Book List #3

What I read in March

Another month of reading, trying a few different things, and DNFing a few. I don’t believe in slogging through books that aren’t doing it for you. Obviously if you’re reading for professional or educational purposes you should probably finish a book. But if you are reading for entertainment and distraction and enjoyment, they why keep going with a book that isn’t doing that for you?

I’m trying to get more non fiction books into my life. Especially since I’m mostly cutting out social media and news because it’s all just too f*cking irritating, I feel like it’s maybe not totally good for me to be living completely in a fictional world. I do want to keep feeding my brain some knowledge about the real world. So I decided that moving forward my audiobooks will be non fiction, and my reading will be fiction. I started last month with Braiding Sweetgrass which was absolutely wonderful. It is turning out to be a harder challenge than I thought though, because while I do want to take in non-fiction and feed my brain some more intellectual stuff, I am not currently interested in anything that is going to cause me irritation and stress, and honestly a of non-fiction talks about some really unpleasant stuff. So I’m having to be a bit choosy.

On to the book list - what I read in March:

First off, books I didn’t finish:

The first two weren’t because they weren’t good. Altered Carbon and Slow Horses. Both were actually very good, but both were books that have been made into streaming series that I have watched. I often like to read something that inspired a show or movie that I enjoyed, because usually the book only inspired the show and the makers of the series took the story in their own creative direction, so it’s a bit like reading a new story with some familiar characters. This was the cased with Foundation, as I mentioned last month, and the Silo show and series that I talked about in January. But sometimes they make a series that is really true to the book. When that happens I find that reading the book isn’t very interesting to me, because none of the character development or action or events are any kind of surprise. I’m not as interested if I already know everything that is going to happen. So that’s what happened with both Altered Carbon and Slow Horses, I probably got about a quarter of the way in to both of them and they were both so much like the series that they just weren’t grabbing my attention, so I moved on. But if you haven’t watched the streaming series for either of those, I would still highly recommend the books.

I also started and didn’t finish Watermelon. I guess this fits in a romance category, which isn’t usually my thing, but it had good reviews. I liked it at first, the writing style was sort of irreverent and fun. But after a while it felt pretty repetitive, and it just seemed like a lot of whining and complaining and talking about too much trivial stuff without a whole lot of depth in the characters. So I moved on.

The fourth one I gave up on was Killers of the Flower Moon. Also not because it wasn’t a good compelling story, or that it wasn’t very well written (it definitely is well written). It is a true story that reads like a crime thriller and a lot of it really is stranger than fiction. And frankly if I had been reading it as fiction I probably would have finished it. But knowing that it was all true got a little too stressful for me - particularly the whole undercurrent of racism and the treatment of the native people in this story. It just all started to make me too mad, which violated my rule about sticking with books that are going to get me away from all of the stress of our current dumpster fire of a world. I would like to see the movie sometime, and/or finish the book, but I had to park it for now for my own mental health.

so now the ones I actually did finish:

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (Wayfarers book 1): Very comfortably in my favorite genre of sci-fi. This one is an adventure story, with some action and unexpected twists. What was different about this from a lot of what I read is that a lot of the characters were not human, they were other sentient races in the universe. It was cool the way the other created these other cultures with their own traditions and history and languages, and some very unique biology. A fun one for sure.

Everyone on This Train is a Suspect (Earnest Cunningham Mystery book 2): Just as fun as the first, which I read last month with the same irreverent poking fun at mystery authors and breaking the 4th wall kind of dialogue. This one takes place on a train, and most of the suspects are mystery authors, it’s sort of irony on top of irony, with some fun twists and clues throughout like any good classic mystery.

The Bear and the Nightingale (Winternight Trilogy book 1): sort of an epic feeling story that takes place in the northern Russian wilderness, with a lot of hardship that comes with living in such a harsh environment. It weaves in a lot of Russian folklore and a bit of magic. Good for reading with a warm fire raging in your fireplace, because it will leaving you feeling the chill of winter. The main character is a very strong girl who overcomes a lot, and I love those kind of strong female characters. It’s apparently the first of a trilogy and I will definitely read the next sometime to see where our girl ends up.

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O: This was an audiobook that I’d had for a while and finally managed to finish. I very much enjoyed the story - science, time travel, witches, history. It was a very different twist on some familiar themes, combining fantasy and sci-fi and historical fiction, and very fun. The only caveat is that I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the audiobook version, just because of the way the story is told, in the form of back and forth emails and reports and such, and with an audiobook all of the header and address details for those communications are read aloud, which makes it seem like the book is just really, really long, when in reality I think a lot of that stuff would just be skimmed over in your head if you were actually reading. There is a second book in this series that I do want to read, but I’ll do that one as an ebook instead of an audiobook.

Women in White Coats: This was my non fiction audiobook this month. I actually didn’t quite finish it because my library loan ran out and I couldn’t renew it, but I’m still counting it because I got most of the way there. This is the story of the first women doctors and everything they had to do to overcome all the prejudice against women in the medical field at this time. I really enjoyed it.

A Closed and Common Orbit (Wayfarers book 2): The next in the sci fi series. The cool thing about this series is that the second book isn’t the continuation of the story of the characters from the first book. It’s set in the same universe and time, and tells the story of a character we only briefly met towards the end of the first book. So it was kinda the second book in a series, but more just another story set in the same universe. I liked that, it was another whole new story with new characters, but you get to know more of the world you were first introduced to in the first book.

Record of a Spaceborn Few (Wayfarers book 3): as above, another new story with new characters, set in another place in the same universe and time as the first two, with only minimal connection to the characters from before. There is a fourth book in this world that I would like to read at some point.

Sunrise on the Reaping: possibly needs no introduction. If you are a Hunger Games fan, you probably already know of this one. It fits right in with the rest, in her gripping and engaging writing style with some known and some new characters. I thought was a bit predictable, which I guess is to be expected with a prequel - we obviously already know how it ends - but very entertaining and fun anyway.

That’s it for March.

Several DNFs, and not nearly as many books as February, but these books were all longer.

Book List #2

What I read in February

A combination of ebooks and audiobooks, mostly for entertainment. I’m trying very hard to not doom scroll social media, and books are taking the place of that habit for me. I’m also trying to not give so much of my money to the corporate broligarchs, so most of these are checked out from the library, but I’ve provided links in case you do want to buy any of them. (I do get a small commission when you by from my links, and I very much appreciate your support.)

Here’s my February book list:

• Ready Player 2. Loved it. I found it funny that the review weren’t great when this book first came out, so it took me several years to get around to it, but I found it just as good as the first. I did this one as an audiobook, as I already had it in my library because one of my teens wanted it a while back. And I’m a sucker for any book read by Wil Wheaton. All of the gen-x and 80’s references hit me right where I live, and I thought the story was just as engaging as the first time around and maybe even a bit deeper character development.

• We are Legion (We are Bob Series). Actually I read the whole series, so this counts as 5 books. These were fun, mostly lighthearted, different twist on some familiar and some new sci-fi themes. Sentient AI whose consciousness used to be a real person, who then creates dozens, and then hundreds of replicants of himself who all become unique characters. I think this could make a very fun show or movie, with the same actor playing all the characters.

• Foundation. As much of a science fiction fan as I claim to be, I’d never read this. But after watching the streaming series I wanted to get into the original story. To say that the series is inspired by the books is maybe even an overstatement. Some of the character names are the same, and it starts out somewhat similar, but aside from that original inspiration the streaming series went off in such a different direction that this was almost like reading a totally different story.

• The Belt series - 6 books here - all fairly quick and easy reads. Kind of a typical sci-fi with space travel and adventure. Not very deep as far as characters go but fast paced adventure and a fun distraction from the world. I read his Colony Mars series last year and enjoyed it a lot.

• Moonbase Delta series - 3 books. Same author as above. A solar storm cuts off moon colonies from earth and all the typical human conflict you would expect ensues. Same as his others, nothing too deep, good fun adventure and suspense, and some fun hard science fiction to get you thinking about what’s possible.

• Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone - super fun. A sort of tongue in cheek comedy mystery, the description said it was a bit like Knives Out or Glass Onion and I concur. The humor is poking fun at the typical mystery novel and mystery writers and there’s a good amount of “breaking the fourth wall” type of dialogue. Not sure what you call that when it’s in a book - but sort of asides where the author is talking to the reader about his editor and things like that. Good fun.

• Braiding Sweetgrass. oh my heart. This book is so good. I had read great review of it and had bought the paper back a while ago and hadn’t gotten to it yet. And then I read that listening to the audiobook was an experience not to be missed and I couldn’t agree more. The book is read by the author, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and to listen to her tell her own story makes it so much more meaningful. You can hear the smile in her voice when she’s reading a particularly wonderful part about her kids or her childhood, and you can hear her sadness when she is telling a story of our her ancestors were wronged. I’m very much looking forward to listening to her latest book, The Serviceberry.

That’s it for February. It doesn’t look like a long list but it’s actually 18 books when you count the individual titles in each series that I lumped together.

Another Whole Month Family Meal Plan

Another edition of what I fed my family in a month.

I wrote a whole post for you last month about my latest meal planning approach, and how I write out all our meals on a printout of our shared family calendar. It works so well for me to just keep this printed calendar page in my planner, and jot notes on there about what I plan to cook, what I have in my freezer. Even if I cook a meal I didn’t plan ahead of time, I still write in on my calendar page so I have that idea to refer to at another time when I’m figure out my meal plan. Sometimes on the back I make lists of new ideas, or things I haven’t made in a while, or any requests from the family.

Here is another month of what I cooked for my family.

As usual, it’s not pretty, but it works very well for me.

A few details to point out:

• Casseroles, soups, stews are one of my favorite ways to get a balanced meal in my kids, as well as a favorite way to use up little bits of stuff in the fridge. I swear you can throw a random combination of carb, protein, veggies, sauce, and cheese all in a pot or casserole dish and simmer or bake it and everyone is going to love it.

• We eat a lot of chicken. Partially because I love chicken, but largely because it’s one of the least expensive proteins these days and feeding two adults plus four teenagers gets expensive fast.

Here’s the menu of what we ate in a month.

I actually included the first two days of this month in last month’s list. I won’t repeat those here so technically we’re starting on the 3rd but it makes for a tidier list.

1. see last month

2. see last month

3. Taco casserole: I was shocked at the rave reviews this one got from the family. I make this sort of thing all the time usually with leftover chicken, but for this one I browned some ground beef and then combined that with homemade black beans, rice, and salsa. I guess they really liked it with beef.

4. Enchilada chicken taco bar again. I told you last month this is one of our often repeated favorites. It’s so easy and everyone loves it. I always make a lot extra because it’s great for leftovers, I

5. leftover night.

6. Teriyaki chicken and tofu. This dinner is also going on my list of easy meals for a first timer on their own to cook. It’s one of the easiest meals I make and one of my family’s favorites. Literally take chicken pieces and pour a bottle of teriyaki sauce over them to marinade for a while, and then cook. This is my favorite teriyaki sauce if you want to just open a bottle, or I have a recipe I came up with that makes one with very similar flavor if you prefer homemade. Teriyaki sauce is shockingly easy to make actually. To cook, I like to spread the chicken out on a sheet pan to roast at high heat (like 400 convection for 20-30 minutes). I do the same for tofu - slices of extra firm tofu with teriyaki sauce poured over the top. The tofu obviously doesn’t need to “cook”, but it’s nice to get it a bit browned and let that teriyaki sauce caramelize a bit. We have this dinner with rice, and sometimes I might also roast some broccoli or make a salad.

7. frozen pizza

8. Roasted salmon: I explained last month how I cook salmon. With this one I made a lemon pasta that we love - using my no drain pasta method and when the pasta is almost finished I stir in a couple tablespoons of butter, let that melt, then a splash of cream, lemon zest, a couple tablespoons of lemon juice, and parmesan cheese.

9. Enchiladas: this time was two kinds, one was chicken similar to last month, and the other was black beans and cheese. And yeah we can have that argument again about whether these are enchiladas or wet burritos, because the black bean ones probably were more like a burrito, but whatever.

10. Fried gyoza, and some leftovers: You can get good frozen potstickers at most stores these days, but Trader Joe’s are our favorite. The ones from Costco are pretty good too. For this dinner the potstickers was the only part I cooked, and we had those with leftover salmon and rice from earlier in the week.

11. Ground chicken tacos. We have recently discovered ground chicken for tacos. I’ve used ground chicken for other things over the years but only the last couple months tried it as a taco meat. Seasoned simply with a little garlic salt, it’s actually a delicious and easy taco filling that’s a nice change from some of our usual.

12. Leftover night

13. Teriyaki meatball yakisoba: I made this up last year and it became an instant favorite. I’ll also add this to my list of easy weeknight dinners for my older teen. Maybe not the healthiest, but so good. Frozen meatballs, frozen broccoli, packaged fresh soba (or other noodles you like), all tossed in a pot with teriyaki sauce and simmered until hot. It’s really quick and easy and it’s one you can make with stuff from your freezer.

14. Homemade pizza

15. Chicken biryani: Biryani is a sort of curry spiced Indian rice dish that’s usually made with lamb or beef, but it’s great with chicken too. I very loosely followed this recipe, in as much as I ever “follow” a recipe.

16. Sheet pan chicken sausages and asparagus: We love the chicken & apple sausages you can get at Costco. I pair these with some simple roast veggies and pasta.

17. Black bean soup: A three ingredient soup that never fails: black beans (homemade or canned), chicken broth, jarred salsa. You could argue that a jar of salsa isn’t technically a single ingredient, but whatever. This makes for an amazingly flavorful and fast and EASY dinner. You can add some meat to this if you want, or dress it up with a bit of cumin, garlic, and onion, if you want, but it’s great without. I serve it with sour cream and shredded cheese and tortilla chips. A diced avocado on top is really nice if you have it, or some fresh cilantro. This is a great one to use up bits of leftovers from the fridge, cut up leftover meat, or chop up some of those bits of veggies.

18. Arroz con pollo: (Mexican chicken and rice) I basically made a simple restaurant style Mexican rice, and tossed some seasoned chicken pieces on top to cook, but you can probably find more authentic recipes on the google if you like.

