Place Marks - Gathering Around a Table: Meal Prep for a Week of Work

I have always been a meal planner, starting when we had the dairy and the closest grocery store was 20 minutes away. My planning has gone through phases: much less organized when the boys were busy with sports and school activities - lots more quick meals: soups and casseroles, and batches and batches of cookies for team meals and rowdy friend get-togethers.

Now it's just Spencer and me to cook for. However, Joseph eats with us regularly, and we have had volunteer workers to feed. And, I'm taking after Melba - chasing down the UPS driver to make sure she has cookies, delivering snacks to the guys loading at the quarry where I haul road base, and making sure the neighbors and kids who live in our RV sites feel loved.

So here's what my current plan for a week looks like:

Meal Planner and Grocery List

I transferred from a paper planner to Google Sheets years ago, but if I get an IPAD, I'll transfer again - striving to keep up with Lanie Alaniz Villarreal's organization.

I only shop once a week, and I rarely go to the store in between. If I don't have something I need, I improvise or wait until next week to make it. I list the items in the order they are arranged at the Belton HEB - my favorite local HEB so far. I had to change up the order from the Rockport and Flour Bluff HEB stores, both of which I also loved and visited weekly. Spencer thinks it's absolutely insane that I enter on the Pharmacy side when I am shopping for groceries, but that is the way my list is organized. He shakes his head every time he goes with me - not often!

When I was working, I shopped and meal prepped every Saturday. But now, I have my choice of days. This week it was Friday. And I planned enough to go through next Friday, ith some extra, because you never know who will stop by, or when I might need to run some food somewhere.

Below are some of this week's recipes.

Breakfast

Bacon & Cheese Bagel

I just cook the bacon, add a little butter, and put them together. The guys open them up, lay them in the air fryer for 2 minutes and they're toasty good. I make six of these at a time.

Egg Bites with Spinach

My muffin pan is in storage, so I made these in a loaf and sliced them up. Eggs, milk, cheese, spinach, seasonings. Warm them in the air fryer. Delicious. These two loaf pans made 8 generous servings. I ate mine with a fruit smoothie about midmorning.

Breakfast Tacos

Leftover beans, refried, with tomatoes, onions, and cheese on HEB butter tortilla. Nothing easier. And they work for breakfast or a quick lunch or snack. In the air fryer, they get a little crispy!

Lunch

Broccoli Salad, Sandwiches, Fruit

Last week I made salads for every day's lunch. And while it was definitely healthy, we were often starving by dinner, so I opted for sandwiches and fruit this week with enough of one salad to last several days. For sandwiches, I bought HEB homemade bread, added Black Forest Ham and Roasted Turkey Breast from the HEB deli, spinach or lettuce, pickles and cheese. Then, I cut up watermelon and cantaloupe, washed red and green grapes, and bought fresh peaches from the Belton Farmer's Market. On a Thursday - because I'm retired and can go in the middle of the day! Our salad this week is below.

I learned to make broccoli salad when we planted our very first garden, and we grew so much broccoli that I did everything I could with it. I usually add bacon and cheese, but I already used so much of those in breakfasts that I tried to minimize the fried meat and cheese for this week's lunches. I also have tried all kinds of dressings, but my favorite, and the one I used this week is this Honey Mustard Dressing from my Pinterest Recipe page. I didn't have Dijon, so I substituted some horseradish mustard. And Joseph has a quart jar of honey that someone gave him years ago. I opened it to use for the sweetener. It worked.

Dinner

The one dinner I made on prep day is super easy and goes a long way. I never really follow a recipe: Bell peppers stuffed with whatever I have leftover in the fridge. This week, it was a pound of hamburger with some leftover stir fry veggies and cauliflower rice. Because of the stir fry, I also added some soy sauce to the filling.

Notice the onions in the picture on the left. I have ALWAYS used a LOT of onions when I cook. But when my kids were little, they absolutely FREAKED if they thought they spotted an onion in anything, so I ground them very fine in the food processor and stored them frozen, just to keep my sanity.

Now, they love onions - so I barely chop them, because I like big chunks of veggies.

Something else that makes stuffed bell peppers easier is to cut them in half and roast them for about 20 minutes before stuffing them. I have tried making the whole pepper fancy and pretty like the ones I see pictured in recipes, but the whole pepper doesn't stuff nearly as well as these halved ones.

They turned out fine and we have enough left for a hot lunch if we don't want sandwiches one day. If they are not gone by mid-week, I will freeze them in two-piece packages and take them out for a quick dinner or lunch - or to take to a single neighbor - one day down the road.

Dessert

Last week Spencer and I made homemade ice cream for the first time in years. I found a recipe with no eggs, but I will not make it again. The eggs make the ice cream stay creamy. So, I'll try another batch soon and post my grandmother's peppermint ice cream recipe (raw eggs included) with pictures.

This week, I had about 10 of those tiny apples left over and they weren't moving fast, so I wanted to make a turnover-type dessert we could hold in our hands to take after dinner on our evening walk to check on the deer.

I didn't even look for a recipe, but I will try to follow one next time. I cooked the apples with the peel, brown sugar, butter and water until the apples were tender. The filling was SUPER. But I tried stuffing it into crescent rolls. They were too small or I was too tired of meal prepping, so they don't look great, but Spencer ate three and pronounced them delicious. You can't always judge a dessert by how pretty it looks.

That's all the prepping I did in one day. It took most of the day, but the rest of the week will be a breeze. Good thing, since my schedule includes hauling around 15 loads of road base from the quarry. More about that little chore to come.

Keep following the blog to find more Place Marks. And if you have a great recipe, I would love to have you contribute as a guest blogger. If you enjoy reading and looking at pictures, share with your friends.

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