Five on Friday--the Fall Food Edition
It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Nope, not time for Christmas carols yet, but it’s time for FOOTBALL, pumpkin spice flavor, and if I lived somewhere besides Florida it would be almost time for leggings, jeans and boots. Alas, I have to pretend it’s fall here by cooking favorite fall dishes and putting autumn scented oils in my diffuser. Then around Thanksgiving we can wear the jeans, boots and leggings, and that will be fabulous indeed. If you couldn’t tell, I adore all things fall and it’s the thing I miss most from my years in Seattle—fall was GLORIOUS there! But even though the weather doesn’t match the season on the calendar here, I still think there is something fun about changing things up with the seasons. We spend more time watching TV on weekends in the fall as we faithfully cheer on the Clemson Tigers and the Jacksonville Jaguars. We begin decorating for the fall holidays (although I refuse to talk about Halloween until the calendar says October) and I change up our meals to feel more like it’s cooler outside. Even if it’s not ;) Today’s post isn’t so much in the format of 5 things, but I wanted to share a couple things about food. If this is not your jam at all, check back next week for a recap of the summer books I went through—I’ve read some great ones lately I’m excited to share with y’all! But for today, I have some stuff about freezer cooking for you because that’s something I get a lot of questions about from friends every time I mention it, and I have our fall dinner rotation to share in case you need some ideas of fun meals to add to your dinner queue. Plus encouragement to simplify life by making a seasonal dinner queue in the first place! Warning, this edition may make you hungry :)
A Fall Meal Rotation
If you’ve followed me here for awhile you know by now that I like trying to simplify things as much as possible so I have time to do the things I truly love like plowing through novels, hanging with my family, and being freed up to jump in and help someone when they need it. Which is why I have so many routines and systems in place—Emily Ley always says when talking about a simplified life that if the stuff of life (the meals, the laundry, the tidying of a home or the grocery shopping) is on auto pilot, you never find yourself completely burried in the mundane tasks, you’re on top of them throughout the week and are therefore freed up to be with people, say yes to spontaneous things or find time to relax. If you have an awesome system for tackling laundry throughout the week, you don’t have to spend your whole weekend folding clothes, you can say yes to a last minute dinner at the beach with friends.
One of the ways I like to simplify life is to have a meal rotation we use for a season. Since food preferences tend to change (at least for me!) as the seasons change, I’ll make a rotation of meals that we’ll use for 3-4 months on repeat. I shared my summer meal rotation back in June, but now that school is back in session I am ready to change it up and bring out more cooler weather foods. And maybe eventually our actual weather will catch up to what I’m cooking :) Some meals stay in our rotation all year long. We will always eat spaghetti, tacos, fish tacos and things everyone loves. But some meals like chili and cornbread, well that’s not a meal I make in mid-July but it’s absolutely a meal I’ll make September through December! It may sound like a ridiculous amount of work to come up with several weeks worth of meals to build a dinner rotation, but honestly, once I spend about an hour and put it together, I don’t have to think about menu planning for months, I just repeat my rotation. Because I love food and variety I make a 6 week rotation of meals for the fall months, but you could simply do 2 weeks of your family’s favorite meals and repeat those, there’s no shame in that and I’ve done that many times in more stressful seasons of life. I’ll share my fall rotation here, and if you click on a link it will take you to the recipe in case you want to try any of these. This system may not work for your personality at all! And that’s fine! But if meal planning weekly is hard for you, maybe try this for a month and see if it does simplify things—make a list of 10 meals and repeat those for a few weeks and see if it feels easier to not have to answer the question every day of “what am I going to cook?”
Here’s our 6 week rotation that I’ll just have on repeat over here for several months. I plan 6 meals a week because we eat a lot of leftovers for lunches, but if your family eats out more or whatever then it’s perfectly fine to plan only 4-5 meals a week. We try and only eat out once a week as a family to help our budget out & that’s usually after church on Sundays so that’s why I plan so many dinners for us. (an * next to a recipe denotes that it’s a meal that’s freezer-friendly and I probably already have it in my freezer ready to pull out and serve—see below for a bit on how I’ve been using freezer cooking to bring sanity to busy afternoons, but if you want to dabble in freezing a few meals these are all meals we’ve personally frozen, cooked and served and liked them enough to want to make them again!)
Week 1:
2. Grilled burgers*
4. Taco Soup*
5. Honey Lime Chicken Enchiladas*
6. Hawaiian Bowls * (I just cut up the chicken, freeze it in the marinade and then it’s ready to cook, I don’t free this whole meal)
Week 2:
3. Homemade tomato soup w/ grilled cheese*
6. Taco Salad* (I’ll freeze taco meat and so this is sort of a freezer meal)
Week 3:
1. Spaghetti & Meatballs*
2. Fish Tacos
4. Black Bean Soup w/ quesadillas* (the soup freezes well, I don’t freeze the quesadillas)
Week 4:
5. Pumpkin Seed Encrusted Tilapia* (this is SO good you guys, my kids inhale this one!)
Week 5:
5. Asian ground beef & quinoa or rice bowls
6. Sweet Potato quesadillas (In full disclousure my husband hates this meal, but I’ll make him something else that night—Aidan and I LOVE these! It calls for butternut squash but I love sweet potatoes more so we roast one of those and use it instead of the squash).