19. Leftover night

20. Faux Pho: It’s kinda like pho, but far from authentic. Rice noodles, cooked according to the package. Chicken broth that I’ve doctored up with a bit of fish sauce, lime juice, oyster sauce. Cooked chicken or other protein. We have this set up as a build your own noodle bowl bar with the noodles, broth, protein, veggies and herbs (sprouts, mint, basil, cilantro), lime wedges, and a variety of sauces (oyster, soy, fish, hot sauce), and maybe some greens.

21. Frozen pizza

22. Schawarma: I usually marinade my own but this time I had been to Trader Joes so I bought their marinaded schawarma chicken and cooked that. I did make a homemade hummus to go with, which was delicious. And a cucumber yogurt mint sauce. We had this with flatbreads, lettuce, tomato, cucumbers.

23. Pulled pork sandwiches: I cooked a big pork butt low and slow. I like to buy the two pack of pork butt/shoulder at Costco. I seasoned this one with salt, pepper, cumin, chili powder, and dry mustard and then cooked it at 300 for about 6 hours. I kept the seasoning fairly simple because I wanted to use the pork for multiple meals. I made some homemade whole wheat rolls and a simple coleslaw to have with this, and we had some barbecue sauce and I made a simple pasta.

24. Another taco casserole, this time with chicken again.

25. Shredded pork tacos: with the leftover pulled pork and all the usual taco fixings.

26. Leftover night

27. Pasta with polish sausage and spinach. I used leftover pasta for this that already had some butter and cream on it, browned some diced polish sausage and onions and mixed it with mushroom soup, and added a bag of frozen spinach.

28. Homemade pizza

29. Meatball parmesan ziti: cooked pasta mixed with Raos marina sauce, frozen meatballs, frozen spinach, and parmesan cheese. Baked until hot and bubbly. An easy thrown together meal, but I did actually bake a fresh loaf of bread to go with it.

30. Teriyaki chicken and tofu again. I try not to repeat a meal within a month very often, but occasionally it happens and this one is such a favorite that nobody complains.

31. Tuscan tomato & turkey meatball soup: I tried something new and it turned out delicious! I wanted to use up some ground turkey, and soup sounded good, so I googled “soup recipes with ground turkey” and came up with this recipe which I loosely followed. A bunch of my herbs in my garden beds had survived the winter and were thriving, so I made a bunch of turkey meatballs with loads of fresh chopped herbs, and used the last of the buns from the pulled pork night for breadcrumbs. I made a massive pot of this soup (because of course I ignore recipe quantities) which left us with a lot leftover, so it’s a good thing that everyone loved it.

There you go! Another whole month of family meal ideas. I hope this helps you figure out what to feed your busy family.

One Month Family Menu

Meal Planning For a Family. Or, what we ate in a month.

I think we all love the idea of not having to think about what’s for dinner every day, and one of the best ways to give yourself that little gift is to make a meal plan ahead of time. Meal planning saves you time, reduces stress, and saves you money. When you’ve planned ahead what you’re going to make, then you can shop less often and buy just what you need. You reduce the impulse buying and eliminate the stress of having to figure out what’s for dinner at the last minute after a long day.

Another one of my favorite ways to think about meal planning is to look at a whole month at once. I don’t always plan the whole month ahead of time, but I always write my menus on a one month calendar page so I can easily look back at past months and see what we had, get ideas, or even just copy it.

Even if you don’t make a meal plan in advance - try just writing down what you cooked for dinner every day for a month, and then at the end of that month now you have a whole month dinner menu that you can just repeat with maybe a few changes! You’ve made a whole month meal plan without even trying.

You can look at my past meal plans too! For this post I’m sharing with you a very typical month for us, and what we had for dinner each night of the month.

A few of my meal planning & cooking guidelines:

• We basically never eat out, except for birthdays and anniversaries, so I really am providing dinner for my family for 7 nights of the week.

• I always cook extra, so we can have at least one night a week with leftovers for dinner. That’s how I get a break from cooking, instead of spending money to eat out. One night a week I get out all the leftovers from the fridge and everyone helps themself to whatever they want for dinner.

• I honestly hardly ever follow recipes when I’m cooking, but I do look at a lot of recipes for ideas, and I might follow the general concept of a recipe for ingredients but not quantities. I’ve included recipes below where I could find ones for you that are similar to what I make.

• I try very hard to use minimal processed foods, but you will see that canned cream of mushroom soup makes an appearance once or twice a month. I’ve tried to live without it and it keeps sneaking back in. Given how healthy we are with almost everything else, I don’t feel too bad about it. Sometimes little shortcuts are what keeps you sane.

• I almost always follow a theme for each night of the week for my meal planning. This helps me keep a good variety while at the same time makes it easier to figure out what to cook because I’ve already narrowed it down to a category.

• I used to use specific meal plan templates (and I do have some I’ll share if you want one), but most of the time now I just print out a month view from our shared family calendar to write the meal plan on. This allows me to see what we have happening on the calendar right at the same time I’m figuring out the dinners. Then I know if there’s an event I need to plan around separately from my usual routine.

Here you can see what a very typical month meal plan looks like. It’s not pretty but it works. I write the daily themes across the top, sometimes I scribble in the margins what meats I have in the freezer to use up, sometimes I cross things out and move things around as plans change. As you can see, we’ve got a busy calendar - we have four teenagers, with scout meetings, theater rehearsals, climbing classes, and more - and it really helps to have a solid plan to keep all these people fed. Also we live and die by our family calendar.

More detail about the meal plan!

I’ve typed it out week by week for you below, with a bit more description of most of the meals. I make a lot of one pot meals, soups, stews, casseroles - it let’s me get a well rounded meal in everyone without having to argue about vegetables. If the veggies are chopped up small and mixed in, they get eaten and basically not noticed. I always keep riced cauliflower in my freezer, and it probably makes it’s way into at least 2 meals a week. Otherwise, if there isn’t a serving of veggies mixed in the main course, then I’ll usually have a simple salad on the side, or at the very least heat up some frozen broccoli.

One Month Family Meal Plan / Dinner Menu

Thirty Days of Dinners

1. Burger night: Frozen beef patties (we love the ones from Costco), set up build-your-own style on the kitchen island, with lots of fixings and fries on the side (bag of frozen fries, cooked in the oven).

2. Cottage pie: a winter dinner favorite, basically like a rich stew of ground meat in gravy with veggies, topped with mashed potatoes and baked. Here’s a good recipe. The tomato paste really adds a lot, but I don’t do bouillon cubes.

3. Kale & meatball soup: a tomato & beef broth with kale, onions, carrots, celery, meatballs, pasta. This one is super easy to make if you have frozen meatballs, or I like to make what we call “brat-balls” - take bratwurst sausages and squeeze the sausage out of the casing into balls. Mine is similar to this recipe.

4. Chicken taco night: chicken pieces cooked in enchilada sauce until falling apart, served taco bar style with all the usual taco toppings and chips. I make this at least once a month, it’s the easiest thing ever. You don’t need a recipe for this - just frozen chicken pieces (we prefer thighs) and canned enchilada sauce, and cook it by your preferred method. You can do this in a pot on the stove, in a dutch oven in the oven, in an instant pot or slow cooker. I don’t usually add any other seasoning to this, not even salt, because canned enchilada sauce is usually salty enough.

5. leftover night

6. Korean beef bowl: ground beef seasoned with savory asian flavors. Here’s a great recipe. This is an easy meal to sneak a lot of veggies in - you can finely dice mushrooms & cabbage, or toss in a bag of frozen riced cauliflower - with all the seasoning and flavor the veggies hardly get noticed. served over rice. Here’s a good recipe to get you started, but you can really be creative and add a lot to this.

7. Homemade pizza

8. Roasted salmon, asparagus, pasta, salad. I watch for salmon on sale at my grocery store and usually buy two whole filets because we love it. I put the salmon on a baking sheet lined with either parchment or nonstick foil and season it generously with nothing but salt, and cook it on the top rack in a 500 degree oven for about 7 minutes, or slightly longer if it’s a very thick piece.

9. Chicken & rice casserole: easy old classic style, with cream of mushroom soup, cooked chicken, some frozen broccoli. I mixed this one up and used a wild rice blend this time, which gave it a really nice extra texture and flavor. You can google mushroom soup chicken and rice casserole if you don’t already know how to make this.

10. Dumpling soup: so easy! frozen asian potstickers or gyoza, in chicken broth with some carrots & celery. Our favorite frozen dumplings come from Trader Joes, but Costco has some pretty good ones too. When my oldest head out on their own I plan on writing them up a list of easy meals they can make for themselves and this soup is going on that list!

11. Taco casserole: leftover enchilada sauce chicken, with rice, black beans, salsa, cheese - baked until bubbly. This is a great one to make with leftovers from the fridge. A lot of my casseroles are made from leftovers actually.

12. leftover night

13. Macaroni & cheese: homemade the easy way - which is basically just mixing cooked pasta with a bit of milk and a combination of American cheese and shredded cheddar & jack cheese until it’s all melted and saucy.

14. Homemade pizza, chop salad

15. Sheet pan beef & broccoli: I sometimes loosely follow the Nom Nom Paleo recipe, except I do use soy sauce. Or here is another simple recipe from Damn Delicious, another of my favorite food blogs. Sometimes I add oyster sauce to either of these, it adds a ton of umami flavor. (seriously oyster sauce is on my apocalypse pantry prepping list.) I use all kinds of cuts of beef for this, usually whatever has been on sale. If you slice it very thin, then a tougher cut still works fine. And here’s a secret tip from Chinese restaurants - a way to make your beef extra tender - add a little bit of baking soda to the marinade. You can google “baking soda velveting beef” to read more about this technique and why it works. I make a lot so usually the beef and the broccoli are spread across two sheet pans and combined after cooking. Served with steamed rice.

16. Chicken Enchiladas: shredded chicken (I’ve got a great post here about how I cook a whole chicken in the instant pot), mixed with diced onions, cheese, enchilada sauce, rolled up in tortillas and topped with more enchilada sauce and cheese. I usually do this with flour tortillas because that what I keep in my fridge, and some people will argue with you that flour tortillas makes it a wet burrito instead of an enchilada, but call it whatever you want it’s still delicious.

17. Chicken & rice soup: homemade chicken broth (in the same post mentioned above about cooking the chicken, I also tell you how to make chicken broth), with diced onion, carrot, celery, and leftover rice.

18. Ground beef tacos: simple seasoned browned ground beef with taco bar fixings. I quit buying taco seasoning years ago. It’s unnecessary. I season the meat while it’s browning with a bit of salt, pepper, cumin, onion, garlic, and sometimes chili powder. Served with tortillas, chopped iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, cheese, salsa - a very American take on a Mexican class, but it’s delicious.

19. Leftover night

20. Moroccan chicken & couscous: chicken thighs, seasoned with my moroccan seasoning blend, browned and then added to a pot to finish cooking by braising in a broth sauce made with sautéed onions, canned diced tomatoes, preserved lemons, and a bit more moroccan seasoning. I added a bag of frozen spinach and a can of garbanzo beans to this to make it a complete meal. I might try to repeat this someday and write out a recipe, but here’s a very similar one I have actually posted, minus the tomatoes and plus potatoes.

21. Homemade pizza

22. Pot roast, potatoes & carrots, gravy, salad: I figured out a trick not long ago to make pot roast have loads of extra amazing flavor: add way more onions than you ever think you’ll need. You’ll get a broth or gravy that tastes like French onion soup. But please don’t add packaged onion soup mix - you really don’t need to do that to get that onion flavor. Just extra onions and salt are all you need.

23. Lasagna: I make lasagna the northern Italian style, with a béchamel sauce, a simple tomato sauce, and really very little cheese. You don’t need meat, you don’t need ricotta, just layers of thin pasta (I prefer flat pasta sheets instead of the ruffled ones), tomato & béchamel sauces, a sprinkling of cheese. Sometimes a little spinach in a layer is nice, or some basil. If you don’t know how to make béchamel, you need to learn. I basic white sauce is a kitchen staple and you can make so many wonderful things with it. Béchamel is just a white/milk sauce with a bit of pepper & nutmeg.

24. Beef stew (with leftover pot roast & veggies): all the leftover meat, gravy, veggies, chopped up and simmered in a pot with a little extra broth, with a fresh loaf of bread.

25. Enchilada sauce chicken and black beans taco bar again (it’s a favorite) and a pot of homemade black beans. If you’ve never cooked black beans from dry, you really must. They actually taste amazing, vs. canned beans that have very little flavor. You can pretty much just follow the cooking instructions on the bag, but I have found that adding a little bit of baking soda to the water helps soften the beans faster and I like the little flavor it adds. I think the bit about not adding salt while cooking because it toughens the beans is a myth. Salt makes them taste better. Sometimes I add a little cumin, or quarter an onion and toss it in.

26. Leftover night

27. Stir fry with chicken, tofu, cabbage & shiitake mushrooms, with steamed rice. There are a million good stir fry recipes out there and I have never followed one. Knowing how to stir fry some protein and veggies together and add a little flavorful sauce is a basic kitchen skill I think everyone needs to know. I highly recommend you find a few stir fry recipes you like and make them many times until you understand the basic technique and can do it with any combination of ingredients and without a recipe.

28. Frozen pizza & bag caesar salad

29. Turkey burgers, all the burger fixings, potato chips

30. Pasta with pork & cabbage: this is one I made up years ago and my kids ask for all the time. I came up with it one day when I hadn’t gotten to the store and there wasn’t a lot to work with. Ground pork, onions, cabbage, sautéed until cooked and the veggies are soft, and then mix in some cream of mushroom soup (or you can make a white sauce and add mushrooms), combine all that with cooked pasta, top with parmesan cheese. If you can find the cream of mushroom soup with roasted garlic, it really kicks it up a notch. Sometimes I do this with leftover pasta. I often also add other veggies, depending on what I have - riced cauliflower, chopped broccoli, frozen spinach. You can get a lot of veggies in this and the family doesn’t complain because what’s not to love about pork & pasta.

Phew. We did it.

That’s a whole month of real meals, what I actually cooked and what we actually eat for dinner.

You can see we have some repetitive themes and I repeat some favorites, but I try to mix it up enough that it doesn’t get boring for the cook or for the eaters. I hope this give you good ideas and helps you plan meals for your family!

