. And yet… I find this hard to do??? When it comes down to it, I am extremely picky. My child, also extremely picky, only has two or three places where she will deign to eat on these takeout nights. And there are only a few options at each of them that I can stand to eat. Plus, I have a lifelong resistance to paying good money for food I don’t like. If I’m going to spend extra money on takeout, I am going to enjoy it, dammit. So. Loading up on fries and chips. I am my own worst enemy, etc.)

I DO have control over what I can make at home, though! So I will try to compensate for the takeout with some protein and veggie packed meals. 

Dinners for the Week of April 29-May 5

• Sheet Pan Lemon Garlic Chicken with Potatoes and Veggies: You KNOW I love a sheet pan meal. And I have a bunch of broccoli in the fridge that needs to be used up. 

• Caesar Chicken with Salad: I cannot for the life of me remember where I saw this idea, but it sounds easy enough: marinate some chicken in Caesar salad dressing and roast with a little parmesan sprinkled on. Pair it with a salad. My only question is whether I dress the salad with the Caesar dressing? Or go for a light vinaigrette instead???? I don’t want to over-Caesar myself. 

• Baked Pork Chops and Zucchini: Another sheet pan meal! This recipe calls for asparagus, but I already have some zucchini on hand, so I will probably use that instead.

• Golden Cauliflower Chickpea Bowls: These sound so nourishing right now. I bet my husband will want a chicken breast alongside his, and maybe I will add a salmon filet. We’ll see. I wonder if I could coax Carla into eating this? She likes crispy chickpeas…

 What are you eating, these last few days of April? How’s your summer shaping up?

Read Full Post »

HVAC, Moths, Dinners This Week

Oh hi! I am once again waiting for the HVAC professionals to arrive at my home! My furnace worked for two days. Then we had a day of beautiful sunshiney 79-degree weather and the interior of my house transformed into a sauna, so I turned on the air conditioning. Which didn’t work. This morning, my husband thought to check whether the furnace would work… and it did not work either. We have neither heat nor air conditioning. I am very glad today’s forecast is for mild temps, but… What is happening?????

Sidebar, since I was already moaning to you last week about pest woes: We opened the windows to help cool the house last night, and when I got into bed I noticed that approximately ten zillion miniature flying critters had taken up residence inside my lampshade, on the wall around my lamp, and on the ceiling directly above my lamp. I suspect they were tiny moths or other light-loving insects. I examined the screen nearest my bed and discovered that there is a large rip in it. It was past one (I fell asleep at my desk while working), so I did not have any energy to do a single thing about the moths. I turned off my lamp and went to bed, hoping they wouldn’t swarm me while I slept. This morning, they were gone. Where… did they go? I closed the window with the broken screen, so they didn’t exit that way. They don’t seem to have congregated around any of the nightlights. But… where are they? On the scale of pest awfulness, a million tiny moths doesn’t really register… but I am still very concerned. Am I going to open a seldom-used closet one of these days and find a full-fledged moth hive, pulsing with winged bugs?

MOVING RAPIDLY AWAY FROM THAT HORRIFYING IMAGE. I am in desperate need of groceries, but I’m afraid to leave the house lest the HVAC person choose that moment to show up. (They are supposed to give me a 30-minute window, but, in my experience, it is more like, “Oh, hey, I’m five minutes away!”) 

Let’s turn our thoughts away from the specter of replacing BOTH air conditioner and furnace and to the much more comforting prospect of food!  

Dinners for the Week of April 15-April 21

• Taquito Enchiladas: I am pretty sure Sarah inspired this one, as I never in a million years would have thought to do this myself. But I am newly in possession of a bag of chicken taquitos from Costco and I really, really want to see if this easy delicious-sounding meal is as easy and delicious as I hope it will be. 

• Whole-Roasted Cauliflower with Feta: I saw this on Instagram and cannot stop thinking about it. My husband will probably require some sort of meat accompaniment, so I am thinking chicken shawarma, maybe?

• Pasta Primavera: It’s that time of year again when I want ALL THE VEGGIES. I will sauté whatever I can find – asparagus! zucchini! broccoli! peas! – and add it to some protein pasta with a ton of lemon juice and parmesan. YUM.

