One of our favorite weeknight dinners! Super delicious broiled salmon with a Korean-style sauce that can be made in advance, and quick fried rice with kimchi and whatever veggies you have in your fridge.
Hello and hi.
Are you doing OK? Are you loving or hating or nothing-ing this stay-at-home moment in our lives?
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ON WEDNESDAYS WE EAT PINK FISH.
Yep. Super easy broiled salmon, comin' atcha. This recipe is a companion to the kimchi fried rice from last week, but I wanted to keep them as separate posts (and eventually together!) because they are so good together OR separately.
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Let's make the unbearable (not to me) story of why we're making this suuuuuuper short and get to the buttery, spicy goodness that is kimchi fried rice.
...My favorite kid-friendly meal prep dinner! This recipe for healthy baked chicken tenders has just a few ingredients and is super easy to make. Bonus, you can freeze the breaded tenders and bake them right before serving for a quick + fun weeknight freezer meal!
THEY'RE JUST LIKE FRIED.
Ha. Ha. No, no they are not. Sorry, not here to lie to you.
Here are the ways that easy homemade baked chicken tenders are not like fried chicken tenders:
So, what I'm saying is that MAYBE baked chicken tenders are better than fried chicken tenders? In like 3 cases, but I'd say that at-home no-frying situations are preferable from a mess standpoint FOR SURE.
...Here's a look at the easy meal prep method I use, along with some tips for creating your own schedule! What works for me may not work for you, but the key, I've found, is to create some sort of system that allows you to spend the time you want to spend making the foods you want to make. That's easy meal prep, no matter what it looks like for you!
It is no secret that I adore cooking. If I’m feeling stressed after a long day I crave being in the kitchen. I refuse chopping help from Jay because it feels like my own little worry stone – back and forth, controlling something simple compared to the rest of the world.
I never used to meal prep. My schedule allowed me to get home early enough to go to yoga and make dinner, and blissed out chopping, stirring, tasting, and enjoying the process was my nightly routine.
...This Thai chicken larb recipe is so quick and easy thanks to the use of ground chicken. We love making this for meal prep with extra dressing and using it on salads or in rice bowls all week. It's gluten free and wildly delicious thanks to a fish sauce lime vinaigrette.
IknowIknowIknow.
Maybe not the most inspired thing to do for our first 2020 recipe, but inspired is not what we're attempting here. Delicious is. Chicken larb is delicious.
Jay usually does some kind of January ... eating thing ... which, is fine. I could go on and on about how I don't do things like that for a variety of reasons that I feel strongly about, but I'm also happy to support people in my life that try to make healthier choices.
...One of my best "use the oven at all times" Thanksgiving tips: plan an easy side dish that can roast or broil while the turkey rests and is carved.
EVEN IF you have a few casseroles that need to reheat at the same time, having one veggie that comes out of the oven fresh right as you're ready to eat makes a really nice balance to what can be a pretty heavy meal.
This technique can apply to tons of veggies, like this 5-minute asparagus from last year or these broiled lemon green beans. This year, I'm doing spiced, roasted Brussels sprouts. They get washed/prepped early in the week, then tossed with butter and spices early in the day. It's a raw veg, so no need to clog up fridge space. They hang out on a baking sheet prepped and ready, roast in the oven while the turkey gets its beauty treatment, and done! A vegetable for those of us that like some vegetables with our butter.
...That's right. It's turkey time.
How are you on turkey at Thanksgiving? I'm very medium. Mostly here for the sides, can manage if it's well cooked and the gravy is on point. It's never my FAVORITE thing, though. And the obvious next thing to say would be...."until now," but honestly still give me all the casseroles.
HOWEVER. This turkey is 1,000% delicious, flavorful, juicy, and just really really simple to make and make well.
My issue is dry turkey, mainly. This is not that.
...Lentil Quinoa Bowl with kale walnut pesto! These are my absolute favorite ingredients for a meal prep quinoa power bowl. The ingredients can all be made in advance and the kale and walnut pesto keeps perfectly in the fridge for at least a week, and even longer in the freezer. Enjoy these fun vegetarian Buddha bowls!
I am SO, so pleased that this is going to be your dinner this week (go with it). This lentil quinoa bowl is one of the best things to come out of my kitchen in recent months (and there are....a lot of contenders), is gluten free, vegetarian, and ridiculously yummy in a way that makes you not really that concerned about the health factor.
But the health factor is THERE with these lentil quinoa bowls. We're talking quinoa, turmeric lentils, roasted sweet potatoes AND tomatoes, and walnut pesto that we've made several times this summer for these bowls, pasta, and lots of other yummy things!
(PS this is not unlike the lentil quinoa bowl from Panera!)
The walnut kale pesto is not to be skipped, is my point.
...Yummy kale pesto without pine nuts made in my favorite food processor (the parts go in the dishwasher!) is the best meal prep ingredient ever! It doesn't require fresh herbs so can be made year-round and keep beautifully in the freezer.
Here's the thing:
I don't actually hate cooking entire meals on the weeknights. I find it relaxing to put our kids to bed, chat with Jay, and make an entire meal start to finish.
Buthoweveralso, when I do that it means that we eat dinner at 9pm and then don't go to bed until 11, and that's not OK. SO, I mostly prep some things and then cook one or two items when we're ready to eat.
...I am not gluten free. But! A lot of people are, and all of the kinds of people in this world should be allowed to eat cake. Yummy cake. Intentional cake. Cake with chocolate chips on top of it that are slightly melted like icing.