Easy Chicken Enchilada

Chicken enchiladas are one of our favorite family meals. They are easy to make, really versatile, and always a crowd pleaser. The way I make this most of the time is actually more of a layered casserole, or what some people will call Mexican lasagna, but we just call it enchiladas.

You can make this with any kind of meat you like, shredded chicken cooked in enchilada sauce is our favorite so that’s what you’ll see below, but I’ve done it plenty of times with pork or beef as well. It’s nice to mix it up. Or you can leave out the meat altogether and use black beans instead. Or just layer the sauces and cheese for cheese enchiladas.

My favorite way to make enchiladas is with my homemade mild enchilada sauce. You can make this of course with any favorite enchilada sauce from the store, but if you really want to make them in a way that your whole family is sure to love, you’ll want to start with my super easy mild enchilada sauce recipe. I came up with this recipe because I love enchiladas but my little kids weren’t fond of anything spicy, so I needed to come up with a flavorful sauce that wasn’t spicy. I love the results so much that I make it all the time, and even make extra to keep in the freezer.

After you’ve got your sauce, the next step for these amazing homemade enchiladas is to cook chicken in the enchilada sauce. This method of cooking chicken is one of my favorites and I make it probably twice a month. You can again do this with a canned sauce, I do it all the time, or you can use my homemade sauce. All you need to do is pile a bunch of chicken pieces, fresh or frozen, in your favorite cooking vessel, and cover them with enchilada sauce, and cook until the chicken is falling apart. You can do this in a pot on the stove, in a dutch oven or casserole dish in the oven, in the instant pot or a slow cooker. And as I mentioned above, you can use the same method with any cut of pork or beef. It’s a great way to use less expensive cuts of meat, as they need to cook longer to get really tender.

Now lets make enchiladas!

I rarely make “real” enchiladas with the filling rolled inside tortillas- all that rolling is just too time consuming for my lifestyle.  You of course can do it that way, but I find this method much faster and easier and just as delicious.

What we make here is an enchilada casserole.

It's basically everything you would put in enchiladas, but layered in a casserole instead of rolled up. 

Easy Enchilada Casserole Recipe

Author: Lisa Marsh, WhatLisaCooks.comPrint Recipe

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Easy Enchilada Casserole

A simple layered enchilada casserole that the whole family will love. Kid pleasing, and great for a crowd.

ingredients:

• 2 cups enchilada sauce
• 3 cups grated cheese (a blend of cheddar and monterey jack)
• Cooked meat: browned ground beef, or shredded enchilada chicken
• 2 cans cream soup (cream of mushroom, cream of celery, etc.), or about 2 cups homemade white sauce (optional)
• 1 can diced green chilis
• about 2 dozen corn tortillas

instructions:

This is a simple layered dish, and the ingredients are very flexible. Use your choice of cheeses (we often just buy a bag of shredded "Mexican blend" cheese. 

Mix the green chilis in to the cream soup or white sauce if using, otherwise just spread them between the layers. Or leave them out.

We use a standard casserole dish.

Spread a bit of sauce on the bottom of the casserole dish to prevent sticking.

Cover sauce with a layer of corn tortillas. Break up tortillas to fill in any overlaps or gaps. 

Top with meat, if using. Then sprinkle with cheese. 

Repeat layers of tortilla, filling, sauce(s), cheese... until the dish is full. 

Top with shredded cheese and bake at 350 for about an hour, until the whole thing is bubbly and cheese on top is browned. 

This can also be done in a slow cooker. Follow directions the same as above, and cook for 4-6 hours on low until bubbly and melted. 

Serve with sour cream, extra cheese, salsa, shredded lettuce, diced avocado & tomato. 

Created using The Recipes Generator

Family Meal Plan #30

I don’t always stick very closely to the meal plan I sketched out the week before, but this week I actually did.

Here’s what I cooked for my family last week.

Scroll down for details about some of the meals.

Monday: Chicken and Rice soup, Greek (avgolemono) style

Tuesday: Ground beef tacos

Wednesday: Leftovers

Thursday: Moroccan inspired chicken

Friday: Homemade pizza

Saturday: Pot roast

Sunday: Lasagna

Details about some of the meals:

Chicken and Rice soup, Greek Style: You can look up recipes for this traditional Greek chicken soup called Avgolemono, but I didn’t really follow one. A lot of the recipes you will see have orzo in it, but I had leftover rice that needed to be used so I put rice in mine. I had bought rotisserie chickens at Costco the week before, so I had homemade broth and the last of the cooked chicken that needed to be used, so along with the rice already cooked this made for a very easy dinner. When I add cooked chicken to a soup I like to add it last, so it doesn’t get overcooked in the pot. So basically I just combined the broth with the rice, diced carrots, lemon juice (and I added a little zest) a little salt and pepper and let that all simmer for a bit. The real unique thing about this soup is the eggs - you beat eggs and then temper them slowly with hot broth, and then pour that combination back into your pot. It thickens the soup and gives it a texture that makes it seem like you added cream, when you didn’t. After the eggs are in and thickened, stir in the chicken and that’s basically it. I had some fresh dill from a neighbor so I added that before serving which added a nice extra bit of flavor. We had it topped with a little grated parmesan, and some freshly baked bread.

Ground beef tacos: You don’t need me to tell you how to make this. Browned and seasoned ground beef, with all the taco fixings. I don’t buy taco seasoning, I think it’s unnecessary. We just brown the ground beef and season it with salt and pepper, sometimes garlic salt, sometimes cumin. Keep it simple.

Moroccan inspired chicken: I won’t claim any kind of authenticity here, so this is inspired by moroccan recipes. I seasoned chicken thighs (some boneless skinless, some not) with my Moroccan seasoning blend, and browned them in the oven. While the chicken was browning I did the rest in a big cast iron dutch oven on the stove. I sauteed a bunch of sliced onions, added a little chopped garlic and parsley. When the onions were soft I added a couple cans of garbanzo beans and a couple cans of chopped tomatoes, and a couple pieces of preserved lemons finely diced. I simmered that all together for a bit, added part of a bag of greens that needed to be used, and then placed all the browned chicken pieces on top. I put the pot in the oven to let the chicken braise and finish cooking in the sauce. We had this with some couscous.

Homemade pizza: I don’t have a pizza dough recipe for you because I make my sourdough by feel. But I did do a couple things a little different this week. For a while now I have been adding olive oil to my dough when I am making it for pizza. But this week I left out the oil. I think the resulting dough was better, more chewy and crispy. I also did a different sauce than usual. I normally make a homemade sauce starting with canned crushed tomatoes that I season with olive oil, salt, garlic, thyme and rosemary. But I was out of the crushed tomatoes I like so this time I just used canned tomato sauce and didn’t do anything to it, just straight from the can to the pizza. At least one of the teenagers declared that she liked it better. It certainly was easier, so it’s good to know they like it. I still prefer the other sauce though, so I’ll maybe alternate moving forward.

Pot roast: Your standard low and slow cooked pot roast with carrots and potatoes. The secret I discovered recently to great flavor in the meat and the resulting gravy is to add a LOT more onions than you think you need. Your recipe maybe calls for one onion, I’m telling you to use three or four. They disintegrate and fall apart so it’s not like you’re eating a lot of onion. But all that slow cooking leaves you with amazing flavored broth, almost like a French onion soup type of broth. Thicken this with flour and you get a wonderful gravy. I’ve been experimenting with multi-grain bread lately so we had some homemade multi-grain sourdough rolls with our dinner.

Lasagna: There are a million ways to make lasagna and I don’t care what anybody says there’s no wrong way. I’ve never met a lasagna I didn’t like. But one of my favorite ways is the simplest - just layers of pasta, a simple tomato sauce, béchamel, and a little bit of cheese. This is not a cheese heavy lasagna, it’s more about the creamy sauce. You can find a recipe for béchamel in many places, in my opinion it is one of the basic sauces that everyone should know how to make. For this lasagna I layered the pasta, tomato sauce and béchamel in many layers with some basil leaves in one layer, a little cottage in another layer because it needed to be used, a sprinkling of mozzarella on another layer, and a little parmesan on top. We had this with more of the rolls from the night before.

That’s all for this week! Happy cooking.

~ Lisa

Family Meal Plan #29

Another week meal plan for you. These are the actual dinners I cooked for my family in a week. Sometimes the dinners are more elaborate, but most of the time my goals are simple but flavorful meals that give my family a balance of nutrition without a lot of work. I hope my dinner plans help you find some ideas or inspiration for how to feed your busy family.

Here’s what we had this past week:

Sunday: Wild rice & broccoli casserole, sheet pan chicken & apple sausages

Monday: Dumpling soup

Tuesday: Taco casserole

Wednesday: leftovers

Thursday: Mac & cheese for the kids (mom and dad were out)

Friday: homemade pizza

Saturday: Broccoli beef, and crispy salt & pepper tofu

Sunday: Enchiladas from the freezer

A few details about the meals:

Wild rice & broccoli casserole. I don’t know why, but I am never successful with rice casseroles that start with uncooked rice and have it all cook together in the oven. I always end up with mushy rice around the edges and crunchy undercooked rice in the center. I’d blame it on an uneven one, but I’ve had the same issue with three ovens now so I can’t blame it on the equipment. It’s operator error. Anyway, when I make rice casseroles these days I usually start with cooked rice. This was a bag of a wild rice blend, I cooked it in some homemade chicken broth for extra flavor. I mixed the cooked rice with some frozen broccoli, sautéed chopped mushrooms and shallots, a bit of frozen riced cauliflower, canned cream of mushroom soup, and some shredded cheese. No quantities because I’m not following a recipe, but I’m sure you can find plenty of wild rice casserole recipes around. This kind of dish is also a great one to use up little bits of leftover veggies - I actually also mixed in some chopped up leftover asparagus. I love these kinds of dishes for getting veggies in the family - you can mix a lot of finely chopped veggies in with rice and soup and cheese, and nobody even notices they’re there.

Dumpling soup: Another favorite that needs no recipe. Frozen Asian style dumplings (pot stickers, gyoza) are one of the best soup shortcuts ever. My favorite frozen dumplings are from Trader Joes, but you can do this with any kind you like. Start with some good flavorful broth, I had homemade broth but you can use canned also, add veggies, frozen dumplings, and whatever flavors and seasonings you like. I went with a bit of a Thai style for this one - lemongrass, lime juice, coconut milk, fish sauce, along with ginger and garlic. I like to slice my veggies in thin strips for this, and for this one I used carrots, king oyster mushrooms, and cabbage. You can serve it with a bottle of hot sauce for those that want theirs a little spicy, or oyster sauce for those that want to add a little sweet/savory/umami flavor.

Taco casserole: Maybe I should call this burrito casserole, because it’s basically everything I love in a good loaded burrito, minus the big tortilla. Casseroles are one of my favorite ways to use up bits of leftover things and make them seem new. In this case I had some leftover brown rice, chicken that had been cooked in green enchilada sauce, chopped lettuce and tomato from a previous taco night. I combined all that with a couple cans of black beans, some cilantro, a little salsa, mixed it up well and dumped into a greased casserole dish and topped with shredded cheese. Since everything in it was already cooked it just need to heat up long enough to get hot and bubbly and melt the cheese.

Enchiladas: When I make things that are a little more labor intensive, like enchiladas, I always make extra. Because it isn’t twice as much work to make twice as much - you’ve already got the mess out, so just whip up and extra pan of something. Enchiladas are one of my favorite things to make extra of, and they are great to have in the freezer. This week I had two pans in the freezer - one chicken and one made with smoked pork. We went to a movie and I didn’t feel like cooking after, so it was great to have these handy.

Broccoli beef: I actually used a piece of chuck roast for this, sliced very thin. A secret to tenderizing beef like this for asian recipes is baking soda. Sounds weird, but it works. Something about changing the ph softens the proteins. Anyway, thin sliced beef in a bowl, seasoned with soy sauce, sesame oil, ginger and garlic powder, white pepper, a little soy sauce, corn starch, and a sprinkling of baking soda. Let that all sit for a couple of hours. This time I seasoned the broccoli with sesame oil and oyster sauce. I spread all those out on a couple of sheet pans and cooked in a 400 degree oven for maybe 20-ish minutes, stirring and turning over about halfway through. You can do the beef and the broccoli all on one pan, but I’m cooking a large quantity so I spread it out over two.

Crispy salt & pepper tofu: My recipe for this tofu is here. The difference this time though was that I deep fried it instead of using a pan on the stove. I got a deep fryer for Christmas and it’s great. It makes this recipe much quicker and less messy. My original recipe used kosher salt and white pepper, but I’ve since discovered Penzey’s Szechuan pepper salt and it kicks this dish up a notch. The Szechuan pepper is not spicy but it has such a unique flavor and really makes this amazing. I make a lot of this because we love it. It’s delicious leftover too, just not still crispy.

That’s all for this week. Enjoy.

Family Meal plan #28

After another break from this blog (it seems I need one every now and then) I’m back with another meal plan. I’ve been cooking of course, and planning our dinners ahead of time most weeks, just not getting on here and sharing them. But here is a mid-winter dinner menu, what we had for dinner last week. Not a lot of pictures for this one, sorry. It’s really hard to take decent food pics in the middle of winter when the natural light is gone by dinner time.

The menu this week:

Sunday: Cottage pie

Monday: Kale & sausage soup

Tuesday: Chicken tacos

Wednesday: leftovers

Thursday: Egg roll in a bowl (with ground beef)

Friday: frozen pizza & Costco Caesar salad with rotisserie chicken

Saturday: Broiled salmon & asparagus, lemon parmesan pasta

The details on the meals:

Cottage pie:

If you know Sheperd’s pie, then you know cottage pie. It’s the same except Shepard’s pie is ground lamb and cottage pie is ground beef. Either way - a savory stew made of minced meat and veggies with a flavorful gravy, topped with seasoned mashed potatoes and baked. I don’t really follow much of a recipe, but here is one that is quite similar to how I make it. This is a great one for a sort of clean out the fridge meal, because it’s pretty flexible and you can add some of those leftover bits of veggies that you’re not sure what to do with.