• Sheet Pan Red Curry Chicken and Veggies: This recipe calls for butternut squash, which I will probably sub out for… something else. Broccoli and cauliflower? Green beans? 

Carla is back in the throes of Multiple Extracurriculars, now that spring sports have begun, so we will also be eating some junk food this week – some sort of fast-food chicken or burger, we’ll see. I am not a big fan of eating fast food on the regular, but sometimes it is the best and easiest option. This season of eating fast food multiple times per week won’t last forever, so I will try to lean into it as best I can.

What are you eating this week, Internet?

Read Full Post »

Recipe Bust, Activity Report, Fall Panic, Dinners This Week

First, I feel duty-bound to inform you that last week’s spinach artichoke chicken was a bust. I don’t exactly know why it was a bust, but it was. 

The spinach artichoke dip or sauce or whatever you want to call the element containing the creamy spinachy artichokey goodness was quite delicious. But the chicken… well, it suffered, and the whole dish suffered in empathy. I made enough to have leftovers, but when it came time to reheat the leftovers and eat them, I was filled with such revulsion I ended up a) making fish tacos with frozen fish sticks one night and b) ordering Chick-fil-A another night. And then I ended up throwing out the rest, which made me feel extremely guilty and wasteful. (I did scrape off the rest of the spinach artichoke element and ate it by itself; it was yummy.)

The other issue – besides the chicken, which was very tough? and also didn’t really seem to complement the sauce somehow? even though chicken is so neutral I have no idea how this is possible? – was that some of the artichoke hearts were… inedible. So that you would be eating along and then all of a sudden you realized you had been chewing for ten thousand years on a particular leaf. That was wildly unpleasant. I used the frozen artichoke hearts in a bag from Trader Joe’s and maybe that was the issue. It really kind of put me off of artichokes, though, and those have always been such a treat. 

Since I raised the issue of extracurriculars in my Dinners This Week post last week, I also feel duty-bound to update you. We had our first (nearly) full week of extracurriculars and we survived. It was rough going though. Although it was also a Call Week and it was also a week that Carla was recovering from a nasty respiratory thing that resulted in a lot of coughing, so she and I didn’t get a lot of sleep. 

This week has to be better, right?

I am also experiencing that free-falling panic that often accompanies September, which only just started and yet is also somehow two-thirds done. I have several freelance projects all due at once and then another one coming up in a couple of weeks; I have a big volunteer event looming in the near-distance and preparations and meetings have begun for that; we just had two family birthdays and two more are coming up early next month and one more after that; I am finally getting the ceiling repaired so we’ll have workers taking over our kitchen for a bit; then there are ALL the fall holidays one right after another and I feel as though I am already behind. Plus, in that time my husband and I have a pre-planned mini-getaway and I am trying to figure out if we can go visit my sister-in-law to see a performance she’s in even though the dates we could possibly make that work are the single weekend in between the big volunteer event and Thanksgiving. I don’t mean to complain, because it is all good stuff. It is just A Lot and it all stresses me out. 

I did buy my husband one of his birthday gifts already, so there’s that. But the rest of the uncompleted tasks are in a big, teetering stack and I don’t know what to grab first because everything is going to come toppling down on my head. 

Let’s think about food!  

I did not make lentil soup last week. The weather went from cool and rainy to 80+ degrees and sunny, and hearty soups no longer sounded appealing. I am back in Salad Mode, at least until I remember how much work salads are to put together. 

Dinners for the Week of September 19-September 25

• Greek Marinated Chicken with Something Green, Probably Zucchini: I saw this on Instagram and immediately wanted to try it. In the Instagram video, Laura Vitale simply combines all of the marinade ingredients in a blender and blends them together, which is a relief because “use a mortar and pestle” is otherwise a reason for me to skip a recipe entirely.

• Greek Farro Salad: I am feeling really into farro right now? I will make an extra couple of chicken breasts on Greek Marinated Chicken night so that we can have this salad.

