Meals and Planning..

I've given one planner over completely to meal-planning. Maybe it would would better within my 'bullet journal', but I feel like it would take up too much space, unnecessarily. I already have another planner with areas for each meal and a grocery list, a water counter, and the daily readings from Mass. It all fits together so well. 

We read the Mass readings aloud at breakfast, as the start to our school-day, our day is bookended in Scripture, my husband reads aloud at bed time as well. Right now, Isaiah precedes The Wizard of Oz.

Meal planning comes naturally to me, I love doing writing it all down and seeing the week

progress on paper. Living out my plans, is a constant struggle. I'm lazy or distracted, or else I forget entirely to go shopping and my plans are abandoned. But as we transition to a more intentional life, meal planning is essential. I want our meals to mean something, to be times of communion as a family. Acts of hospitality and love. I also need them to be healthy, sustaining, and frugal. All my intentions, existing together demand a primarily plant-based diet. A monastic table, rich in the living things we can grow, harvest, and grow again. 

I'm writing out the coming weeks meal-plans, and to keep track of how we're progressing towards our monastic table..I mark each meal with a notation to indicate vegan, vegetarian, or meaty. Only the meals on Sundays or feast days are meaty, and my goal is that out of the 21 meals in a week, 10 will be without animal products (excluding honey, which seems both penitential and hospitable). It's easier than expected, but writing out goals always is..living them is another thing entirely.

I would love to hear your mealtime goals, and what inspired them! Blessings.

Food & Love

I’ve been working on planning meals and eating beauty. This week went delightfully well apart from Wednesday - the day I felt absolutely exhausted and didn’t bother with much at all. I’ve discovered some things in just this week that I’d always known, but hadn’t really considered much recently.

1. So much of my desire to shape lovely meals is one of love. I am more than delighted to see my husband’s appreciation of the right food on the the right plate and here his excited appraisal of some new mingling of flavor. It’s such a joy, and we connect over plates and plates of good food, well arranged, in a way we don’t over rushed meals or even dinners out. This evening it was just delightful to linger over glasses of vino verde (my ever-affordable, and always amazing Gazela) mingled with Elderflower presse while Yarrow took her time enjoying dessert. The love that comes through food is something I’ll never really get over needing.
2. I love to allow Yarrow the joy of eating and drinking from the same dishes her parents use - it, I think, fits well with her personality, which is concerned and attentive at best; and it gives her such a sense of pride an accomplishment. That’s one reason she had her own Elderflower presse (mingled with water, not wine) in a cordial glass tonight, the other, obvious, reason is that cordial glasses look better paired with wine glasses than baby cups do..and looks are pretty important to me..probably too important.
3. The sense of rhythm that meals - all laid out and prepared in advance - give me is so nourishing to my spiritual life, which needs rhythm to thrive, and is often starved for it because, as much as I love cultivating rhythm, I’m just as likely to pull up everything I’ve started and reseed the entire thing..enthusiastic is the nicest word for it, but certainly not the only one. My meal rhythms have kept me focused, honest, and have started to bring some order too thoughts that have grown wild.

Tonight we had salads, butternut squash ravioli in arugula cream-sauce, and for dessert: nectarines and chocolate cream. It was delightful..and pretty easy, considering the salads were basically just lettuce, red onion, almonds, and the first radishes from our garden; and arugula is really going to need to be in pretty much everything for the next month, as we planted tons of it! The chocolate cream was easy as well, I was inspired by something in this month’s The Simple Things magazine, but I didn’t have any berries yet, and I didn’t think their Lemon Possett would go with nectarines, so I put a tablespoon of butter and an ounce of unsweetened chocolate in a pan to melt both, added about a cup of cream, one egg (but only because we have so many..I think it’d work beautifully without the egg) and about 1/3 cup Turbinado sugar. I stirred it with a fork the whole time (and if you add the egg -beat it first and don’t add it to hot cream!! Make sure the creams just been mixed in and the pan is off the burner!) and then, when everything was decently mixed and melted, and whipped it with my aero-latte..but if you just have a whisk that would work just as well. It thickened pretty nicely on the stove and had to be spooned into the serving glasses, then topped and decorated with nectarine slices. We loved it!

We’ll see how next week goes - I’m hoping to add some small soups the dinner menu, and get together enough scrap wood to bake a couple times this week. With all the rain, my oven’s been languishing a bit, and I’d really like to wake it up with some bread and cake and popovers!

Making Meals

This morning I greeted the day right. The early sunrise helps, I can feel my body getting ready to wake as the darkness recedes and when the alarm rings at five I’m ready. I’m trying to remember to breakfast in the mornings, early, before hunger and distraction make it more a duty than a joy: grapefruit, yogurt with slices of nectarine, coffee - black to cut the sweetness and tang of the fruit. Snatches of conversation as my husband readies to leave - Yarrow is sleeping late today, she’s been grasping extra moments of sleep since her dziadkowie left on Saturday. Recuperation. Remembering the flow of quiet living.

I’m making goals left and right this spring, and keeping more than I expected. A new one, a reminder after a delightfully focused Lenten fast, is to eat well. To plan meals around beauty, taste, and health (in that order, of course) and in that way avoid continuing the post-fast gluttony that is so habitual to me. I’m committing to eat at the table (or picnic, or patio, or anywhere but on the go..standing and absorbing foods instead of enjoying them; committing to let the flavors rest and make their home on my tongue before adding more; to delighting in the vision - slices of sunny melon on bright red plates and greens embracing gold curry, not merely the act of eating.