Tuscan kale and sausage soup:

A comforting meal for a cold wet winter day. I mostly followed this recipe, but probably didn’t pay much attention to the exact quantities, and I left out the potatoes. I also used a combination of homemade chicken broth and the last of some smoked turkey broth which gave it such amazing flavor, and I added a little cabbage because I like cabbage in soup. It was really good and I made enough that I had it for lunch several days throughout the week.

Chicken tacos:

One of my top favorite things to do is toss a bunch of frozen chicken in a pot with enchilada sauce. It’s the easiest thing to make, and full of flavor, and always a hit here. This week I used chicken thighs and green enchilada sauce, and I sliced up an onion in with it. This is my favorite brand of enchilada sauce, but I’ll use others if I don’t have this one, my local store doesn’t carry it so I have to order it online. I don’t add any extra seasoning because canned enchilada sauce is usually plenty salty. Let it cook until the chicken is falling apart, and maybe reduce the sauce a bit if it’s too liquidy for you. You can cook in the oven or on the stove top, or all day in the slow cooker, and you can even do this in the instant pot. Shred the chicken and serve with all your favorite taco fixings.

Egg roll in a bowl:

A perennial favorite for my family. I follow the basic idea of the recipe here from Nom Nom Paleo, but I tweak it a lot based on what I have in the house. It’s pretty foolproof and quite flexible. I don’t always leave it strictly paleo, sometimes I do splash a little soy sauce in there. This week I used ground beef.

Chicken Caesar:

Friday was Costco day, and I don’t cook and go to Costco in the same day. But one of my favorite dinners when I’ve been to Costco is to get their big Caesar salad and a rotisserie chicken, and pick the chicken off to have on top of the caesar. It doesn’t get any easier and the price of those chickens is one of the few great bargains left in the world.

Broiled salmon:

I got salmon (well technically steelhead, but looks and tastes like salmon) at Costco. I’ve tried a million ways to make salmon over the years and keep coming back to the very simplest way that is my family’s favorite. I lay the filets out on a baking sheet, season generously with salt, and cook under the broiler for 5-7 minutes, depending on how thick it is. I think overcooked fish is a crime, it needs to be just barely cooked through. We had this with some nice baby asparagus cooked also on a sheet pan with olive oil, salt and lemon juice, pasta (described below) and a salad with berries and lemon vinaigrette.

Lemon parmesan pasta:

I use my no drain pasta method for this, and when the pasta is just about finished add a few tablespoons of butter, a sprinkle of salt, a splash of cream, zest of one lemon, a tablespoon or so of lemon juice, a few grinds of black pepper, and a couple generous sprinkles of grated parmesan cheese. Mix it all together well and serve. My kids love this and the lemon makes it pair really nicely with salmon.

That’s all for this week!

Family Meal Plan #26

Welcome to our family menu!

This is a real reflection of what my family actually eats—some weeks I’ve got recipes to share, sometimes there are photos, and other times it’s just me giving you the rundown of what I made. I hope these menus give you some fresh ideas or inspire you as you’re planning your own meals. Feel free to adapt or follow along however it works for you—because meal planning should make life easier, not harder!

From one busy home cook to another, let’s make dinner a little less stressful together.

You can find all of our past meal plans here. And don’t forget to subscribe to my newsletter, Notes from the Kitchen Table, to get the latest weekly meal plan delivered straight to your inbox!

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On this menu:

We’re getting into fall meals now, slower cooked things, more sauces and spices, foods that just sound warm and cozy. Here’s what we ate last week:

• Moroccan pork butt & roasted veggies

• Broiled salmon, roasted broccoli, steamed rice

• Shredded pork tacos

• Clean out the fridge pasta casserole

• Homemade pizza

• Bolognese with homemade pasta

• Japanese Curry with chicken and vegetables

A bit more detail about some of the meals:

Moroccan Spiced Pork Butt

I talked about this one last week, so you can read that detail here.

Salmon, broccoli, rice

I see so many delicious recipes for salmon but honestly I think most of them are a waste of time. If I’m going to spend the money on good fish, I want to taste the fish. I cook salmon a very simple way 99% of the time. Seasoned only with a little salt, on a sheet pan in the top third of the oven, broil for 5-7 minutes depending on how thick it is.

With this salmon we had roasted broccoli. This time the broccoli was seasoned with sesame oil, fish sauce, and a salt & Szechuan pepper blend.

Shredded pork tacos

For this I sliced some pepper and onions and tossed those with olive oil, salt, and cumin, and cooked them in the oven until soft. Then I added the leftover pork from earlier in the week and seasoned it with a bit more cumin and let all cook together until the onions were caramelized and the meat was hot and getting browned around the edges.

For a side I tried a packaged cuban black beans and rice. I’ve never used this before and it was really good and so easy!

Pasta casserole

This was one of those clean out the fridge kind of meals. I had three different kinds of leftover pasta, some leftover meatballs, and a few bits of other things. I chopped up the meatballs and added some tomato sauce, mixed in all the leftover pasta, a bit of cottage cheese, a bag of frozen spinach, and put it all in a casserole dish and topped with bread crumbs and cheese.

Bolognese and homemade pasta

For both the pasta and the sauce I used recipes out of Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. It’s my favorite cookbook and my go-to for basically everything. I don’t follow the bolognese recipe exactly, but it’s a really good starting point. I added sweet potato to it this time, instead of carrots, and I used a combination of ground beef, ground pork, bacon, and a little Italian sausage.

Japanese curry

This Japanese curry is one my family’s favorites and it is requested often. I love this sauce because it’s easy and you can make a delicious meal with basically whatever protein and vegetables you have in your house. This time I used chicken breasts, eggplant, zucchini, cabbage, and onions. I always keep this sauce mix in my pantry. It comes in a variety of spice levels but we usually stick with the mild flavor. It’s not traditional, but I usually add a can of coconut milk to the sauce, we like it that way. Served with steamed rice, this time I made brown rice for something different. It’s even better leftover.

That’s the week!

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Have a Question?

Ask me anything. Do you need lunch packing advice or meal planning suggestions? Or do you have other food or family management related questions? My goal is to be your resource for tips and advice - from a mom who has been there, and done that.

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Wishing you a delicious and stress-free week ahead!

– Lisa

How I keep my House Clean

So my house is pretty much always clean, or at least it’s cleaner and tidier than most. People always ask me how I do it, or I think people assume that I spend a ton of time cleaning and never relax, or maybe someone else does it for me.

Well that is definitely not the case!

I value my chill time and the last thing I want to do is spend hours a day cleaning my house. But I also think it’s a waste of money for a healthy person who doesn’t work full time to pay someone else to clean. And I am also a person who gets overwhelmed with visual chaos and clutter, so I need to live in a clean and tidy environment. I can’t relax in the middle of a mess, therefore it’s important to me to have easy tricks for keeping the house clean.

With two sets of twins less than three years apart and living in a relatively small house for a family of 6, I had to figure out a lot of tricks and routines for keeping up with everyone and everything. We have a bigger house now and these strategies really help me keep on top of keeping a bigger space clean.

I’ve picked up a lot of ideas over the years and come up with some of my own, so read on for my top suggestions for how to keep your house clean with minimal work every day. Some of these are about organizing and general strategies for keeping it all under control, and some are about actual cleaning.

The real secret here is two big ideas:

1) There is no one single thing that is going to transform your house - it’s a lot of tiny habits that add up to making a big difference.

2) The keyword is “keeping” your house clean. If you are starting out with a big mess then you are going to have to put in some work to get it sorted out. You don’t have to do it all at once though, and some of my tips can help you chip away at it a little at a time. You may need to bring in outside help to get yourself to a manageable place. But once you’ve got it cleaned up is when you can really make a difference in your life - by doing all the little things to keep it clean and never let it get that messy again. I promise you this is doable, even with a house full of little kids. There’s nothing special about me, if I can do it so can you.

You don’t have to do all these things every day, but if you pick a few to do regularly I can guarantee you that your house will be in much better shape and you will be much happier for it.

So here we go, my favorite tips for keeping your house clean:

First here’s the quick list. Read on for more detail about each of these strategies.

1. Small messes are easier to clean than big ones

2. A place for everything

3. Put away one thing before getting out another

4. The speed clean

5. A quick reset

6. Make the bed

7. The laundry basket trick

8. Robot vacuums

9. Daily sweeper vacuum

10. Wipes

11. Supplies in many places

12. Vacuuming is for more than just the floor

13. Air cleaners (or a fan with a filter), and furnace filters

14. Laundry every day

15. Get up a few minutes before the kids

16. Clean your cleaning supplies

Now for the details.

Small messes are easier to clean than big ones.

I tell my kids this basically every day: the real secret to never having a big mess to clean is to never let the mess get big.

Sounds pretty simple right? Honestly I think it is. You can tidy a room for 5 minutes every day, or it will take you an hour if you wait and only do it every couple of weeks and everything has gotten piled up and feels totally overwhelming. I’d rather spend 5 minutes every day just resetting and putting things in their place so that it never turns into a big mess.

Declutter and minimize.

And then declutter and minimize some more.

Don’t keep stuff you don’t need! And you’d be surprised at how little you actually need. It is so much easier to keep a space clean and keep the stuff tidy and organized when there just isn’t too much stuff. I’ve been in so many houses where my first reaction is “there is just WAY too much stuff here”.

Clean out and clean out and clean out. Marie Kondo the shit out of that stuff. You don’t need 20 sweaters or 6 of the same size baking pan or multiple sets of dishes you never use or a dozen sets of sheets for each bed.

I give a long hard look at even so-called sentimental things. Because things are not memories. The memories live inside you, not inside the stuff. Don’t keep stuff that you have no use for, that just takes up space and collects dust and makes it harder to put other things away. You’re not going to forget a person or an experience just because you get rid of the thing.

There are dozens and dozens of websites and blogs and Instagram accounts dedicated to teaching you how to minimize your stuff so I won’t go on too much about this. But get rid of that stuff.

A place for everything.

One of my top favorite quotes ever is from Alton Brown, he said “Organization will set you free” and I 100% believe and agree with that. When everything has a place that’s easy to fit and makes sense, cleaning up is so much easier. It really does feel freeing.

My kids toys all had a bin, box, or cubby they went in. Bins and tubs make it easy for kids to get out a set of something and put it away. Our homeschool and office supplies are all in simple plastic bins. I have dividers and containers in my kitchen drawers and cabinets. We have our clothes drawers organized with dividers and containers.

But you don’t have to buy expensive containers! Shoeboxes work just as well. In fact, when my kids were little, I always saved the boxes their shoes came in because little kid sized shoe boxes are a perfect size for organizing little kid sized clothes in their drawers.

If you make it easy to put things away, then they are much more likely to get put away.

There are also loads of people out there who can help you with organization. But I'll also refer back to the previous tip - there are no amount of organization hacks in the world that will solve the problem for you if you are just trying to put too much stuff into a space.

Make those kids help!

I know it’s often faster to just clean something up yourself than it is to take the time to coach little ones through it.

But the sooner you start teaching them to clean up after themselves, and actually expecting and requiring them to do it, the easier it will be. They need to have learned those habits by repetition, day after day, year after year.

If they leave a mess and walk away, don’t let them off the hook. Call them back and tell them to clean up, immediately. They will pitch a fit, or at least roll their eyes, and you and they both know you could have just as easily picked up the thing yourself. But if you do that they don’t learn. It’s a pain in the ass to have to come back to a room to do a job once you’ve moved on, so if they know that you are going to make them come back every time, they’ll think twice before leaving a mess. But this takes consistency - every time.

The speed clean

Think you don’t have time to clean? Here’s my trick for cleaning with a limited amount of time.

Set a timer for however much time you think you can dedicate every day. Maybe it’s 20 or 30 minutes, maybe it’s an hour. Or maybe you can manage 15 minutes on weekdays and an hour on weekend days.

Whatever it is. Get ready, set your timer, and go.

Clean as much as you can in that amount of time. Stop when the timer goes off. If you do this consistently, every day, you will be amazed at how much you get done and your house will feel pulled together and clean in no time. Even if all you have is 5-10 minutes for one room, you’ll be shocked at how much you can get done when you are racing against the clock. And the more you do it, the cleaner the room gets, and the more you will get done in less time.

A quick reset

Whether you do it first thing in the morning or last thing at night, a quick pass through the house to just reset the main rooms makes a big difference.

I do the living room in the morning when I get up, I just go through and tidy up the books, straighten the sofa and blankets, pick up any dog toys and toss them in the basket, etc. It takes just a few moments and then we start the day with our main room clean. And people are less likely to leave a mess in a clean room. If the room is messy then they think nothing of leaving just a bit more mess, but if it’s clean then their new mess is more obvious.

Make the bed

This is another small one that I think makes a huge difference in how a room feels.

Get your bed set up in a way that is quick and easy to straighten - we like the European style duvet covers, you basically just give them a shake and straighten, fluff the pillows, and the bed is made. My king size bed takes less than a minute to make in the morning. When you get up in the morning, take a minute to straighten the bed. You’ll be surprised at how nice it feels to walk back into a room with the bed made

Put away one thing before getting out another

This is the most important thing I think you need to teach your kids, but it applies to us adults as well.

Clean up from one project or activity before you move on to another. Kids need reminders about this, you can’t expect them to just do it. You need to be on them to pick up after themselves, all day every day, for many years, for this to become a habit. But if you’ve done some of the other things I suggest, if each toy or art supply has an obvious and easy place it goes, then this becomes very easy. And as I said above - if they walk away without doing it, make them come back and clean it up, every time.

The laundry basket trick

This is one of my favorites and it works especially great in a house where you’ve got kids who tend to leave a trail.

When you go into a room to clean it, take an empty laundry basket (or it could be a box or a bin or some kind of larger container, it really doesn’t matter what). Pick up every single thing that doesn’t belong in that room and put it in the laundry basket. Don’t distract yourself with putting those things away, just focus on the one room you are in. Set the basket by the door, fill it up as you go around that one room. This allows you to really clean one room without getting distracted. When you are finished in that room, walk around the house and deposit all the things into the rooms they go in. Then repeat with another room.

Daily vacuuming

The number one thing you can do to cut down on the amount of dust in your house is to vacuum every day. I have a sweeper vac that I love that lives in my laundry room. I run this thing around my house for 10-15 minutes every day and I am litterally never not shocked at how much dust and pet hair gets picked up.