• Fall Chopped Salad with Some Sort of Protein: Another salad, and another Instagram find, this time from Healthy Girl Kitchen. Her recipes are vegan and I am not vegan, so there will be a little variation in the way I make my salad. For instance, I might add shrimp? Also, I don’t have any butternut squash on hand, so I may skip that part. I absolutely HATE chopping butternut squash – they are so hard and I am always afraid I will chop my hand off with the knife, or that I will send a shard of squash straight through the window (they tend to fling themselves away from the knife, when I can get it through the rind). My grocery store sells pre-cubed squash but one package was $5.49 and, while I appreciate how much labor is required to cube that squash, $5.49 is too much for me to pay for what is likely to be my least favorite part of the salad. I suppose I could look for frozen cubed butternut squash but I didn’t and I am not eager to return to my grocery store anytime soon. Last time I went I FORGOT TO WEAR A MASK and I am still reeling from that. Like… WHAT? I have worn a mask in a grocery store for TWO YEARS at this point, how did I just… forget?!?!?!

• Tacos: ** Alert, alert: very quick weight loss talk ** The thing about tacos is that I love them with my whole heart. I want to put them on the menu because they are easy and everyone loves them, and because they SHOULD produce enough leftovers for a second night. However. I tend to overeat tacos. It’s as though you put a taco in front of me, and suddenly my body is certain this is the last time I will ever have access to a taco, and so I eat more tacos than any person should eat. I have a fond memory of being invited over to my schoolbus driver’s house when I was in elementary school, along with all the other kids on her route, for a taco night. (Yes, I suspect this is a little unusual, and yet my parents okayed it as did other parents of other children. Small town life, I guess.) And I ate TWELVE TACOS. As an elementary school student. Please understand that I do not eat twelve tacos when I make them at home, that was a one-time feat of extraordinary stomach stretchiness, but I do really, really like tacos. For most of my life, I have just… eaten however many tacos I want. But that’s not in line with trying to lose weight. I think it is reasonable to eat tacos, but that it is also reasonable to not eat ALL the tacos. So I am trying very hard to tell myself that just because things like tacos exist in my house right now, doesn’t mean I need to eat them. And likewise, that just because I am not eating tacos now does not mean I cannot eat them later. (This point is to prevent me from scarfing down leftover tacos for lunch, which I usually do as well.) Furthermore, I am not going to die if I only eat two tacos. I’m just not. (I am being hyperbolic; I never feel like I am going to die by restricting myself to X tacos. But I do feel a deep, deep longing for more.) Anyway. I am going to put tacos on the meal plan for TWO NIGHTS and ZERO lunches and it is going to happen.

Do any of these meals seem particularly in line with “easy” or “quick” (aside from the tacos)? No, not especially. So we’ll see how quickly it all falls apart. 

Read Full Post »

Football Season, After-School Activities, Dinners This Week

Football season is back, baby! It’s super problematic and fills me with conflict and yet I just can’t quit it! My husband and I enjoyed a luxurious afternoon watching our team win yesterday and sampling some Octoberfest beers, all from the comfort of our living room. Carla made herself a couch out of blankets and the cushions from the actual couch, and sat there through the whole game. She was originally very excited about football, but then realized after only a few minutes that she finds it quite boring. Well. It took me many decades before I learned how to enjoy it, so I get it. She watched a few shows on her iPad, then started doing a “research project” on her computer that seems to involve googling photos of animals and pasting the photos into a google doc. There may be an element of alphabetization at play. (“Mommy, Daddy, what’s an animal that starts with a G? All I can think of is ‘gnu.’”) Delightful.

We’ve been having fallish weather, which is pleasant. And makes me crave all the soups and stews and hearty foods. We made impromptu chili last night, which was delicious, and which means we have leftovers for dinner tonight. 

This week also marks the start of all of Carla’s after school activities. To be fair, we started one activity a little more than a month ago, and then there was a week of tryouts for the sport she’s doing. But the real, FULL schedule begins this week. (Technically, it’s not “full” yet. We will add a second Monday activity in late October as part of her music lessons. I am apprehensive about that one, because it means Carla will need to eat dinner in the car as we drive from one activity to another.)  

