Hey hey, fall sheet pan dinner recipe! This sheet pan sausage and root veggies comes with its very own warm spinach salad made right.on.the.freaking.pan. The ingredients are simple, the method is foolproof, and the salad dressing is seriously, drinkably delicious.
Omg how is it Halloween week. Like seriously.
...This is our absolute favorite way to make salmon! A doubled-up method; we sear the salmon in a cast iron skillet until the skin gets super toasty and crispy (salmon bacon, HELLO), then broil to finish. The result is a flaky, medium-well salmon that is perfectly cooked every time.
Welcome to the inside of my brain, wherein if something goes well a few times I declare it THE BEST with very little testing of other things, then do the same thing over and over in perpetuity because it works for me.
So if we're being honest it's THE WAY I cook salmon, but I'm calling it the best salmon recipe because it is so, so good.
This is our easy weeknight salmon. We have it at least once a week. We cook it the same each time BUT with different seasonings, which I think is a big key to "cooking well" without, say, culinary school. I can't cook all.the.things. but I have a few methods that I'm great at, so I change up the spices and BOOM variety.
You're like...this is not very inspiring it sounds like you only know how to do this one thing.
...Gluten free buffalo turkey meatballs served with an easy smashed cucumber salad for a yummy low carb lunch or dinner! The gluten free turkey meatballs have tons of flavor and can be made as part of your meal prep for the week. They're also great meatballs to make in a big batch and keep in the freezer!
I made us lunch!
A really really yummy lunch. No story, really, just a way to showcase the gluten free turkey meatballs and smashed cucumber salad from a few weeks ago together. I threw on some easy "homemade" (not really) buffalo sauce because Buffalo all the things and call me happy.
...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?
...Call this our OMG JUST EAT SOMETHING list.
Piggybacking on my last post re: our favorite feeding gear for kids!
I do not love talking about giving in to kids, or being overly permissive out of laziness, or anything like that.
But. However. Also. If we were going to describe feeding kids in those ways, this would be THE list that we would come back to again and again.
These are the recipes that our kids gobble down. They taste good, aren't overly complicated, don't try to force habits (cough, broccoli) that take a little more work, and overall are just wonderful recipes that everyone in our household loves.
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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.
...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.
...How are we feeling this week? Or whenever you and yours start back to school (if you do)?
Our district starts today, and Beck goes next week 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 loves it, and I love that. ...
spicy noodle bowls made with ramen noodles (or any pasta you like!) are the perfect mid-week alternative to spaghetti with meat sauce. this asian noodle bowl is the best!
What do you watch while you eat dinner?
Do not tell me that you talk to other people. I won't hear it.
...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.
...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!
...One of my favorite recipes with sweet potato gnocchi from Trader Joes (or wherever)! This super quick dinner recipe is perfect for any greens + gnocchi you have and comes together in just 20 minutes or so. Butter, sage, and garlic make a quick sauce, and dinner is on the table ready to be eaten in half an hour!
Obviously healthy enough for what we're trying to do this January.
One thing I've been trying really hard to do since having Will is find a balance between 1. complicated meals that I love to make but take forever and trash the kitchen and 2. takeout. I know that seems dumb, but I'm never the one to look for "super quick and easy weeknight meals!" I don't mind eating at 9pm, I love cooking, and it mostly works for me.
Until, of course, it doesn't. Will has been taking a longer stretch of sleep (like...two hours, don't get too excited) in the late evenings, so if we eat at nine and go to bed around 11pm I'm missing a lot of that good sleep. Then homeboy wakes up sometimes every hour at night, I'm exhausted and forgetful and irritable and honestly the fun crazy dinners are mostly not worth that.
So the quest is to find quick and easy dinners that are actually GOOD, and this is definitely that. It's sweet potato gnocchi (I love the sweet potato gnocchi from Trader Joe's!) that boils in four minutes, during which time we saute some spinach with so.much.garlic. aka my favorite way to eat spinach. Then the gnocchi gets a brown butter + sage bath because we've earned it, and dinner is ready in FIFTEEN MINUTES, tastes like something from a fancy restaurant. You need this in your life, trust me.
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We are making chips for dinner a thing. Because we survived the hurricane!
Kidding. The rain did zilch here, which of course is a good thing, and it definitely did some huge damage elsewhere. And honestly even if you aren't in hurricane-land chips for dinner just sounds like a perfect idea, right? You know it does, admit it.
Chilaquiles is a generic Mexican dish that varies from region to region and household to household. It mostly involves sauce and fried tortillas. In this case we're using leftover chips, the few handfuls at the bottom of the bag, the leftovers from takeout, you get it. This version is super simple: you can make your own chicken OR use leftovers, and the sauce comes from a can. I love all things verde, but red enchilada sauce would be delicious here as well. The result is a 30-ish minute meal that includes chicken, veggies, and chips, so a well-rounded meal with tons of flavor and precious little effort.
We win Monday!
...Today we are going to be talking about fried chicken. 
Not fried chicken that you have to heat up a vat of oil for, though. Easy weeknight fried chicken that you make right on the stovetop, that doesn't make a huge mess or tons of oil stink, and that is perfectly crispy and delicious every single time. Perfect for a Monday, practically a health food, that sort of thing.
I know fried chicken on a weeknight isn't something we do a ton (it's super rare for us, although I wish it weren't so), but once you have the method down it really doesn't take a ton of extra time or effort, and the results are SO rewarding. This particular chicken cutlet is wonderful on its own with a side dish or two, but is also yummy sliced over a salad or doused with some marinara for a quick chicken-parm type of meal. Or OR! You could put it on a sandwich and that wouldn't be a bad thing at all.