Robot vacuums

The daily vacuuming is even easier if you can invest in a robot vacuum. You just turn it on and it does the work for you. It really feels like a little housekeeper running around my house cleaning for me.

This requires that your floors be picked up, but that’s easy if you’re taking all the rest of my advice and doing a quick pickup in each room every day and never letting the floor get cluttered. Also it’s a great motivator to get kids to pick up their little bits off the floor - tell them that if it’s not picked up the robot vacuum is going to eat it.

Use wipes

Whether they are sanitizing cleaning wipes or just plain baby wipes, using some kind of disposable wipes around your house is a great shortcut.

I just grab a couple wipes and quickly go over any surfaces around the house. I keep cleaning wipes and baby wipes in every bathroom. A quick (we’re talking a minute or less) bathroom wipe down with a sanitizing wipe will make your weekly bathroom cleaning so much easier.

Again, if you never let it get really dirty, then it’s never a big cleaning job. Also dusting and wiping with baby wipes is a great first chore for little kids. I will never stop buying baby wipes, they are great for so many things, I keep them in practically every room of my house and in my car. Yes we all want to reduce the amount of single use disposable things in our lives, but we also have to make compromises to keep our sanity. This is one that I think is worthwhile.

Supplies in many places

Like with wipes, if you keep basic cleaning supplies stocked in a few places around your house, then it makes just grabbing a bottle of cleaning spray or a few wipes even quicker. I especially like to do this when I have kids and teenagers doing some of these cleaning chores, anything to make the job a little easier for them means it is more likely they will do it. A container of wipes on the bathroom counter means it’s much more likely they will wipe down their sink and toilet every day.

Vacuuming is for more than just floors

My vacuums are my secret weapons.

I use a vacuum to dust and clean all kinds of surfaces in my house, not just my floors. Baseboards, crown moulding, louvered closet doors, corners, ceiling fans, windowsills, curtains, even walls get dusty. A first pass with the vacuum gets the first layer of dust actually removed and locked away, rather than just moved around and letting it settle somewhere else, and then when you go back with a damp wipe or dusting cloth there is much less to be picked up.

Don’t leave kitchen messes

Empty that dishwasher as soon as it finishes so that any dishes that are used throughout the day can go straight in the dishwasher and don’t pile up in the sink. And you’re going to have to remind your family constantly. I can’t tell you how many times a day I say “put that in the dishwasher”, and call kids back to the kitchen to do it.

I know a lot of folks leave dinner dishes for the morning, because after dinner you are just done. But getting that kitchen cleaned up before you go to bed really does get your day off to a better start. If you can manage to just get it cleaned up as soon as the meal is finished, I promise you will be happier in the morning.

In our house the dinner dishes are done by the husband and teenagers because I do the cooking. My husband and I agreed at the beginning of our marriage that this was a fair deal - whoever cooks the dinner does not have to do the dishes.

Empty that dishwasher as soon as it finishes! It is SO MUCH easier to keep your kitchen clean if you are able to put a dish right into the dishwasher as soon as you’re finished using it.

Air cleaners and filters

Air cleaners are another of my secret weapons for minimizing dust in a house.

These can be expensive air cleaners with high end filters, but when it comes to picking up dust I’ve found that a cheap box fan and a square furnace filter works just as good. It’s amazing how much dust is on that filter after just a short time. I have these all around my house. If you have a forced air system in your home you also need to make sure you are cleaning or swapping out those filters regularly. They collect so much dust.

Get up a few minutes before your kids

Ok if we’re being honest this is my least favorite thing to do.

I love sleeping in, and I hate getting out of my bed. But I still did get up before my kids for many years because I figured out that it really was a key to success. If I could get up even 15-20 minutes before them, I had time to get myself a cup of coffee, get the laundry cycled and empty the dishwasher. Getting those two chores done made a huge difference in my day.

Laundry every day

Laundry is my least favorite chore.

I would honestly actually rather clean a toilet than fold laundry. As much as I hate laundry though, I still do it every day. Because if it piles up it becomes totally overwhelming and then I avoid it even more, and then it piles up even more and it’s just a bad deal. The only way laundry works for me is if I keep up with it every day. With six of us in the house, this usually means two loads a day. So, per my previous tip - start a load first thing in the morning before the kids are up, switch one to the dryer, take one out of the dryer and fold it. It’s the folding that’s most important for me. When my kids were little if I didn’t fold that load as soon as I took it out of the dryer, then it was basically never getting done. This is just another one of those things that is so much easier to manage when it’s a small job, so don’t let it get big.

Clean your cleaning supplies!

You can’t expect to get clean results if you are “cleaning” with a dirty tool.

Does it seem like your vacuum isn’t picking up stuff as well as it used to? When was the last time you cleaned it? All of these things have removable air filters and usually the rollers and brushes are removable too. They get all clogged up with dust and hair and they need to be cleaned. And I don’t care if you have one of those fancy kinds that claims to never lose suction. They all lose suction and they all can get clogged up. I take apart and clean my vacuums regularly, clean my mops, wash my rags and sponges.

Clean your dishwasher regularly and it will get your dishes much cleaner - run vinegar through it and take out and scrub the filter. Clean your sink and scrub your disposal if you have one. Clean your washing machine - run empty loads with vinegar, or oxi-clean, or bleach - most newer machines have a self clean cycle. I also spray down around the insides with vinegar, spray and wipe the outside. If you have a front loader you need to get in around that rubber gasket and clean, it gets really gross.

That’s it for now!

Ok, that’s a lot. But it’s all really small stuff, and if you do even a few of these things they add up to make a big difference. I’ll add to this post as I think of more tips for you, so check back!

Instant Pot Whole Chicken and Chicken Broth

Food is so expensive these days, but a whole chicken continues to be one of the most economical proteins you can buy to feed your family.

Cooking a whole chicken in the instant pot (or pressure cooker) is one of the easiest and most foolproof ways to cook a whole chicken. It’s mostly hands off and you end up with moist and juicy chicken to use in a variety of meals, plus you get to make homemade chicken broth with the bones.

What you’ll need for Instant Pot Whole Chicken:

• A whole chicken. I get mine two at a time at Costco.

• Carrots

• Celery

• Onions

• Garlic

• Bay leaf

• Salt

• Peppercorns

• Water or other liquid (broth, wine, juice)

How to cook a whole chicken in the instant pot:

The quantities do not need to be specific.

I cut up a couple of carrots, a few stalks of celery, a couple small onions or one bigger one, toss in a few garlic cloves, a few bay leaves, a small handful of whole peppercorns. You can leave out any of these things if you don’t have them, or you can add other herbs, seasonings, or veggies that you like. You can add cumin and chili powder for a more latin flavor, or ginger and lemongrass for an asian flavor. You can add bunches of fresh herbs which gives amazing flavor if you are going to use this for something like chicken soup or chicken and dumplings. I usually keep it more basic so I can use the resulting meat and broth in a variety of ways, but you can do whatever sounds good to you.

The veggies add flavor to the chicken and the broth, but they also as a sort of a rack for the chicken, to keep it off the bottom of the pot. Pour about a half a cup of water or other liquid in the bottom of the pot. You need a bit of liquid to get the steaming process going (read your pot’s instructions to see what the minimum is), but I try to keep it minimal because the chicken and the veggies release a lot of liquid when they start cooking.

Clean out the chicken if it’s got the parts inside (some come with, some don’t), and season it well inside and out with salt. Place the chicken on top of the veggies. If your chicken came with all the parts, I usually toss everything but the liver in the pot as well, they will add flavor to the broth you are going to make later. I leave out the liver because it is a really strong flavor. You can freeze your chicken livers and save them until you have enough to make something with. Or I usually just toss them in a frying pan to cook and feed to the dogs.

Put the lid on your Instant Pot and set it for 30 minutes on high pressure, let it cook and then leave it to slow release, that usually takes a good 20 minutes more.

When you open your pot you will have a wonderfully juicy chicken. Take it out and let it cool enough to pick the meat off.

I use this chicken in soups, stews, chicken salad, and more. I love having cooked chicken in my fridge for quick high protein lunches.

Now you get to make homemade chicken broth!

If you’ve never made homemade chicken broth you are in for a treat. This is the easiest way to do it and you will be amazed at how much more flavor it has over canned broth.

Put all the bones, skin, and other scraps back in the pot, top it off with water, paying attention to your pot’s max fill line, and teaspoon or so of salt if you like salty broth. Close up the pot again and set it for an hour. After the hour you can quick release if you want or let it slow release, it really doesn’t matter.

Strain off the broth and go again! Yes! I usually get two batches of broth from one pot of chicken bones. For the second batch you’ll want to add a bit more salt, you can add more veggies if you like, and some folks recommend adding a little acid - lemon juice or vinegar - to help draw even more flavor out of the bones. Set it for an hour again. The second batch of broth might not be quite as rich as the first, but it will still taste amazing. I sometimes combine the two batches together, so all of my containers of broth have the same flavor.

You can freeze or store in the fridge. Mine rarely makes it to the freezer because I use it up so fast.

Caramelized Brown Butter Rice Crispy Treats

Caramelized marshmallows and browned butter bring the old classic Rice Krispie treats to a whole new level.

I first made these by accident. I was just melting the butter and marshmallows for regular rice crispy treats, but I was also doing a little too much multitasking and I let the pot alone for a few minutes longer than intended. The result was that the butter got a bit browned and the marshmallows on the bottom got a little caramelized. But nothing was burned and I didn’t want to waste it, so I went with it. I mixed it all up well and it had a lovely just faint golden brown color and made the rice crispy treats as usual. The result? A wonderfully delicious extra layer of flavor - just a hint of caramel flavor layered on top of the usual marshmallow and butter flavor. I didn’t tell the family they were different, but everyone seems to have noticed that there is something just slightly more delicious going on and they can’t figure out what.

Here is the recipe:

I make them with a bit more butter than the classic recipe, and I add a pinch of salt)

2 bags of large marshmallows

1 stick of salted butter

12 cups rice crispies

a pinch of salt

Melt the butter in a large heavy bottomed pot, let it go until it’s just barely starting to brown. Add the marshmallows and stir occasionally until they are totally melted. Let the melted mixture simmer a few extra minutes until it starts to develop just a very light golden brown tint. Stir in the salt. Take the pot off the stove and add the rice crispies and mix until well combined, and press into a buttered casserole dish or other shape of your choice.

Family Meal Plan #25

Welcome to our family menu!

This is a real reflection of what my family actually eats—some weeks I’ve got recipes to share, sometimes there are photos, and other times it’s just me giving you the rundown of what I made. I hope these menus give you some fresh ideas or inspire you as you’re planning your own meals. Feel free to adapt or follow along however it works for you—because meal planning should make life easier, not harder!

From one busy home cook to another, let’s make dinner a little less stressful together.

You can find all of our past meal plans here. And don’t forget to subscribe to my newsletter, Notes from the Kitchen Table, to get the latest weekly meal plan delivered straight to your inbox!

On this menu:

(see below for a few notes about some of the meals)

This one is a little different because this wasn’t just one week - here is a list of some of the things that have been on our dinner table lately, in no particular order:

• Pasta blanco (white pasta), creamed spinach, nuggets

• Teriyaki tofu

• White pasta, nuggets, creamed spinach, and a big salad

• Slow cooker butter chicken, with coconut tofu saag

• Yellow coconut curry chicken meatballs with udon noodles

• Moroccan spiced pork butt with roasted vegetables

• Moroccan spiced roasted veggie soup

A bit more detail about some of the meals:

White pasta, creamed spinach, nuggets.

Not every meal is gourmet. Sometimes nuggets from the freezer are where it’s at, paired with some quick and easy pasta and spinach and it’s a balanced meal that everyone loves.

The pasta: I like to call it pasta blanco because it feels fancy, and my Italian family told me that’s what they call pasta served with butter and cream. But let’s be honest, we’re basically talking about buttered noodles here. This version is a staple in my house, I make this at least once a week, often twice. I use my no drain pasta method - butter, 1 pound of pasta, 4 cups of water, a couple pinches of salt, cream. Melt the butter, get the pasta coated, add the water and salt. Simmer, stirring occasionally, until the water is mostly absorbed, then add a bit more butter, a splash of cream, and more salt if needed. It’s quick and easy. I make this for the kids but every time I serve this and adults are around the adults devour even more than the kids. It’s just simple and satisfying and comforting, and goes with basically everything.

With this meal I made a quick and simple creamed spinach. This is just a bag of frozen spinach in a pan with about a tablespoon of butter and a little salt, stir it around until the spinach is getting hot and some of the liquid is cooking off, add a bit more butter, a splash of cream, a dash of nutmeg if you have it, pepper, and a little parmesan cheese if you like.

Teriyaki Tofu bowls

This teriyaki tofu is one of the easiest things I make and maybe one of the most popular in our house. If you think you don’t love tofu, I encourage you to try it this way. Tofu really just takes on the flavor of whatever you cook it in, so cooking it with a really flavorful teriyaki sauce makes it taste amazing. For this meal I literally just slice the tofu, put it in a baking dish, and pour teriyaki sauce over the top, and cook in a hot oven (375-400) for 15 -20 minutes until the sauce is bubbly and the edges of the tofu are getting a bit browned.

You can do this with a favorite bottled teriyaki sauce or make your own. It’s surprisingly easy to make, you can try my favorite recipe here. I usually try to keep a jar of this in my fridge at all times, because it makes for such an easy weeknight dinner. It’s an easy recipe to customize to suit your tastes.

I serve this with steamed rice and a variety of other toppings & sides. This time we had broccoli and edamame (both from the freezer), spring greens, sliced tomato and cucumber, steamed rice, and furikake. Furikake is a Japanese seasoning for rice that my kids love - there are different varieties but our favorite is this one that is a mix of dried seaweed, sesame seeds, a little salt and sugar. It’s a simple way to make a scoop of plain rice a lot more interesting.

Slow cooker butter chicken, and a coconut saag with tofu.