We’re eating in meals again, without grazing in between. Breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner; and working on courses in the last meal. Tonight: black bean soup, chicken quesadillas, and a romaine salad with cilantro-lime dressing. For tea, I’m leaning towards lime and poppyseed mini pancakes, with curd and cream cheese to spread, and enough left over for my husband’s early morning meal. I am leaning away from heavy breakfast foods for the weekdays - I don’t work like he does. There are plenty of options: eggs we have in abundance - with seven or more arriving each day, yogurt, grapefruit, and melon.

Christie over at Everything to Someone is doing a similar meal-time re-adjustment. It’s something that’s helpful to do whenever things get stale: reflect, remember, recast..and live just a little deeper because of it.

Monday's Meal

Monday.

Seth is home again, and we’re tucked inside, listening to the bitter wind outside. I love having him here. He fixed my rocking chair and began recovering Yarrow’s chair over the weekend, brought in wood, and laughed with me as an ermine chased the chickens - seemingly uninterested in eating any of them. I think he just wanted to play! We chased him off eventually, just in case, but I loved the little guy, and so did Luba. She wandered the yard for a while after, trying to entice him back for another chasing game.

Lenten weekends are decadent. We had wraps loaded with spinach, avocado, red cabbage, hummus, cucumber, and dried cranberries. We had a tomato-y fish stew with na’an for dinner on Sunday and the last of the wine. But Monday is here again, and the dish of oil on the table from last-night’s dipping is a reminder that this is one of the hard days. But I still have some red cabbage, so for dinner I’ll be making tomato-bean soup with red-cabbage salad on the side, and more na’an..unless I brave the wind and go out to bake in the kitchen. The tomato soup is easy:

soak and boil a cup of dried, soup-bean mix (or just dump in a can of beans..any kind would work, really, even lentils, I think), when they’re soft, keeping them in the bean water add some vegetable bullion if you have it, and some garlic and spices if you don’t. Add one can of tomatoes (whole, canned tomatoes are best, but I’m all out of those, so I just used a can of sauced tomatoes). Then let the whole thing cook for a while on low, you can leave it for a long while if you have it very low, and let the flavors meld together. That’s it..except salt!

The Red Cabbage Salad is even easier:

1/2 red cabbage, shredded

1 pickling cucumber, chopped

1-2 carrots, chopped long or shredded

Drizzle liberally with vinegar - I used a peach-infused vinegar, but balsamic would work well

Salt & pepper to taste

Then you put in all together in a pretty bowl - I like blue bowls with this salad because of the contrast, but yellow would be pretty to, or some crisp white-patterned dish..not so much red, I think..

Enjoy!

Simplicity: Food, Meals, and Beauty II

 

I’m too often guided by whim. In an effort to simplify, I’ve been working on building a pantry full of food to add to our garden produce (mainly eggplant and tomatoes) to make a variety of foods that are simple, beautiful, healthy, and interesting. I want beautiful meals - meals that are more than just one dish, meals that are bright and sensual and satisfying in a holistic way, we will be less inclined to go out, or to run to the store “for just a few things” every other day. The biggest trouble is refrigeration, we can’t keep perishables for more than a day or two without ice. We’re still in the market for a used propane fridge, a small one, with just enough room for a couple leftovers, a few quarts of milk, and yogurt. The trouble with me is, I let this little limitation affect my attitude toward meal prep. I allow my mealtime aesthetic to be damaged by a simple limitation, one that a majority of cooks in the world, and throughout history have shared.

        Another limitation is financial, we aren’t wealthy, and I often want food that really isn’t within our budget. But planning meals well, and using the space I have to store ingredients that do keep is the best way to deal with that frustration. In the summer, with access to my own garden, I try to craft meals around what I have access to: eggs, tomatoes, summer squashes, eggplant, herbs, and others.

The point really isn’t to have an overwhelming variety of meals, but to have beautiful, filling, healthy meals. Meals that bring us together around the table with flickering lamps, good conversation, and love.

        My attitude toward our meals has been evolving, in a subtle way. The ideas are the same but the feeling behind them is growing stronger. I’m planning a winter of hearty soups, crusty bread, preserves, good cheeses, and an abundance of pork.

The Simplicity Project: Living Well

This is how I’ve been feeling recently

 

 

Fortunately for my self-image, the simplicity plan has a catagory for me. A few actually: learn to say no, eat healthy, exercise.

And all of those are actually a huge part of living simply, because gluttony clutters life. A late night coffee with Irish cream is lovely, but a whole pot is completely unnecessary. Now obviously, a whole pot of coffee isn’t exactly fattening, at least, without the added Irish Cream it isn’t, but it’s still ends up falling into a failure in simplicity, because when the pot is done, I’m in full insomnia-mode, stay up late cleaning under the counter, or writing jittery verse and by the time I’m asleep I’ve lost any motivation I might have had for getting up early and forming my day well.

The irish cream just adds to the trouble - who loses excess weight drinking irish cream? Nobody, that’s who. A definite failure in the ‘eat healthy’ catagory. A step in the right direction is my recently renewed attempt to take meals - actual, sit-down moments in time, in which food is arranged attractively on a plate, with a begining and an end. A tiny pitcher of irish cream runs out a whole lot sooner than a whole bottle, and it looks fantastic. Meals are more satisfying when they’re made into events (even if the event is rather small and simple: eggs on a blue plate and black coffee in blue and white cups).

Exercise has been my success of the week. I’ve been inspired by some friends to get back into running, and it has been amazing! With or without Yarrow, the solitude of the run is refreshing - in her stroller, Yarrow is content to sit and see. I’ve managed to start a running habit -whether I can keep it or not remains to be seen - and it’s a joy to me. With it, the rest of the day feels more my own.