Meal Plan 1/22/23

A week of nourishing meals for your inspiration (and my accountability)

Happy Wednesday! Guess what? Since I’m celebrating a full five years of being a homemaker, this week’s meal plan is free for all. I like to send out a sample from time to time, so that you can see what I share behind the paywall and decide whether a Holistic Homemaker membership is something that you will find value in. My hope for these weekly meal plans of mine is to give you some inspiration in your own meal planning- and hopefully some insight on the unique logistics of running a nutrient dense kitchen. Over time, you’ll probably pick up on patterns- like what’s in season, how I create balanced meals, proper preparation, and maybe other things, too. This will also serve to hold me accountable and make sure the meals really do get planned. Check out last week’s meal plan here.

Sunday: Baked spaghetti with ground lamb (organic semolina pasta layered with tomato sauce, cooked ground lamb, herbs, ricotta cheese, and topped with leftover pepperoni from the pizza bagels we made a couple weeks ago), roasted asparagus

Monday: Cajun andouille pork sausages, baked fries (seasoned with ground red pepper, black pepper, and salt, and then topped with chopped green onions after roasting), pickled green beans from our old garden

Tuesday: Feed sourdough starter in afternoon and start bagel dough before bed. Leftovers for dinner.

Wednesday: Bake bagels in the morning (half cinnamon raisin, half plain). Nourishing chili, corn bread

Thursday: Bratwurst (boiled in beer with sliced onions and then browned in a skillet), pea salad (peas, homemade mayo, onions, cheddar, salt, pepper)

Friday: Roasted squash, spinach and ricotta lasagna (I’ll be using this recipe from LeCreuset) with grass fed beef summer sausage slices on the side

Saturday: Canned seafood (herring, sardines, oysters) and leftovers (I’m thinking some of that squash lasagna with oysters sounds pretty good!)

Breakfasts & lunches: Leftovers, eggs, egg drop soup, raw milk, homemade yogurt, pâté, dried, fresh, or canned fruit, raw carrot salad, canned seafood (herring, sardines, oysters), grass fed beef summer sausage, wheat porridge or oatmeal (prepped night before and cooked in the morning), sourdough bagels.

Food sourcing notes:

I’ve been waiting for this week with great anticipation; I’m getting my first Pastured-Kitchen CSA meat box from Taste of The Wind Farm! This month, I will be receiving 2 lbs ground beef, 1 lb ground lamb, a package of beef brats, a sirloin tip roast, and a cured beef snack item (I’ve been buying my summer sausages from TOTW for nearly a year now; it’s absolutely phenomenal). If you are a fellow TOTW CSA member, welcome! I hope seeing these meals gives you some inspiration on how your box of magnificent meats can be put to use. If you’re not, you can become one here.

In other food sourcing news, we’re going to pull back a little bit on our raw milk consumption. We love our milk with all our hearts, but driving an hour each way every week to pick up milk is more than we want to be doing right now as gas prices creep back up. As such, the plan is to reduce the size of our herd share and pick up biweekly. We’ve been leaning a bit more heavily on cheaper nutrient dense protein sources, like the canned seafood, to make sure we’re still plenty well nourished.

I’m also going to point out the fact that I am STILL going through the pile of squash we bought at the farmer’s market at the end of Summer. Having a pile of squash in my kitchen makes for both fun natural decor and long term food storage. Absolutely would recommend.

Kitchen notes and odds and ends:

Want to know something funny? I completely forgot about my anniversary when I wrote the meal plan last week. We celebrated five years of marriage last Friday, and no… we did not end up having leftovers. Ha!

Given the occasion, I’ve been reflecting a lot on the last five years. I got married at the ripe old age of nineteen. I had been obsessed with nutrition, holistic wellness, and regenerative agriculture for close to five years at that point, so I had a bit of a head start when it comes to making good food. With that said, I have come a long way since then! (And still have a long way to go, mind you.)

One of the first habits I implemented when I became a homemaker was meal planning. I found that by having a plan, I could reduce my trips to the grocery store, save a lot of money, reduce waste, and use my resources efficiently.

Resourcefulness was, and still is, the name of the game. In our first year of marriage, we averaged $20 a week on groceries… I kid you not. With that said, I’ve learned a lot about nutrition since then and would definitely do things a bit differently if I were to start all over. For example, back then, I relied pretty heavily on supplements— so you could say that was a hidden food expense that wasn’t factored into the grocery cost. Even still, we spent very little and leveraged whatever resources we had access to.

Kevin frequently brought home free meats from the job he had at the time.

Even though we lived in a little apartment and were new to the community, we were blessed by a local farm family who offered us a rich garden plot. We grew almost all of our own produce that summer; gardening was our primary source of entertainment. We still have a few cans of pickled produce from that garden— In fact, Monday’s pickled green beans were from there!

We also had an Amish bulk and discount grocery store nearby, where we found great food items for pennies on the dollar.

These days, after having gone to school for holistic nutrition and gained some more life experience, I’m prioritizing our food budget quite a bit more so that we can include raw milk and a lot more protein. Resourcefulness is still the name of the game. I’ve reduced expenses in other areas, like our cell phone bills, to make room for better food. I cultivate relationships with my favorite producers and exchange my help for food whenever I can. I have a super secret local contact who hooks me up with cheap eggs. I still shop at discount grocery stores. I buy in bulk. I share my meal plans here and have written an ebook on homemaking skills, helping my own food budget by lifting other homemakers up and sharing what I’ve learned along the way. My, things really have blossomed and evolved over the last five years… I can only imagine what the next five will bring!

Thanks for hanging out and reading my ramblings this week. If you’re in the mood for scoring some deals and exploring some of my favorite resources, check out this link.

Have a fantastic week!

Lisa