I did after-school activities as a kid – piano and gymnastics starting when I was in elementary school – and I remember dinners being tricky. Well, they were also wonderful because I had a sanctioned reason to eat fast food; my parents both worked right up until the time of the activities, and our house was too far out of town for us to go home for dinner. I have no recollection of how I got from school to my parents’ offices. But I do remember fighting with my brother over whether we were going to get tacos or McDonalds for dinner, and then eating whatever we’d decided on at my father’s paper-cluttered desk while he finished seeing patients and dictating notes. This was the time before smart phones and iPads, too, so I am not sure what we did while we waited. Looked through old medical journals and bickered, probably.

I don’t remember feeling overscheduled when I was a kid. But until high school (when I still did piano, but also added debate, cheerleading, individual voice lessons, and a capella group practice), I had two, maybe three activities spanning two or maybe three nights a week. Carla is going to have something every single day. Yikes. She and my husband and I talked at great length about the scheduling and the time commitment, and I am hopeful that it won’t be too overwhelming. Carla doesn’t really have homework yet, so her only requirements at home are playing her instrument, reading for 15 minutes, and keeping her room and play areas tidy. And even though she’s doing something every night, she really only has three activities. (Sport: 3 nights a week. Instrument: 2 nights a week. School activity: 2 afternoons a week.) And she is SO excited about all of them. 

She’s a very busy, active kid, so I don’t necessarily worry that much about her being overstimulated or tired. My main worry is that she won’t feel like she has any time to play, which is really so important for kids. But she will be able to come home after school three days a week and play a bit before her sports practice. Plus, her weekends aren’t terribly crowded. Well. I forgot about Girl Scouts. She will have Scout meetings once a month. But that’s not too bad. And then there’s skiing, but that doesn’t start until January. 

Well. We’ll see how it goes. If it’s impossible, or she’s too exhausted, we will apologize profusely and back out of one of the activities. 

Did you do after-school activities when you were a kid? Did you feel overscheduled? If you are a parent, what is/was it like for your kiddo/s? Do you think Carla and I are nutso for doing this to ourselves on purpose?

With all these activities, I am back to planning super easy meals with plenty of leftovers. Here’s what’s on the agenda for this week:

Dinners for the Week of September 12-19

• Leftover Chili: This reminds me that I have never posted my chili recipe. It’s very good. I make it with ground beef and beans, but it’s very adaptable to be vegetarian or to accommodate alternate types of ground meat or your particular preference for beans. 

• Spinach and Artichoke Chicken: I don’t know why, but I’ve been dreaming about something like this for awhile. I think it should make some good leftovers, and it sounds perfect for fall. 

• Crockpot BBQ Pork: This was on the menu a couple of weeks ago, but I didn’t execute it for whatever reason. So it’s happening this week. I slather my pork on a baked potato, my husband eats his in a sandwich with coleslaw. The pork tenderloins at Trader Joe’s were teensy, but I think I can make this stretch to two nights anyway.

• Lentil Soup: I haven’t made lentil soup in a good long while, but it sounds really yummy. I got pre-made mirepoix from Trader Joe’s, which makes this meal very simple to put together. Perhaps I will also make a loaf of miracle no-knead bread to go along with it. I’ll make a nice big pot, which should make enough for another night of dinners and maybe even a lunch or two.

Are you having fall weather in your neck of the woods? Are you a football fan? Any fall meals on the docket for you this week?

Read Full Post »

Fire Dreams, New Schedules, Dinners This Week

I woke up at 3:00 this morning from a bad dream. In the dream, I was in my childhood home with my husband. Somehow, my horse had gotten into the house, and we were trying to get him out but he was stomping around and bumping into the furniture and getting very riled up and upset. In the confusion, a fire started in the dining room. My husband was yelling, in a very loud monotone, “Fire! Fire! Fire!” That’s when I woke up.

My father is a volunteer fire fighter, and he’d told me yesterday about a recent fire that had devasted a dwelling. Plus, my husband and I started watching a new show this weekend and last night’s episode featured an explosion that resulted in a house going up in flames. So I think it’s safe to say that I had fire on the brain.