I very loosely followed this recipe for the butter chicken. I used riced califlower so it all cooked into the sauce, and I never bother with unsalted butter for things like this, salted butter is better. I also used pieces of pre-cut frozen chicken breast, I got a bag of them at Costco and it made this really easy. For the saag - which is a greens/spinach dish - I mostly made it up as I went along, but this recipe is pretty close to how I made mine, with frozen spinach and minus the chili paste and sugar. I really liked both of these and will definitely do them again. Maybe next time I’ll take a picture.

Yellow coconut curry chicken meatballs with udon

I’ve been obsessing over the idea of this meal for a few weeks, ever since I saw this recipe. I didn’t really follow that recipe, but I made up my own and I was very happy with it. We all love meatballs here, so it’s fun to try new ways to make them.

This dish will work with essentially any asian style chicken meatball recipe you like, and any coconut curry recipe - just make those two and put them together with some veggies and serve over noodles. For mine I didn’t really follow a recipe, but I made the meatballs with mostly ground chicken and a little ground pork, green onions, mushrooms, ginger, garlic, panko breadcrumbs, and soy sauce. I browned the meatballs first in the oven before adding them to the curry sauce. I made a fairly basic yellow curry sauce with lots of onion, garlic, ginger, turmeric, cumin, coriander and a bit of salt, some chicken broth and coconut milk, and thickened with a little corn starch. I added the cooked meatballs to the curry sauce along with some chopped up bok choy and green onions, and then served it all with cooked udon noodles. It was seriously delicious.

Honestly you could probably do this with frozen meatballs from the store (I just wouldn’t buy an “Italian” style for this) and a packaged curry sauce and I bet it would be almost as good and take you about 5 minutes to throw together.

Moroccan spiced pork butt and roasted veggies.

Pork butt is one of my favorite things to cook when people are craving a big pile of meat. And this was also one that was taking up space in my freezer. I’ve done this one a few times and it never disappoints. I shared a basic recipe here for how I do the meat, and here is the spice rub recipe I use. I cooked the meat on top of a pile of chopped veggies - this time it was cauliflower, sweet potatoes, red and yellow peppers, onions, and garlic. I like to serve this with flatbread, chopped tomatoes and cucumbers, and a few sauces. This time I did a simple tzatziki style cucumber yogurt sauce with preserved lemon, and a roasted carrot lentil hummus.

The hummus was a happy accident. I made a roasted carrot hummus a while back that I loved and I was going for something similar to that. Basically you just take any favorite hummus recipe and swap out some or all of the the garbanzos for roasted carrots and garlic. It’s an amazing flavor. This time I intended to do it with the roasted carrots and garbanzos, but after I got everything else in the food processor I went to the pantry for a can of garbanzos only to find that I didn’t have any! So I used a can of lentils instead. It turned out great actually and I will totally do that again. I doubt anyone could tell the difference.

Moroccan spiced roasted vegetable soup.

Honestly my family doesn’t love the roasted vegetables with the pork as much as I do, so there’s always a lot leftover. For the second time now I have turned all those soft roasted veggies into an amazing soup. This is so easy - literally just dumping all the leftover veggies in a pot, with a lot of the juices from cooking, and enough broth (this time I used homemade chicken broth) to get the consistency right. I heated it all up and pureed with my immersion blender, added a dash more seasoning, and that’s it.

That’s the week!

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Have a Question?

Ask me anything. Do you need lunch packing advice or meal planning suggestions? Or do you have other food or family management related questions? My goal is to be your resource for tips and advice - from a mom who has been there, and done that.

Reply to the newsletter email, post a comment, or hit me up on social media. I’ll do my best to answer, and your question could be featured in my newsletter.

Don’t forget to follow along on Instagram, Facebook, and Threads for daily tips and inspiration, and subscribe to the newsletter to get my weekly updates right in your inbox.

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Wishing you a delicious and stress-free week ahead!

– Lisa

Mild Enchilada Sauce Recipe

Scroll down for the printable recipe card

This easy mild enchilada sauce recipe is one of my most favorite original recipes.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

I love Mexican and Latin style foods and I love making them for my family. But my kids, being typical American kids, didn’t like sauces with any kind of spice at all. And it’s not easy to find a pre-made enchilada sauce that isn’t at all spicy but is still really flavorful. It seems like you either get spicy, or you get bland.

So I came up with my own enchilada sauce recipe. This is a kid friendly, family friendly, easy enchilada sauce recipe that the whole family will love.

It’s basically a flavored and spiced gravy - so if you know how to make a gravy, this will be super easy for you. It makes a big batch, and I often even double this, because it keeps well and it freezes easily.

This one is a long post because I’ve combined a few recipes into one. Below the Enchilada Sauce Recipe I’ve also include my recipes for how I make enchilada shredded chicken, and how I use that chicken and the enchilada sauce in my easy enchilada casserole.

Once I gave up on buying enchilada sauce for a while, I needed to come up with my own. After looking at a bunch of different recipes online, I decided to come up with my own version of a simple sauce that suits us just perfectly.

It's really flavorful and gives a nice southwest style flavor to dishes, but it's not spicy at all. I love to use this for enchiladas, or more often just an enchilada casserole, but it's also great for simmering chicken or other meat in, to shred up and use for tacos, burritos, salads, etc.

I make no claims about this being any kind of authentic - 'real' enchiladas would definitely have a sauce made of chilis. But we're not in Mexico and I'm not Mexican, so this is just my American girl version of this style of dish.

I also love that this doesn't require any special or unique ingredients - I can whip up a pot of this sauce very quickly with just ingredients that I pretty much always have in my pantry. 

It seems like a lot of spices, and it is.  

But what we're doing here is making up for the lack of spice from peppers by adding a lot of other flavor. And, as with all of my recipes, this one is super flexible.  The quantities of spices are just a guideline, and honestly most of the time I don't even really measure. I recommend you start out with measuring, and then as you go along and make the sauce you taste it and you can add more spices as needed.

Not sure how to use this sauce? Try my favorite enchilada casserole recipe. This is a regular favorite on our family menu.

Recipe: Lisa's Homemade and NOT Spicy Enchilada Sauce

Author: Lisa Marsh, WhatLisaCooks.comPrint Recipe

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Mild Enchilada Sauce

An easy recipe for a very mild enchilada sauce that the whole family will love.

ingredients:

• 1 quart of chicken broth
• 1 15.5 oz can of tomato sauce
• 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter
• 3/4 cup flour
• 2 teaspoons garlic powder
• 2 teaspoons onion powder
• 4 teaspoons cumin
• 2 teaspoons paprika
• 1/2 teaspoon chili powder
• salt, to taste

instructions:

If you know how to make gravy with a roux:

1. Basically, you’re making a simple gravy with a butter & flour roux, and chicken broth + tomato sauce for the liquid, and spices added for flavor. Add all the spices (except salt) at the beginning with the butter and flour, so they toast a bit and get more flavorful. Then whisk in the liquid as usual, and taste to adjust seasoning.

If you don’t know how to make gravy:

1. Put the butter, flour and all the spices except the salt in a medium stock pot over medium heat. Stir until the butter is all melted and you have a well blended paste.
2. Once the butter and flour are well combined, slowly add your broth, whisking the whole time to avoid lumps.
3. Then add the tomato sauce.
4. Let it all simmer for about 10-15 minutes, not boiling, stirring frequently.
5. Taste as you go and decide whether you think you like the flavor, or you want more garlic, or more chili powder, etc. I hold off on the salt until I have everything else combined, because the saltiness of any particular batch of chicken broth or tomato sauce can really vary.  So get it all mixed up and then add salt if you feel like it needs it. 

Notes:

1. This recipe is very flexible.  The spice quantities are just a guideline and you should totally play with the amounts.  If you actually want to make this spicy, add a little cayenne pepper, or a bunch more chili powder.
2. You can also make this without the tomato sauce, I’ve had it that way and it’s great too - like an enchilada spiced gravy.
3. This freezes great.  This recipe makes more than you’ll need for one recipe of enchiladas. Set aside half and freeze for next time. 
4. Use vegetable broth to make a vegetarian sauce.
5. Make it gluten free by using gluten free flour.

Created using The Recipes Generator

Meal Prep for Teenagers

School lunch ideas for high school students.

Top ten meal prep tips for teens and school lunch ideas for high school.

If you have teenagers in high school you know how busy their schedules can get. The kids have a lot of pressure on them these days, and I strongly believe that one of the best things we can do as parents to help get them through their demanding days is to make sure they get as much good nutrition as possible, and help them to get it in ways that are quick and easy for them to grab. Lunch for high school, as with lunch ideas for elementary school, needs to be healthy, portable, and easy to eat.

So this where meal prep for high school kids works great! If you can take a little time to get some healthy lunch options prepped for them, then they can just grab something homemade rather than resorting to junk food for their busy days. These ideas aren’t just for lunch - they often end up being dinners too. We’ve got long school days here, and we often have evening rehearsals, clubs, practices, scout meetings, and more - you know how it is!

I’ve got a list of things that I do to meal prep teens to have healthy foods that are easy for them to grab for breakfast and lunch, and sometimes even dinner.

Top ten ideas to make or keep on hand for easy meal prep for teenagers:

1. Muffins

2. Egg bites

3. Smoothie packs

4. Burritos

5. Sandwiches

6. Quesadillas

7. Sandwich fillings

8. Leftovers

9. Cut up fruit and veggies

10. Ramen cups

Let’s get into some of the details of these ideas!

Muffins:

I like to make big batches of muffins to keep on hand in the fridge and freezer. Muffins freeze great so it’s easy to have a supply of them in your freezer for quick breakfasts or lunch packing. I’ve got a great recipe for banana chocolate chip muffins that are a staple in our house - I’ve adapted this over the years to cram as much nutrition into a sweet treat as I possibly can. But you can also easily adapt any favorite muffin recipe to be more nutritious. Here are a few things you can try with any muffin recipe. I recommend you start by changing just one thing at a time and see how you like the results.

• add extra eggs

• swap out any water for milk

• add in a little favorite protein powder - try to find one that is unflavored and unsweetened, or just plain whey powder works great.

• use whole wheat flour instead of white flour

• add in a little ground flax, wheat germ, oat bran, etc.

• add nuts

• try cutting the sugar down, or swapping some for a natural sweetener like honey or maple syrup

Egg Bites

As with the muffins, egg bites are great to make in big batches, and they also freeze great. I make several dozen of this recipe at a time and usually put about half in the fridge and half in the freezer. For freezing I like to put two at a time in little snack bags, so they can just grab one little bag and warm it up. Egg bites are very easy to customize too. My kids like bacon and spinach, but you can add basically any kind of extra protein or veggie you like, or you can make them plain which are delicious too.

Boiled Eggs

If your kids like boiled eggs they are awesome to have in the fridge. I have this little egg cooker which cooks the eggs perfectly every time and makes them easy to peel. You can go ahead and peel the eggs for them so they really can be a quick meal. You can also buy peeled boiled eggs in handy little packs at Costco if you really don’t want to cook them yourself.

Smoothie Packs

These make it so easy for my teens to make their smoothies in the morning. I use reusable silicone storage bags and I get big bags of mixed frozen fruit. I spend a few minutes every week or two quickly filling the bags for easy school day morning smoothies. It’s also a great way to use up fruits that are just getting borderline - I sometimes toss berries, pieces of banana, grapes, cut apples, etc. into a big bag in the freezer and then use that stash to make up the smoothie packs.

Each pack has about 2 loose cups of frozen fruit and a handful of greens. All they have to do is dump it in the bullet blender with a small can (or about 6-8 ounces) of juice (or milk, or nut milk) and a small carton of yogurt. I like to get the big pack of Chobani greek yogurts at Costco. This makes one big serving or two small/medium servings. Lately two of my girls have been sharing this in the morning along with either a muffin or a couple egg bites.

Tip: people ask how we wash the bags. So here’s what we do: after they make the smoothie, they give the blender cup a quick rinse and then fill it halfway with hot water and a squirt of soap and put the lid back on and put it back on the blender for a few seconds. This cleans the blender. Then they take that container of hot soapy water and dump it into the silicone bag and give that a good shake, and rinse. The whole process takes about 30 seconds and everything is clean and ready to use again.

Burritos

Burritos make a great lunch, they can be eaten quickly and are totally portable. I always keep a stack of bean burritos in the freezer. Once a month or so I make extra rice and black beans and I make up some simple burritos with rice, beans, salsa, and a little cheese. These freeze great and the kids either set one in the fridge the night before or pop it in the microwave in the morning. If you make your own beans they have so much flavor - you really have no idea how good black beans can taste if all you’ve ever had is canned.

You can also make breakfast burritos ahead and freeze them too. Fill them with scrambled eggs, potatoes, cheese, whatever you like.

Sandwiches

I’ve got a whole other post about how to make sandwiches ahead of time, and it’s such a timesaver when you do it. I still do this sometimes for my high schoolers as well. It doesn’t have to be a whole extra process either. If I’m making a sandwich for one of us at home for lunch, it takes only a couple minutes more to just make a few extra. You’ve already got all the stuff out, so slap together a few extra sandwiches and put them in sandwich boxes in the fridge, and then your teens can just grab one on their way out the door in the morning.

I’ve even seen where people freeze sandwiches - PB&Js actually freeze great. Or we sometimes keep a box of Uncrustables in our freezer.

And don’t forget about breakfast sandwiches too - it’s easy to batch make all kinds of egg sandwiches, add ham, sausage patties, cheese, or whatever else you like. They also are excellent for freezing.

These are my favorite boxes for packing sandwiches, as you can see in the pic below. I’ve got some of these that are still going strong after 10 years of use.

Quesadillas

As with sandwiches, when I make quesadillas for lunch at home I always make a lot extra. Quesadillas store and keep really well in the fridge for quite a few days, and I think they are one of the most perfect lunch foods you can make. And also as with sandwiches, I pack up a serving of quesadilla slices in a sandwich box and just leave them stacked in the fridge for the teens to grab.

Sandwich fillings

If you keep a supply of easy sandwich fixings ready to go, then even if there isn’t something already made it can really take just a couple minutes to throw together a quick sandwich. We always have peanut butter, jam, sandwich meats and cheese, and condiments for easy access in our fridge. But I also like to make up batches of things like tuna salad, chicken salad, egg salad for the week, so all the teenager has to do is put a scoop of that between two slices of bread or roll up in a tortilla for a quick wrap, and they are ready to go.