This recipe came to me via Instagram; someone that I hadn't heard of before posted the recipe and it included almond flour which I HAPPENED to have a bag of in my freezer, among other gluten free ingredients that need a home.
...A summertime recipe for cobb salad that includes grilled chicken AND corn plus caprese salad ingredients with fresh, juicy tomatoes, mozzarella, and a super easy basil pesto salad dressing that is out of this world delish. This is also a great meal prep kale salad!
Oh hello, here's a salad we can SINK OUR TEETH INTO. Finally.
I'm all about a main dish salad. I order them often in restaurants because I want to, not because I'm punishing myself for something or feel like I should. BUT, the salad's gotta be a good one. House made dressings, fun protein choices, crunchy things, etc. If salads on a menu don't look good, I'm heading straight for ordering a dinner entree during brunch because the smothered chicken is just always so legit, right?
...Today in Quick Dinners With Four-ish Ingredients:
And also What To Do With Baked Tofu!
This is a dinner that I made specifically to pair with the baked tofu from Monday, and one that we make all the time. We love Thai food, and Thai green curry is something that I order almost every time I go to a Thai restaurant.
Curry, though, can take some time to simmer and build flavors. I love doing that BUT definitely only on weekends. Weekdays aren't the time to add little pinches of this and that or be dealing with whole lemongrass and jalapenos, nope. So THIS Thai Curry is the polar opposite in terms of effort: Vegetables, coconut milk, green curry paste. Full stop, done and done.
...Hello and welcome to your Monday! I made us the easiest marinated baked tofu bites ever.
File this one in your "things to make all the time" list of fave recipes.
This, my friends, is baked tofu. We make some version of tofu two or more times per week, and even more since both kids started eating solid foods. Jay and I both eat meat, but the meat in our food system is, let's say, dicey at best. We try to buy lots of local meat, and with that comes a higher food cost. SO, we offset that by eating vegetarian several days per week, so that when we do eat meat we feel good about it while not completely going broke on fancy groceries.
...This recipe was last updated February 2021.
Cauliflower Adobo: A perfect dinner, comin' atcha! One of our favorite vegan cauliflower recipes is here for all of our weeknight dinner needs.
We are always on the hunt for light and/or vegetarian dinners, and this one kept popping up on my Instagram several weeks ago. I'm a huge fan of Chicken Adobo, a soy/vinegar Filipino dish. This vegetarian adobo version features cauliflower as the main ingredient and is different + much lighter.
The sauce here is suuuuuper umami and bright from the vinegar, which I love. There's some sugar here as well, and I love how pungent the sauce gets after it simmers a little bit.
The method here is so simple: sear some cauliflower for tons of flavor, then simmer it in the adobo sauce for a few minutes until it's cooked. The whole dish is done in 30 minutes, maybe less, and YES PLEASE extra sauce all over some rice you'll serve this.
...On New Year's Eve of....last year? this year? how do we describe this? the one that just happened. Let's start again.
The last time we had a New Year's Eve, Jay and I went to a fancy dinner with our best friends. It was excellent. Will was just a few weeks old, we felt free, and the food was fabulous.
The dinner was one of those "four courses choose one thing each course" fixed price special event dealios, and for most of the courses we each chose different stuff so we could try everything. And almost without fail, the vegetables were the best things on the table. I'm talking pate vs a raw cauliflower thing, greens vs pork belly - on paper, the meat stuff should have been the best.
...Oh hi, stereotypical summer meal!
I've been cooking more low carb meals recently, and a struggle I have is finding meals that feel like a whole meal, not like there SHOULD have been mashed potatoes on the side of this steak, you know?
This is that. It's the most perfectly light but complete low carb/gluten free meal, and it's full of huge flavor to boot.
...Oh hi, summer.
My basil plant is doing GREAT this year, in a new sunny spot from years past, so prepare yourself for a gazillion "but it's seasonal" basil-using recipes. You'll get no apologies from me on that one.
I've been playing around with broiled chicken more, and after a few tries I'm definitely liking the method for a few reasons. It's super quick and doesn't smell up the house OR require walking outside to get to the grill, two things that can be a deterrent for me sometimes. This particular broiled lemon chicken is broiled on just one side because the pieces of chicken are super thin. If you don't feel like cutting the chicken pieces in half (or buying thin-cut chicken) you don't have to, just flip the chicken and broil on the second side.
This entire meal is done in half an hour or even less if you make the basil sauce another day as part of meal prep. Let's do it!
...Just in time for summer! Which starts in June I know but the pools open this weekend and I'm a pool rat and pools mean summer and the pools open this weekend so this weekend is summer.
You get it.
This summer! We are going to keep cooking, but we are cooking light in two senses of the word: lighter food calorically, sure. It doesn't feel as great to inhale three plates of pasta when it's 95 degrees outside. But also, light on the actual cooking.
...I almost called these Superfood Meatballs, but Mark Bittman says (and I agree) that there are no superfoods, so I'm trying to take that word out of my vocabulary.
Are Gluten Free Meatballs just as exciting? I have no idea. I wanted to make a meatball that was full of good things but also yummy, and to me that's what these are. I also wanted a chicken meatball that didn't inherently feel like it had to be paired with a marinara sauce. These chicken kale meatballs would be great with tomato sauce, for sure, but I paired them with a light brown gravy that was silky and savory and SO good.
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