How are we feeling this week? Or whenever you and yours start back to school (if you do)?
Our district starts in just two weeks, but we're deep in prep for the big day. Beck has asked weekly when school is starting back since it let OUT in May, and now is up to asking about three times per day if tomorrow is the first day of school. She can't wait to start in her new class with new friends, and I'm SO excited for her.
...Favorite chicken cordon bleu flavors in these utterly delicious and simple Chicken Cordon Bleu Meatballs! Lean ground chicken and a little Swiss cheese get blended quickly with some ham (leftover glazed ham or deli ham!) and easy pantry spices for major flavor in this tender ground chicken meatball. There's an easy sour cream dip with mustard for dipping + extra credit.
These are chicken balls with ham and cheese.
They were, as all good ideas on this blog are, Jay's idea, and they were a fantastic one. I love the nostalgic flavors of chicken cordon bleu, crispy exterior, gooey interior, but the process is pretty arduous and a meatball is just so friendly and celebratory, right?
For the sake of holidays or parties, you can totally make these in advance, bake them, then reheat them in the oven until the cheese melts again so all the mess + raw meat nonsense can happen well in advance of serving these.
The ingredients are simple, and you can use deli ham or leftover holiday ham from Easter or Thanksgiving if you ever have any lying around.
...Homemade chicken cutlets for the feezer! These thin-sliced chicken breasts are breaded then cooked right from frozen for the best meal prep entree ever. These can be pan-fried OR baked, and both cooking methods result in crispy, juicy chicken that is absolutely delicious. Think of this as a grown up version of my baked breaded chicken tenders.
Let us make ourselves some chicken cutlets, keep them in the freezer, and call it good. I am so, so into freshly fried or baked crispy chicken without any effort.
...Meal prep chicken grain bowls with all of your favorite toppings! We're going super easy for meal prep with one dressing for the chicken marinade and salad, a few chopped veggies, and lots and lots of time saved during the week now that your meal prep lunches are made!
Mmmmmmm meal prep ideas for lunch, aka something I think about almost every week. It's been one of the hardest things about quarantine for me; very few opportunities to leave the house for lunch and very little desire to have leftovers since we cook 7 dinners per week now too.
...Two weeks until Thanksgiving! And in less than two weeks we'll be elbow deep in stuffing prep, right?
I will be, at least.
I've shared a few new Thanksviging menu recipes this year, and now is the moment that we get our Thanksgiving menu planning hats on and get to work. Lists, prep, groceries, etc.
This year I'm making two new menus - One that is going to be a traditional Thanksgiving dinner for larger groups, and one small Thanksgiving dinner menu plan for gatherings that are just you and some besties. It's Thanksgiving Menu 2020, COVID-style.
...This gluten free black beans and rice recipe has just 8 ingredients and is done in about half an hour! I love rice and beans for a quick vegetarian dinner, and make these black beans in advance often for an even faster meal-prepped dinner. If you have some extra black beans, black bean salsa is great to have around for snacks!
Weeknight vegan dinner idea, here we go! Weeknight vegan/dairy free/gluten free/BUT NOT SAD dinner, to be exact.
Free of some things people avoid, not free of joy, etc.
...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.
...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.
...OMG OMG OMG. 
In a real world we probably can't have all of these things for one meal. Or shouldn't, at the very least. ButIwanttosobadseriously.
...
HI.
How was your Labor Day? Our was GREAT minus a few things. 1. my back stopped functioning on Sunday morning so I'm on day three of super painful spasms and no I can't stop picking up my toddler and no I can't take medicine because of the fetus and no I refuse to stop wiping my ass or any other normal thing that hurts. Because everything hurts. 2. Beck peed on our bed last night because she giggled too hard so we had to wash the sheets at 8pm after a long weekend but also we got clean sheets out of it? There was also a criminal incident on our street in the middle of the night last night that yielded us sleeping about three hours total.
OTHER THAN THAT. The holiday was great. We did some fun family things but mostly hung out just us, watched enough TV that it felt lazy but did some cleaning and organizing and walked a ton. I also made an entire Thanksgiving dinner which was suuuuuper delicious but weird because it's still 90 degrees here. But! It's done and the fall decorations are out, which I'm not mad about.
It's during holiday weeks that I often find my self really craving things that don't taste like traditional American food, if that makes any sense at all. Asian flavors, Mexican flavors, and hell yes to Italian food all the time. This is that! It's on the weeknight train of things that are easy to make but is a teensy bit special because we're calling it bolognese instead of spaghetti. This was inspired in real life by two things: we came home from vacation with a half bag of frozen meatballs from my sister-in-law, and then we celebrated our anniversary at a fancy Italian place. I ordered bologese there and it had these big chunks of carrot that were cooked down in meat sauce and I LOVED them because veggies should be with pasta in the name of balance. So meatballs instead of meat sauce, extra carrots for your health. Everything simmers super quickly and you can definitely eat in under an hour OR make this on a weekend or random free afternoon and it'll keep great in the fridge for several days, so dinner can be done in the time it takes to cook pasta.