Leftovers

If you’ve followed me for any time you probably know that leftovers are a very important part of how I keep everyone fed around here. I always cook extra of every dinner, so we always have a supply of healthy homemade foods in our fridge that can just be reheated for breakfast or lunch.

One of my teens in particular prefers a hot lunch, so I got her a new insulated Thermos food jar for her lunch this year. I’m liking this one because it’s a bit bigger than the size we used when they were younger, it suits a teenage appetite better. To take hot foods for lunch you’ll want to do two important steps: 1) heat your food to a little hotter than you really want it for eating, and 2) preheat your food jar with boiling water. You can do these at the same time - fill that thermos with hot water while your food is microwaving, then dump the hot water out and pour the hot food in. It will lose a little heat over a few hours, but if it started out too hot then it should end up just right by lunch time.

I also do things like extra burgers on burger night, and extra pizza. Pizza is one of the world’s perfect foods and there’s hardly an easier lunch than grabbing a few slices of leftover pizza. And maybe my kids are weird but they love leftover burgers - when we have burger night I always make at least a half dozen extra and we go ahead and assemble them on buns with ketchup and mustard and bag them individually and my kids love to have these for breakfast or lunch.

Cut Fruit and Veggies

I don’t know about your kids - but my kids will devour fruit and veggies if they are cut up and prepped for them, but they will basically never go looking to cut up the fruit or veg themselves. I can all the fruit in the world sitting right in front of them and it won’t be touched if it’s whole, but if I take a few minutes to cut up the apples and carrots, trim the stems of strawberries, peel oranges, cut cucumbers, etc. then they will eat it. To me it’s worthwhile - I want my kids to eat those healthy snacks. So I like to keep containers, bowls, and bags of prepped fruit and veggies ready for them to eat. These GreenBoxes have some kind of magic embedded in them that makes them keep cut fruit and veggies fresh for so long. You can cut up a bunch on the weekend and have them ready to grab all week.

Ramen Cups and Tofu

This one isn’t as much about prepping but it’s just about buying the right items. There’s plenty of ramen options out there and while it may not be the healthiest food for every day, it’s a great one to have on hand when you are really in a rush but want something hot and filling.

We love this brand of instant ramen, it really is SO MUCH better than the usual cheaper ones, and I’ve found that buying it in the cups makes it really easy for the kids to do themselves. They either microwave it or boil the kettle and add boiling water. If you keep some tofu on hand, and even better if you prep that by cutting in little cubes and having it ready in a container in the fridge, then they can quickly make a hot meal with some protein. I also usually try to keep some plain cooked chicken in the fridge that’s easy to add to ramen for protein. One of mine likes this for breakfast, or sometimes she will make the ramen and tofu and put it in the Thermos jar to take for lunch. This brand of ramen is a bit more expensive but our Costco recently started carrying it for a much better price than our grocery store, or the price on Amazon is pretty good too but not quite as good as Costco.

Other snacks and things

Here’s a list of some other things that aren’t about prepping but that I try to keep on hand for grab-and-go or quick meals. We generally have a rule in our house that the individually packaged things are more for on the go and not really for eating at home. That stuff does get expensive and the quantity we would go through if they were eating the small packages for snacks every day at home would be insane, so I try to keep some individual packages so they have things they can grab and toss in their backpack for snacks at after school and evening activities, and some bigger quantities for at home.

• Various kinds of protein bars and granola bars

• Dried fruit and nuts, or packs of trail mix

• Individual packaged cheeses - like Babybel

• Packs of chips & crackers, or cheese & cracker sandwiches

• Pouches of gatorade mix or other electrolytes that can be dumped in a water bottle for those hot days

That’s it!

There are so many ways you can make your teen’s lives a bit less stressful by helping them with meal prep. Or even better - get the teenagers involved in this prep on the weekends, to help stock the fridge and freezer with homemade items to make their busy weeks just a little easier.

Family Meal Plan #24

Welcome to our family meal plan!

This is a real reflection of what my family actually eats—some weeks I’ve got recipes to share, sometimes there are photos, and other times it’s just me giving you the rundown of what I made. I hope these menus give you some fresh ideas or inspire you as you’re planning your own meals. Feel free to adapt or follow along however it works for you—because meal planning should make life easier, not harder!

From one busy home cook to another, let’s make dinner a little less stressful together.

You can find all of our past meal plans here. And don’t forget to subscribe to my newsletter, Notes from the Kitchen Table, to get the latest weekly meal plan delivered straight to your inbox!

On this week’s menu:

(see below for a few notes about some of the meals)

• Sunday: Burgers

• Monday: Chicken sausages and zucchini patties

• Tuesday: Chicken posole

• Wednesday: Leftovers

• Thursday: Cabbage roll casserole

• Friday: Frozen pizza and bag caesar salad

• Saturday: Slow cooker Moroccan chicken

• Sunday: Cajun spiced meatballs, roasted tomato sauce, pasta

• Extra: banana chocolate chip muffins

A bit more detail about some of the meals:

Sunday: an easy meal of frozen burgers. I had both chicken patties and salmon burgers from Costco, so I just tossed those on the grill and served with the usual burger fixings.

Monday The packs of chicken sausages from Costco, tossed on a baking sheet and roasted until browned and splitting, along with some zucchini fritters and pasta. I make my zucchini fritters very much like the ones in this recipe from Smitten Kitchen, although sometimes I add in another veggies that need to be used, like cabbage or onions or broccoli.

Tuesday Chicken posole. Posole (or pozole) is a Mexican stew, think of it a bit like a tortilla soup, but what makes it posole specifically is the addition of hominy. I have a recipe for a pork posole posted here, but this one was even easier - basically just chicken broth, enchilada sauce, canned hominy, some cabbage and onions. What really makes is great is all the toppings - chips, sour cream, cheese, I like shredded cabbage, green onions.

Wednesday is our usual leftover night.

Thursday I used the leftover sausages from Monday and chopped them up and mixed with rice, cabbage, and some fresh tomato sauce and baked it all together with bread crumbs on top. We can call it a cabbage roll casserole, because the flavor and texture of the cabbage & rice and tomato reminded me of those cabbage rolls my grandma used to make. No real recipe here, and it was just ok, not sure if I’d make it again.

Friday was a frozen pizza night after the end of a very full week.

Saturday was the star of the week. A new recipe that is instantly a new favorite. I made up a Moroccan spiced slow cooker chicken and it was one of the best things I’ve made in a long time and so easy!

Sunday was another new one - Creole spiced meatballs. I don’t have a recipe but really it was too easy. I combined ground beef and turkey in the usual meatball fashion, with some diced onion, eggs, and breadcrumbs. For seasoning I just used a whole bunch of my favorite Creole seasoning, which made it all really easy and very tasty. We had these with an amazing fresh roasted tomato sauce, pasta, and some frozen spinach that I cooked with just a little butter and salt.

Extra meal prep: I made up a batch of banana chocolate chip muffins for school morning breakfasts this week. I’ve adapted this recipe so many times that I felt it was time for a new write up, so there’s a new blog post up with this version of the banana bread recipe.

That’s the week!

---

Have a Question?

Ask me anything. Do you need lunch packing advice or meal planning suggestions? Or do you have other food or family management related questions? My goal is to be your resource for tips and advice - from a mom who has been there, and done that.

Reply to the newsletter email, post a comment, or hit me up on social media. I’ll do my best to answer, and your question could be featured in my newsletter.

Don’t forget to follow along on Instagram, Facebook, and Threads for daily tips and inspiration, and subscribe to the newsletter to get my weekly updates right in your inbox.

➡️ Follow Me on Instagram | ➡️ Follow Me on Facebook | ➡️ Follow Me on Threads

Wishing you a delicious and stress-free week ahead!

– Lisa

Simple Fresh Roasted Tomato Sauce

Wondering what to do with all those tomatoes from your garden?

Make sauce!

Some folks will tell you that you have to use only certain types of tomatoes to make sauce and I’m here to bust that myth. I make sauce out of any and every kind of tomato I grow. I also don’t bother to peel or seed them! If you have a really good blender, then the seeding and peeling becomes unnecessary. I just throw it all in my Vitamix and I’m good to go. This saves so much time.

I often do this with just the fresh raw tomatoes, it makes the most amazing fresh tomato sauce you can imagine. A few garlic cloves, a little salt, some basil leaves if you like - blend it all until smooth and serve. This also freezes really well, and it’s wonderful to have that fresh taste of summer in the middle of a long, cold winter.

But today I’m going to tell you about roasted tomato sauce.

Roasting the tomatoes is an amazing way to bring out flavor, some of these garden tomatoes get so sweet and jammy with roasting that they are practically like candy. I actually have a hard time resisting just snacking on them right off the tray.

This isn’t so much a recipe as it is just some general guidelines. I don’t know what type and size and quantity of tomatoes you have - but it really doesn’t matter.

Here’s how to make simple roasted tomato sauce:

1) Cut your tomatoes into roughly similar size chunks. Cherry or grape tomatoes are usually left whole, smaller Romas I maybe cut in half, bigger tomatoes might need to be cut in several pieces.

2) Drizzle some oil over a sheet pan - I like to do this with a mixture of avocado oil for temperature tolerance and a nice olive oil for flavor.

3) Toss all the tomatoes on the sheet pan and stir them around a bit to get coated with oil, drizzle a bit more over the top if you like.

4) Add a few peeled garlic cloves.

5) Sprinkle salt generously over the top of the whole thing.

6) Stick the pan in the oven - I do mine on about 375 convection, but if you don’t have a convection oven you might want to try 400 degrees.

7) Check the tomatoes after about 15-20 minutes, maybe give them a stir, and keep cooking, checking again in 5-ish minute increments until you think they look ready. You can see the pic below of what mine look like. You want to start getting some browning and caramelization, maybe a few even darker edges but not too much, those cherry tomatoes should burst, some of the juices should start to reduce, the garlic should get a little browned and soft.

8) When you are satisfied with how the tomatoes look, take them out and let them cool for a bit.

9) Dump the whole thing into your high powered blender and puree until smooth. Taste and decide if you want to add more salt, or some fresh garlic, or a little basil or other herbs.

That’s it. Sounds like a lot of steps but it’s really quite easy. If you have a good blender then you shouldn’t have many whole seeds left, and a few little seeds don’t bother me. But if you’re going to be bothered by a few seeds you could put this through a food mill.

Family Meal Plan #23

Welcome to our family meal plan!

This is a real reflection of what my family actually eats—some weeks I’ve got recipes to share, sometimes there are photos, and other times it’s just me giving you the rundown of what I made. I hope these menus give you some fresh ideas or inspire you as you’re planning your own meals. Feel free to adapt or follow along however it works for you—because meal planning should make life easier, not harder!

From one busy home cook to another, let’s make dinner a little less stressful together.

You can find all of our past meal plans here. And don’t forget to subscribe to my newsletter, Notes from the Kitchen Table, to get the latest weekly meal plan delivered straight to your inbox!

On this week’s menu:

(see below for a few notes about some of the meals)

• Sunday: Leftovers

• Monday: Baked mac & cheese, lemon dijon chicken breasts, tomato, basil, and avocado salad

• Tuesday: Chicken tacos

• Wednesday: Leftovers

• Thursday: Seared ahi tuna bowls

• Friday: Homemade pizza and a big salad with my lemon vinaigrette.

• Saturday: Costco chicken pot pie & salad

• Sunday: Burgers

A bit more detail about some of the meals:

Sunday we had leftovers. A little unusual for us but I had cooked so much the week before that the fridge was too fun with leftovers to make anything new. Yay for me - I get an extra night off from cooking!

Monday I was actually again using up some leftovers. I don’t always figure the amount of pasta right, so I had a lot of already cooked pasta that needed to be used. So I made a quick baked Mac & cheese with riced broccoli and a bread crumb crust. You can see this one on Instagram for a little more description of how I made it.

To go with the pasta I also cooked some chicken breasts. I like to cook extra chicken because we use it up in all kinds of ways for lunch. I did these similar to my lemon-dijon chicken thighs recipe, but cooked at 350 convection for 30 minutes.

I made a quick salad with some tomatoes and basil from the garden, a couple ripe avocados, a little shallot, and dressed with just balsamic vinegar and a lemon olive oil.

Tuesday was chicken tacos again. This time I took some already cooked chicken, chopped it up a bit, and added it to a pot with enchilada sauce to simmer for a while. Very easy and we had it with all the usual taco fixings.

Wednesday is our usual leftover night.

Thursday I made one of our all time favorite meals: Seared Ahi Tuna bowls. If you can get some nice pieces of ahi tuna, this is a great simple way to prepare it that feels like a high end restaurant meal but is actually super quick for a weeknight dinner. I’ve got the tuna recipe here. I serve this with a spread of options so everyone can make their own bowl. We have rice & mixed salad greens, tomatoes, edamame, scallions, and tofu. Sometimes it’s just cubed plain tofu but this time I made my favorite Crispy Salt and Pepper tofu. I always have to at least double that recipe because my family devours it. I also made a quick cucumber salad and a simple soy ginger dressing, I don’t have exact recipes for the salad and dressing, but loose directions for those are below.

Friday was homemade pizza. I make a sourdough crust. No recipe, sorry, I just make it by feel. I usually make four pizzas - two thick crust pan pizzas and two thin crust pizzas cooked on a baking steel. Everybody is happy.

Saturday we had Costco chicken pot pies and a salad. If you’ve never tried the chicken pot pie at Costco then you definitely must. I make a pretty darn good homemade pot pie, but the Costco ones are equally amazing and already made for you. They are a treat for me to have a night off from cooking. I always buy two because we will eat a whole one for dinner but the family always wants leftover so I have to get a second one so we can have it leftover.

Sunday we had burgers. I had a variety of frozen burgers so I cooked up several of a few different kinds - chicken, salmon, and veggie.

That’s the week!