Week 6:
1. Parmesan Chicken Tenders*
2. Tortellini & Sausage soup* (if you freeze this one don’t add the tortellini, cook until that step and freeze your portions. When you re-heat it then add the tortellini to cook)
3. Tacos
How Freezer Cooking Has Changed My Life
I’ve shared a bit in the past on social media about freezer cooking and how incredibly helpful it’s been in different seasons. When I was pregnant with Asher 5 years ago is when I dove in seriously to learning (and lots of trial and error) about how to prepare meals ahead of time to serve later. When we were expecting Asher and Aidan was 2 is when we bought a chest freezer to put in our laundry room and I started intentionally stocking it for when the baby arrived and the meals from church friends stopped being delivered. Words cannot describe how helpful that was, to watch the grandparents all depart and the meals stop arriving and knowing I didn’t need to stress about how to feed us the rest of that winter, we had several months of meals stockpiled ready to go. Beginning about 2 months before Asher arrived I designated two of Aidan’s naps per week to freezer cooking. I would choose 2-4 recipes a week and simply double each of them. We’d eat one or two of them that week but the rest would all go in the freezer to be used after baby arrived. Doing this for about 8 weeks that was a lot of meals that went into our freezer! Were all the recipes winners? Nope, but I started learning what worked well and what didn’t, what re-heated well and what wasn’t the best. I started asking friends who I know did a lot of freezer cooking what their tried and true recipes were and started using those. I began reading more blogs and websites about freezer cooking (not everything is awesome in the freezer, trust us!). And over the years I’ve found some sources I totally trust that really haven’t led me wrong. In busy seasons to be able to have dinner mostly made, ready to throw in the oven or on a grill I just can’t even tell you how helpful it’s been. We try so hard not to eat out more than once a week and also to avoid the drive thrus if we can, and it’s so much easier to do when I know we have a meal ready to go in the oven as soon as we get home (well it’s at least harder to justify going out when we have something ready to go at home!).
The way I usually approach it now is I’ll pick a weekend a couple times a year and do a huge cooking weekend. I’ll choose around 18 recipes and some of them will even get doubled—it’s a LOT. I’ll do a big shopping trip to Costco for all the meat I’ll need and the regular grocery store for all the random canned goods/produce I’ll need to put together all those meals. It takes a whole day just to come up with a list of meals I want to make and the grocery list, another day to do the shopping, and then about two days to do the actual cooking. I love doing it this way because even though it’s a huge amount of work and very time consuming I can put close to 50 separate dinners in my freezer. Those will last us a long time. I am such a project person, I want things completed, so I’ll enlist my husband to keep the boys occupied for a whole Saturday (this past time I sent them to the movies and then they were all busy washing cars and doing yardwork while I was cooking) and I’ll just knock it out. I don’t recommend this method of freezer cooking for most people ;). I’ve done cooking days with friends where we’ll work together to make a ton of meals and then each go home with a cooler full of meals. This is super fun if you have someone who has done it before and knows how to organize a day of meal prep. But honestly if stocking your freezer is something you’d be remotely interested in trying, it is absolutely doable in little doses. The easiest way to start is simply to pick one meal a week and double it, eating one and then popping one into your freezer that night. If you do this once or twice a week you will slowly build up a stockpile of meals.
The other super simple way to build up a little stockpile of meals to help you out on a busy evening is to begin freezing parts of meals. I do this a lot and it’s an easy way to give your future self a gift :). I will freeze jars of marinara sauce if I make a batch in the crock pot one day—that means I’ll still have to brown the meat and cook noodles on spaghetti night but the sauce is made. Or if I have extra ground beef for some reason I’ll brown it and season it with taco seasoning and freeze that—taco meat, ready to simply heat and serve. If I have chicken or pork tenderloin because they were on sale somewhere I’ll mix up a marinade we like to use and pop those in it in the freezer—it’s not a whole meal but it’s the meat and marinade frozen and ready to thaw and cook.
It’s totally not for everyone, but if you’re struggling getting dinner on the table because that’s the witching hour for your baby or kid’s homework or sports are taking over your afternoons, it might be worth trying a couple of the recipes above and seeing if having something ready made is helpful for your family. The biggest challenge is sometimes remembering to pull out a meal the night before to let it thaw in the fridge overnight! But I’ve just added that to my evening routine of dish washing and lunch packing and so far I haven’t forgotten yet. As we head into the cooler weather, things like soups freeze fantastically so if you make a big pot one Sunday evening try portioning it out and freezing for another day, it’s the perfect time of year to try it out! Happy cooking and freezing things my friends!