...Crockpot Chicken Gnocchi Soup is just like chicken and dumplings with gnocchi as the dumplings! I use bone in, skin on chicken pieces for tons of flavor, but any chicken you have or like works perfectly in this great make ahead winter slow cooker recipe. Make a super easy kale salad to go with this if you'd like!
Because literally no one that I know has time to make dumplings this time of year, and I know people who cook a lot. I cook a lot!
But sometimes cooking to eat is different than long laborious project meals, which are SO much fun but also this time of year maybe not so much. BUT (imma see if I can start every sentence with that word), we still obviously want the food that tastes like it took 8 hours and a touch of your sanity to create, you know? At least I do. Food that cooks for a long time tastes wonderful, has deep flavors, and is so comforting when it's a stew or soup like this is.
Foods like slow cooker chicken and dumplings with GNOCCHI for a little "open package, dump in" energy.
...Easy dinner alert! 
BUT also fancy enough that you could plan today and make this sometime for friends over the weekend. THAT'S legit.
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It's raining here all this week. Dreary, kind of chilly, muggy as all getout, and rain every single day until we go to New York on THURSDAY. So freakin soon.
So, after yesterday's slaw I was planning all kinds of fun new things to cook for summer barbecues and get-togethers, and it made me sad that I wasn't having a random get-together TODAY.
So, I'm bringing cookout flavors to Tuesday, in an easy + healthy + fast manner. It tastes like sunshine even if you're somewhere that is especially gray and damp this week.
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HUMP day. 
Since I'm talking about so many quick meals that we're forced to eat this week (hayyyyyy licensure qualification exam on Saturday!), I thought it only fair that I share with you one of our new favorites: Chicken Taco Salad with Salsa Vinaigrette. I put it on Instagram last night!
Ridonkulously easy, y'all. The taco chicken method is actually one that I use with ANY meat that I want to taste Mexicanified, and the vinaigrette starts with store bought salsa, so THERE. The rest of the dish is just salad junk, and how hard is that? You can change this every time based on your mood or what's languishing in the fridge, and it's super delicious no matter what.
It's healthy, too! And look, if you decide that you're having a hard week where PMS and hard exams and too much work are happening all at once and decide to eat chips and store bought queso with this salad I won't judge AT ALL.
Not that I know anything about all that nonsense.
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It's dinner for Tuesday!
I know sometimes I send you around this here website looking for old recipes to make into a new meal, but today I thought I'd show you a new meal AND write it for you all in one place. 
Full service, people.
I made this last week for dinner of the week for Linen&Spice, and it was a hit! Lots of orders, and Jay got to have it for dinner one night when I went out with friends. It's simple and delicious: smashed potatoes (these are purple!), zucchini tomato cream sauce, and chicken grilled in butter, salt, and pepper. So easy, but the flavors together are GREAT, and the components are accessible and cheap.
So, let's have dinner together.
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Happy Hump Day, family. 
Is the week dragging or flying? I feel honestly like I have not enough days to get everything done before next week but also like it's definitely got to be Thursday or Friday? Weird.
Anyway, let's make dinner tonight! I told you yesterday that maybe possibly for Christmas you could make pomegranate pork and you CAN, but it's simple enough for a lovely weeknight meal any time of the year!
Let's do pork, something green, and a grain. This whole meal can be made in under an hour, which is super duper sweet.
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I want to be eating this right now.
Instead of course I'm juggling 9,439 things with no lunch in sight, but such is Thursday when you hold multiple jobs, amirite?
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Friends. 
I read all the time various posts, see pictures, get questions....I'm thinking that you people are eating some boring food?
Maybe not you - maybe some other people? 
I don't know.
I think, though, that since it's Tuesday and there aren't any short weeks coming up and it's getting colder that we should discuss at some length why boring food doesn't have to be so.
IT DOESN'T! Promise. You can make affordable, healthy, regular meals every night of your life, but with a few teensy changes make them not so standard that you feel sad in your heart and end up getting takeout half the time. ...
I'm going to the mountains tomorrow!
I'm spending the day getting ready and cooking and packing and I CAN'T WAIT. We're going with some of Jay's comedy bffs and one of them has a baby who is half ASIAN which is my favorite kind of baby tied with..every other kind of baby...and he's going to wear a halloween costume and ALSO we are having Friendsgiving on Saturday and IT'S GOING TO BE AWESOME.
I'm slightly excited. If that was apparent.
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Oh Monday, WHY do you exist. Seriously. I have a serious case of the grumps today. 
Not really, but I kind of had an epic weekend with so much fun and love and yoga and food and friends so now today is just....omgisitdinnertimeyetandcanwegoonadate? That kind of day. You know.
So, to celebrate Monday, let's play with carbs! I PROMISE I have some fun new food coming this week that doesn't involve potatoes, but I'm still kind of in awe of the crock pot baked potatoes that we discussed last week, and also I like carbs so...here are some ideas for what else one might stuff into a baked potato. ...