Here are those loose recipes for the cucumber salad and soy-ginger dressing I mentioned above:

Cucumber salad:

• Thin sliced cucumbers

• Shallot

• Seasoned rice vinegar

• Sesame oil

• Soy sauce

• Optional: Garlic, sesame seeds, Furikake

This is one of my favorites and super easy to make. I usually do 2 big cucumbers and one small shallot, a couple tablespoons of the seasoned rice vinegar (important that you get the seasoned one, otherwise you’ll want to add a little sugar), a couple dashes each of sesame oil and soy sauce. Taste and adjust the dressing to your liking. You can add a little garlic, some sesame seeds, or our favorite is Furikake, which is a Japanese seasoning blend usually served on rice but I think it adds a nice flavor to the cucumbers.

Soy Ginger Dressing:

• Soy sauce

• Sesame oil

• Avocado or other neutral oil

• Fresh ginger

• Seasoned rice vinegar

• Lemon juice

This is another that I usually don’t measure. You can make as much as you like, it’s great on salad or as a dipping sauce for anything Asian. I generally do about equal parts oil to vinegar/lemon/soy. For the oil half you can use all sesame oil if you like that flavor, or use a mixture of sesame plus another neutral oil. For the other half I do about equal parts soy sauce, rice vinegar, and lemon juice. I like the bright tang of lemon juice, but you can play around with this and see what you like. The real star of this is the fresh ginger - grate it very fine, I use a micro grater. Start with maybe a half a teaspoon to about a cup of the oil+vinegar and see if you want more. We like ours rather gingery.

Have a Question?

Ask me anything. Do you need lunch packing advice or meal planning suggestions? Or do you have other food or family management related questions? My goal is to be your resource for tips and advice - from a mom who has been there, and done that.

Reply to the newsletter email, post a comment, or hit me up on social media. I’ll do my best to answer, and your question could be featured in my newsletter.

Don’t forget to follow along on Instagram, Facebook, and Threads for daily tips and inspiration, and subscribe to the newsletter to get my weekly updates right in your inbox.

➡️ Follow Me on Instagram | ➡️ Follow Me on Facebook | ➡️ Follow Me on Threads

Wishing you a delicious and stress-free week ahead!

– Lisa

Moroccan Spiced Slow cooker Chicken

There is a printable recipe card at the end of this post.

Recipe: Moroccan Spiced Slow Cooker Chicken with Chickpeas and Potatoes

Now that we are back in school and our days are getting really busy, I’ve been looking for more slow cooker recipes. There are more and more days when I need to be able to put dinner together earlier in the day because we are running around and on the go right up until dinner time. I don’t want to get home after all the pick-ups and drop-offs and still have to start cooking, so slow cooker meals are perfect for this busy season of life with kids.

This meal I’m sharing with you today started out as an experiment, when I couldn’t find an existing recipe that was really grabbing my attention so I just came up with something on my own that sounded good. And it was a definite success! Every now and then I come up with something that is an instant winner on the first try.

This recipe has everything you want in a slow cooker meal - it’s literally just layering the ingredients in the cooker, with no pre-cooking or browning required, very minimal prep (really just slicing some onion and roughly cutting a few potatoes), hands off cooking time, and amazing flavor. It does require having a couple of specialty ingredients already pre-made if you want this to come together fast, but fortunately they are items that I keep ready in my kitchen almost all the time and I highly recommend that you do too.

So here’s what’s in it:

• canned garbanzo beans / chickpeas (with their liquid!)

• onions

• preserved lemons

• moroccan spice blend

• salt

• yellow potatoes

• frozen chicken thighs

When I first made this I debated about adding the potatoes but I’m so glad I did. They absorb so much wonderful flavor and get melt in your mouth soft and delicious.

The preserved lemons and moroccan spice blend are two items that require advance prep, but they are things I absolutely love for adding a huge punch of flavor to so many dishes. I always keep a jar of preserved lemons in my fridge, and when I mix up this moroccan spice blend I always make a lot so I have it ready for quick meals.

Preserved lemons are very easy to make. They are just lemons and salt, but the process that happens as the salt preserves the lemon creates a really one of a kind flavor that’s hard to substitute. It’s such an easy way to add a huge burst of flavor to your dishes that I highly recommend you make some to keep on hand. I have a short little post about them here, and you can find plenty more online. This is one that you don’t have to be super precise about it, you are basically just layering lemons and salt in a jar. When I make these I like to leave them out on the counter for the first few weeks to let them do their magic, and then I store in the refrigerator. Because you are eating the whole lemon rind when you use this, it is nice if you can find organic lemons, but if you can’t then I just recommend that you wash your lemons first. Most recipes tell you to scrape away the pulp of the lemon before using the preserved lemon peel, but I almost never bother doing that. I love the extra flavor that the pulp adds to my dishes.

My Moroccan inspired spice blend is a version I’ve developed after trying several different recipes I found. This version packs a big punch of flavor without making foods spicy hot, which my kids don’t like. I’m always trying new ways of adapting spices for recipes to capture flavor without heat and this one really fits that requirement perfectly. It’s become one of my favorite go-to seasonings. It’s amazing on all kinds of meats as well as roasted vegetables.

How to make this Moroccan Spiced Slow Cooker Chicken with Chickpeas and Potatoes.

First you’ll want to slice your onions and cut your potatoes into big chunks. It’s good to leave the potatoes relatively large so they hold up to the long cooking time that the frozen chicken needs. If the potatoes are on the smaller side you might even leave them whole. I used yellow potatoes here because I like the hint of sweetness they add and I think they hold their shape better with longer cooking, but feel free to use your favorite kind. You could also decide to add the potatoes in a bit later, but I love all the flavor they absorb and how soft they get in the longer cooking time, and I wanted this to be a dump and walk away kind of recipe, not one you have to come back to and add things.

In your slow cooker you are just going to layer all the ingredients. Start with the canned chickpeas and their liquid. This part is important. You need some liquid to get that slow cooking process going, and the liquid from the can of garbanzo beans is full of flavor you don’t want to waste. So don’t drain - just pour the whole can in there. If you accidentally drain that liquid then you will need to add a little water or broth. On top of that place sliced onions, chunks of potato, then several pieces of preserved lemon, and then the spice mix. Then I put the frozen chicken thighs on top of all that and more spices. Cover and cook.

Quantities and cooking time are in the detailed recipe card below. As with all of my recipes though, the quantities don’t have to be exact. Feel free to use more or less of any ingredient and customize to your liking. If your chicken isn’t frozen you’ll want to cook this for less time. You could certainly also do this with bone-in thighs, or with breasts, and I’m sure it would be equally delicious. I also think this would be amazing as a vegetarian dish leaving out the chicken altogether and just using more beans and potatoes and maybe even adding other veggies like cauliflower. The frozen chicken adds a lot of moisture, so if you aren’t using that then you’ll probably want to add a half cup or so of broth or water.

I served this over couscous with a dollop of plain yogurt, but we also ate it leftover both just by itself and over some leftover pasta. It was amazing no matter how it was served, and only got better after it sat in the fridge overnight.

I hope you enjoy and let me know if you try it.

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Moroccan Spiced Slow Cooker Chicken Thighs with Garbanzo Beans and Potatoes

Author: Lisa Marsh - WhatLisaCooks.com

This easy recipe comes together in no time, cooks hands off in the slow cooker, and packs incredible flavor.

Ingredients

• 2 cans garbanzo beans, with their liquid
• 2 large white onions, sliced
• 3-4 medium yellow potatoes, cut in large chunks
• 3-4 pieces of preserved lemon
• 3-4 tablespoons Moroccan spice blend
• about 3 pounds frozen boneless skinless chicken thighs

Instructions

1. Slice onions and cut potatoes into large chunks
2. Layer in slow cooker: garbanzo beans with their liquid, then onions, then potatoes and preserved lemons
3. Sprinkle about 2 tablespoons of spice mix evenly over the top
4. Add frozen chicken pieces
5. Sprinkle anther 1-2 tablespoons of spice mix over the top of all the chicken
6. Cover and cook for about 5 hours on high
7. Serve with rice, couscous, or noodles

Notes

Feel free to adapt any of the ingredients to your preference - more or less of any ingredient will work out just fine. If you choose to use fresh instead of frozen chicken you will want to cook this for shorter time, I suggest about 3 hours. See the original post on whatlisacooks.com for more suggestions and notes.

Did you make this recipe?

Tag @whatlisacooks on instagram and hashtag it #whatlisacooks

Banana Bread No. 03

This is a healthier than average banana bread recipe that is very loosely based on Martha’s recipe, which still is one of the best ever. But this version has been tinkered with enough that I think it can be called its own recipe at this point.

There is a printable recipe card at the end of this post.

I have two other quick bread / banana bread recipes posted on this old food blog, this one is a really flexible blender recipe that uses very little sugar, tells you how to adapt it to just about any fruit or vegetable, and comes together without having to soften butter first; and this one here is also similar but specific to banana chocolate chip; so this new one gets the very original name of No. 03.

Those earlier recipes were adapted when my kids were smaller and I was more concerned about refined sugars in their diet. I don’t worry about that quite as much now because they all are mature enough to make relatively smart food choices for themselves, and we believe that a little sweet treat here and there is a fine part of a balanced diet. But I still try to pack in extra nutrients whenever I can, and sometimes the best way to get kids to eat the extra healthy stuff is to hide it in something a little sweet. It’s all about balance.

So let’s talk about this recipe specifically. As I said above, I started many years (decades?) ago making Martha Stewart’s original banana bread recipe. It’s about as perfect as a banana bread recipe can get, and I highly encourage you to try it as originally written. But let’s be honest, part of what makes it so delicious is because it’s practically cake, with the white flour and white sugar. I wanted to try making something that preserved what made that recipe special (it’s so moist!) but see if we could pack enough extra nutrition in that it feels ok to eat as a stand alone quick morning meal, with enough protein and fiber to get them through a school morning.

I also can never get away with making just a single loaf of banana bread, or just a dozen muffins. So when I develop recipes I like to make them bigger than most. If you’ve followed me for any length of time you’ll know that one of my rules to live by is that I always, always, always make extra, so we have enough for leftovers or for the freezer. But if you’re not cooking for 6 people, including four hungry teenagers, feel free to cut this in half.

I like to bake this as muffins for school morning grab and go, I can pack these full of extra goodness by using whole wheat flour, yogurt, eggs, flax and wheat germ, but as long as I also add a few chocolate chips my kids with gobble them up. You can even get away with a little less sugar than this recipe calls for, I’ve cut the sugar by up to half occasionally and they still taste great, especially if you are using really ripe, sweet bananas.

They freeze great, and we love having a stock of muffins in the freezer for easy weekday breakfasts. If I make a couple dozen muffins I will usually leave out enough for a couple of days meals and then put the rest in the freezer.

Here’s what you need to make this banana bread recipe.

But keep reading because I’ll also let you in on a few secrets that most people won’t tell you about baking.

• butter (regular salted butter)

• sugar (white, brown, or a combination)

• eggs

• flour (white, wheat, or a combination)

• ground flax, wheat germ, oat bran

• baking soda

• salt

• mashed ripe banana

• sour cream or plain yogurt

• vanilla extract

• chocolate chips or nuts

• butter or cooking spray for your pans

• muffin or loaf pans

Here’s the thing most people won’t tell you about baking - the recipes don’t really need to be quite as precise as many will have you believe. Of course if you are making a very delicate fine cake or a souffle then you probably should follow a recipe exactly, at least the first time you make it.

But this kind of quick bread recipe really is way more flexible than you might think. You can use a variety of types of flour and sugar, you can try it with less sugar, you can add in more or less of the flax or wheat germ, or try oat bran or even a bit of whole oats instead. We like to add chocolate chips, but you could leave those out, or add nuts. In our house we don’t love nuts in this kind of thing, but it is a great way to add extra protein if you like them.

How to make this:

I make this using a one bowl method. A lot of recipes want you to sift all the dry ingredients together separately, but I feel like that’s mostly outdated advice. I mix all the wet ingredients together first, creaming the butter and sugar and then mixing in the rest, and then sprinkle the dry ingredients somewhat evenly over the top, and then combine. It all comes together just fine and you only end up with one bowl to wash.

You can spray your pans with cooking or baking spray, or it’s extra nice if you take the time to smear them with butter. After you fill the pans it’s quite nice if you sprinkle a little extra sugar over the tip, this give the top of nice extra bit of crust, but this is totally optional.

This is a double recipe, so if you make it in loaves it will make two. For muffins it makes about 2 dozen, depending on size of your muffin cups and how much you fill them. Sometimes I make one loaf and some muffins.

I bake this at 350, or 325 convection, for about 1 hour for average sized loaves or about 30 minutes for muffins. You also need to remember that not every oven is the same and not every muffin or loaf pan is the same, so you can’t take the time listed in any recipe as absolute. You need to know your equipment, and if not then you need to be vigilant and check things. When I’m baking a new recipe I tend to set my timer for about 3/4 of the recommend time (so, 45 minutes if the recipe says 1 hour) and check and see how it’s doing. Use a toothpick or a skewer and see if it’s still really wet in the center, check and see how it’s browning or if it’s getting too brown, and decide how much longer you need to go. I’d rather find that something is a little undercooked and needs more time than not check and realize too late that it’s overcooked.

Here’s the full recipe. I hope you enjoy!

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Banana Bread No. 03

Author: Lisa Marsh - WhatLisaCooks.com

Ingredients

• 2 sticks (1/2 pound) salted butter, at room temperature
• 2 cups of white baking sugar (or try half white and half brown if you like)
• 4 eggs (I have also substituted the eggs with flax + water with good success)
• 3 cups flour - all purpose, or whole wheat, or a combination
• 1 cup ground flax
• 1/2 cup wheat germ
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 2-3 cups mashed ripe banana (5-6 medium bananas)
• 1 cup sour cream, or plain yogurt, or a mix of both
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1 cup chocolate chips

Instructions

1. In a large bowl, cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. You can use an electric mixer or do it by hand.
2. Stir in the mashed bananas, sour cream (or yogurt), and vanilla
3. Sprinkle the dry ingredients somewhat evenly over the top of all the wet, then fold and stir gently until just combined.
4. Mix in chocolate chips, or nuts, if using.
5. Grease baking pans with butter or cooking spray
6. Sprinkle the top with extra sugar if you like.
7. Bake at 350, or 325 convection, for about 1 hour for loaves or 30 minutes for muffins. See the notes in the blog post for more detail.

Notes

See the notes in the blog post about this recipe on www.whatlisacooks.com for more instructions and comments.

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