Nonetheless, it’s easy for a dream like mine to have the weight of prescience, foreshadowing, and I lay there in the dark house taking long deep breaths through my nose, trying to smell smoke, listening intently for the crackle of flames. I finally got up and did a walk-through of my home, which allowed me to fall back to sleep after an hour or so of troubled thoughts about my loved ones and whether the dream fire had escaped into any of their homes. 

We’re also about to begin the new school year, and, along with it, a new schedule of extracurricular activities. So perhaps my brain was merely venting its feelings of facing the unknown in an uncontrolled way. 

Carla will be doing extracurricular activities FOUR DAYS A WEEK, sometimes five, and that sounds completely bonkers I am aware. But these activities are ones she has been wanting to do for a long time, and we discussed the time commitment at length as a family, and my husband and I think they will be good for her. 

But I am fretting, as usual, about dinner. Dinner is a thing I can – usually – control, in a world that increasingly feels uncontrollable, but I haven’t quite figured out how I will make it work with our new schedule, so I am out of sorts. Horse-in-the-dining-room, fire-breaking-out out of sorts, it seems. 

Some weekdays will be normal – by which I mean Carla has no commitments after school is out. One day each week, she will have an extracurricular commitment that takes place after school but ends before dinner. I suppose on those days, I will need to have everything prepped and ready to go so that we can come home from the activity and I can immediately get food in the oven. Some weekdays, we will have a couple of hours of free time after school, and then the extracurricular activity takes place in the evening. My plan is to feed Carla dinner before we leave for her activity. But then, it will be quite late when we return, and she’ll need to shower and go to bed immediately upon arriving home. (To accommodate the new activities, we’re pushing her bedtime back a teeny bit to 8:30, as long as she still gets adequate rest.) So… when will my husband and I eat? 

(Recall, if you will, that our normal school-year dinner schedule is: Carla eats at 5:30 and is in bed by 7:30-8:00, my husband arrives home between 6:00 and 8:00, my husband and I eat between 8:30-9:00. Thanks, I hate it.) 

I wailed to my husband that we might be eating a lot of Lean Cuisine this year, and he very kindly said that that was FINE, we would make it work. But I don’t really LIKE Lean Cuisine (or its brethren), so I would prefer to find an alternative that isn’t a) fast food or b) nothing or c) me making dinner at nine o’clock at night or d) some variation on Lean Cuisine. (Although all of those are options occasionally, I don’t want to do any of them ALL the time.)

Making meals with built-in leftovers sounds like our best option. That’s why I have chicken fajitas on the menu this week. That way, I can eat before the activity and my husband can eat whenever he gets home. But I’m not great about knowing which meals will produce leftovers, and it seems to me that most of them (not all, but a lot of the ones I love: chicken paprikas! pizza! chili! spaghetti and meat sauce! tacos!) are the more decadent, less I’m Trying to Lose Weight ones that I would prefer to be eating lately. Sigh. Maybe Lean Cuisine is the way to go. 

Dinners for the Week of August 22-28

• Slow Cooker Chicken with French Wine and Mustard and Green Salad: Maybe this will produce leftovers? Also, the slow cooker is going to be my bestie this year, I can already tell.

• Sheet Pan Chicken Fajitas: I can definitely amp up the chicken and veggie quotient to get at least one, maybe more, days of leftovers out of this. 

• Thai-Style Pork Tenderloin with this Quinoa: The quinoa is leftovers-friendly, but I’m not wild about reheated pork. Hmmm. 

• Honey Garlic Sheet Pan Salmon & Brussels Sprouts: I’m fine eating leftover salmon, but my husband doesn’t particularly like it even on Day One. Hmmmmmm.

• 20 Minute Korean Beef Sesame Noodles: This doesn’t seem particularly leftovers-friendly, although that could be my own bias against reheating beef, but it sounds really tasty. 

What are some of your favorite Plentiful Leftovers meals? Also, your favorite make-ahead meals, quick meals, one-person-eats-now,-the-other-person-eats-later meals?  

Read Full Post »