A note on portioning here: Once you pound a chicken breast (which is really a half breast, but the regular cut from the grocery store, boneless and skinless) to a thin thickness and bread it, it can seem pretty huge. If you have big appetites you could certainly make one chicken breast per person, but I find that one chicken breast is more than enough for two servings, especially with other things on the plate. Of course, you can also make ten of these at a time and have leftovers. Make ten for sure.
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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.
...I'm on a very annoying and very necessary mission. 
The mission is to reduce waste, and you're joining me today. I HATE food waste. I hate all waste, really, but I also know that it's a part of life (don't even get me started on the unnecessary packaging that is involved in having children), and since I'm not yet ready to go full no-waste (have you seen documentaries about those people? It's inspiring and also seems hard), food waste is really where I focus my efforts, mainly because it's easily avoidable compared to other things. A little bit of thought and creativity can go a long way, and today we're tackling condiments. Specifically, salsa! I was rummaging around the fridge a few weeks ago and realized we had four types of salsa. Some in little ramekins from takeout (you can use that stuff you know...) and a few jars with an inch or two of salsa. Not quite enough to put out for chips and dip, but not bad or old at all.
By the way, expiration dates literally have nothing to do with food going bad or being unsafe, even with meat and dairy. Literally nothing. They are dates used for the producer to "talk" to the grocer and to give the consumer (you) some information about when the food might not be perfect anymore. Imperfect food is not unsafe to eat, and usually doesn't even taste different. This is not my opinion, this is a fact. Food is bad when it has a strange smell, grows mold or something else, or has a physical sign that it is bad. You of course are in charge of when you throw things out, but throwing things out because they have passed an arbitrary date is willful waste, so keep that in mind when doing purges and cleaning out. If nothing else, it's a money saver to not constantly throw away things you purchase.
SO WITH THAT, I had all of this salsa and no plan for it. And I had chicken, and I always have rice. So I made this super duper quick seared chicken, reduced the salsa together into a sauce, and served it over rice in half an hour. I've made this several times since with other salsa, and the fun thing about this is that it tastes different but familiar each time. Salsa usually involves a base of onions and garlic which add tons of flavor without any chopping on your part. I've also chopped up extra onions, peppers, and random veggies (see: no waste!) and simmered them in the sauce, and they turn out delicious as well with zero effort. This is all about use-what-you-have, with delicious results. It feels GREAT to get a few items out of the fridge without throwing them straight in the trash.
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Happy first day of school! For public school kids in our area. Not anyone in my house or most people reading this, but happy Monday anyway! Let's eat some beef.
Since school is starting now-ish, I've been working on some new dinners that are quick, easy, and delicious. This comes from my obsession with kid sleep - they need to sleep more than they do, they can't sleep until they eat, dinner can't take five hours to make, that kind of thing. Tons of sleep for kids yields better moods and better focus in school plus more time in the evenings for grownups, so once the dirty work of getting small people to sleep is done I really only see benefits to the situation.
But we've got to eat early enough to make it happen! Enter, easy Thai steak bites. They cook way quicker than a whole steak and don't require resting time, and while they marinate you make the rest of dinner - in this case, rice and raw veggies that get a quick slaw treatment with lime juice and salt. Then, the steak bites cook for maybe five minutes total, and dinner is ready!
...Monday food/gift food/make-ahead food, YES. 
Also tastes like salsa verde that you made yourself so double YES.
Hi! How was your weekend? We had a whirlwind of moving some furniture OUT, which made room for my brain to create new projects for us in the next 17 weeks (omg), and next on the list is paint Beck's new room, secure a toddler bed, and move her next door so we can organize the baby room. I'm not quite sure she understands what's happening with all of that, but there are currently no fewer than 7 pillows on the floor of the empty room so she enjoys the rolling-around-without-getting-in-trouble aspect of the space so far. Also please feel free to educate me on kids room Ikea hacks that are easy and cheap. Like...really easy.
So this dinner. It's the perfect been-working-on-the-house meal because it can be made in advance OR doesn't take long at all to make fresh. I made this last week while Beck napped and it was all I could do to not eat a massive second lunch right on the spot. I took half of this to friends of mine who just had twins, and saved the other half for dinners while Jay has been gone for work. Chicken seared in tons of spices, shredded to absorb sauce. Roasted tomatillos and veggies blended super quickly to make a hugely flavorful sauce without any chopping. Fresh cilantro + lime + garlic, jasmine rice to balance the whole thing.
I kind of had in my mind at first to make this more decadent, like an enchiladas suiza or similar with sour cream or some kind of melty cheese all up in this. That would be DELICIOUS, but the mom that was receiving this is off dairy because one of her babies has a milk allergy (just one of them, weird huh), so I kept this super light and dairy free which I think I loved even more.
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Cool story: It's my birthday week so we're starting with fried chicken and heavy cream and calling it a balanced dinner because there's a salad on the side. 
I am not about shaming relating to food in general, but if there was ever a time to indulge, a birthday is it, right? Of course, this year, my birthday is Wednesday, the most anticlimactic of days, and there's work and toddler things and it's raining and in that case we just absolutely need to have a delicious, tasty, SIMPLE meal. (it should also be noted that I had a lovely birthday celebration on Saturday with my family and got some super duper generous and fun presents) It has very few ingredients, so they all matter a lot - salted butter, fresh portobellos, heavy cream. Things that are great on their own and super delicious when combined.
The method is simple and stolen somewhat from Lydia's Kitchen, which we've been enjoying a lot on Amazon. Her presence calms me, as does her pasta. The chicken is dredged super quickly in a little flour, then pan-fried in oil and butter. When it's done, the same skillet is used to make a 5-minute mushroom sauce, then we pour cream into the skillet and dinner is done in seriously 20 minutes. I think a super simple side salad is very European, but if anyone made this for me over, say, buttered pasta I wouldn't necessarily be pissed about it.
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