Category Archives: life

I got a wild hair this morning and decided to make a Dutch baby for breakfast. My mom used to make this for special occasion breakfasts when I was a kid, and I loved how it came out of the oven all puffy and then settle down into eggy-custardy pancakey deliciousness.

We’re out of frozen blueberries, which I’d normally use to make a fruit compote… So I took our one remaining apple, cored & peeled it, and cooked it in butter & brown sugar until it made a caramel. A little salt and cinnamon and presto! Sooooo good.

I cooked this one a bit too long, but it was still fantastic! Amelia ate most of hers, and Bax enjoyed his bits too. This is a good breakfast-for-dinner company-for -brunch dish, too: one fourth of a cup of flour and warm milk for each egg, and you mix it all in the blender so cleanup is easy. 5 minutes of prep, bake for 20 min, and you can make the fruit topping while it bakes. Here’s the recipe I used. Dutch baby ftw!!

There’s nothing like a wild Friday night of grocery list-making and meal-planning – whew, good times! I got some new cookbooks for Xmas that I’m pulling heavily from this week; 4 of the 6 dishes here are new, though with familiar flavors and ingredients.

Here’s what’s coming to our table this week:

Saturday: beef stew, crusty bread

Sunday: chicken with orange-ginger sauce; rice, broccoli with almonds

Monday: teriyaki salmon w/mushrooms; whole wheat spaghetti, green beans

Tuesday: weeknight play date; out

Wednesday: Greek meatballs w/yogurt sauce; rice, sautéed spinach

Thursday: herbed chicken w/feta sauce; buttered noodles, green beans

Friday: 3-cheese spinach orzo bake; cucumber salad

I’m lucky in that my 4yo and 1yo both like fish. The Greek meatballs are made with ground pork and broiled (grilled in summer) to rave reviews. This week most everything’s from Fresh Food Fast Weeknight Meals from Cooking Light or my old favorite, Time for Dinner. If you have kids and need to be able to have dinner on the table in 20 minutes pretty much every night, Time for Dinner is a necessary pantry item. 🙂

I also have scoped out some backup meals for which I’ll have ingredients in the fridge/pantry – Spanish tortilla or Swedish meatballs – in case work blows up on me and I forget to defrost something, or any other mid-week weirdness occurs. Because, you know, it does sometimes.

So now that my lists are all made, I can enjoy a slow Saturday morning with the kids while Tom gets us a new tire; small luxuries! Have a great weekend, everybody.

I always feel better about the week when I have our meals planned out. It’s terribly grown-up of me, I know, but there you are.

It’s also a non-trivial intellectual exercise, to plan out healthy meals that i can slap together quickly, that factor in leftovers, lend themselves well to packed lunches for Amelia. and include food that Bax can eat too. 🙂

Here’s what’s on the menu for this week:

Sat – Thai baked chicken with peanut noodles
Sun – Uncle Chris’s ribs, mac&cheese, broccoli (at Aunt Adrienne & Uncle Chris’s house)
Mon – picadillo with rice, breadcrumb cauliflower
Tues – bean burritos, cauliflower-cheese soup
Wed – teryaki pork tenderloin w/rice and green beans (Mimi and Grandpa over for dinner)
Thurs – pork fried rice
Fri – mushroom & sausage pizza

Hide yo kids, hide yo wives, and hide yo husbands, because Tom’s Kentucky Bourbon Fruitcake is in the oven!!

It’s hard to include everything I’m thankful for in text, but foremost in my mind is family, in Texas and Oregon – our family of blood and family of friends. Amelia, laughing until she can’t breathe with friends and cousins. Baxter, grinning as big as he can at the next table in the restaurant, and chortling at the “Thunder Show” of big girls play. Tom, enjoying all the Texas thing we can’t get in Portland – and, of course, all the people. 🙂 We left a lot of friends behind when we moved to the PacNW, and those people are (you know who you are) incredibly precious to us. I feel very grateful to have so much love in my life. Thanks.

In an attempt to meet my first week of work with as much organization as possible, I’ve made a meal plan using the template provided at Go Gingham.

Go Gingham’s fabulous Sara Tetreault took me shopping at WinCo this morning, introducing me to yet another Portland grocery store that meets some but not all of my family’s needs. Great bulk bins, though, and pretty decently cheap prices on other things as well. Plus, they’re open 24 hours – so I can shop ridiculously early in the morning or ridiculously late at night.

Sara has got stylish frugality in Portland sewn up; it was a blast buying lentils with her this morning. 🙂