Five on Friday
Hi friends! We’ve made it to another Friday! I don’t know about your family but we hit this week and felt the exhaustion settle in like a ton of bricks. That first week excitement and adrenaline was replaced this past Monday morning with a “you mean we have to go back??” attitude when the alarm went off. We also got to take our first trip to the pediatrician this school year for strep tests, so you know, that didn’t take long. But we’ve made it to another Friday with some excitement around here too! Read on to find out what’s new in our neck of the woods!
**One**
Our 6th grader had the opportunity to try out for his first real team sport this week (the middle school flag football team) and he made it! He is so excited and we are so proud of him, he is one of only 3 or 4 6th graders they took, so it was a huge accomplishment for him! We approached sports in our family a little differently than I know a lot of folks do. When Aidan was 5 and 6 he played soccer and basketball at a little local church sports league, which was adorable and introduced him to the rules and teamwork. What we noticed though is that he was just not at all coordinated nor did he look to have much natural athletic ability. Sure he could run, but his hand eye coordination wasn’t great, he had zero body awareness, and even though the kids were still so young you could absolutely see other kids had much more natural athletic skill than our very enthusiastic kiddo did. When he hit 3rd grade my husband said he really wanted to try something different. Instead of continuing to sign him up for these teams he thought trying karate might be good for Aidan. He figured it would introduce some discipline, respect, self control and physical fitness (and hopefully some coordination!) into his life. So we got some local recommendations and tried it. Over the past 3 years he has absolutely learned physical fitness, respect, and well, we are always working on self control. But what we didn’t count on was the way martial arts increased his athleticism exponentially.
So this is the first time we let him try a team sport again, and even though he’s never played on a football team before (he plays a lot of catch and runs a lot of practice routes with friends from church and his dad but hasn’t ever played with a coach) his physical fitness impressed everyone. They did their fitness testing in PE the other day and he now holds the 6th grade record for sit ups and even the principal mentioned to me he had heard about Aidan’s sit up record! His coordination and stamina are pretty impressive (to spar with another student in karate for 5 minutes straight takes a TON of aerobic energy and he can absolutely hang in there). We will see how football goes, and if he will still be able to test for his black belt in December as planned or if he will need to punt that to the June testing date with this new sport taking up a lot of his time but we are so proud of him and are excited to see how his 3 years of conditioning and coordination building he’s done in martial arts is translating into other areas of athleticism for him.
**Two**
With the above mentioned new football schedule (which we aren’t even sure what that will be yet, but I think it’s most every day), the new youth group schedule we’ll have now that we are in middle school, and my youngest finally starting karate, our afternoons have filled up probably more than I would choose to have them! But the thing that doesn’t change no matter how busy one gets is that every evening the people want dinner at some point and if I don’t actually have something to offer they will eat chips and probably nothing else. A few weeks ago I had the hunch that this fall was going to be busy so I asked myself that Lazy Genius magic question that I referenced last week “what can I do now to make life easier later?” and the answer this time was get my freezer stocked with meals ready to cook, not just frozen packs of meat that aren’t close to dinner status yet.
I’ve written about freezer cooking before, it’s definitely public knowledge that I am a huge proponent of this style of cooking, but I want to acknowledge a couple things. First, it isn’t for everyone. It’s okay if you are thinking “absolutely not!” And secondly, if you’ve never tried this method of cooking (by method I simply mean making extra portions of something now that can be frozen and prepared later) and you are interested in giving it a shot, just know it’s okay to start small! I’ve done this for years, so it’s a little easier for me now than it was when I started. And third, freezer cooking or meal prepping does NOT have to mean making a full meal, even having pieces of a meal prepared and in the freezer can cut the dinner prep time in half. For instance I bought 3 pounds of ground turkey, cooked it all one night and seasoned it all as taco meat. When it cooled I divided it into several ziplock bags and labeled it (a KEY to freezer cooking so you don’t forget what stuff is!) and now we have taco night pretty much ready to go. Or another one I did this time around is I seasoned chicken breasts with just salt and pepper, grilled them, chopped them into tiny pieces and divided them into two different containers for freezing. When I want to make BBQ Chicken Chopped Salads one night all I have to do is open a bag of lettuce, some black beans, corn, shredded cheese etc because the chicken is already cooked. So it’s a piece of a meal but it’s still getting me closer to dinner time than a pack of frozen raw chicken breasts sitting in my deep freeze.
I think we often hear “freezer meals” and think “ew! Mushy, bland, over-cooked pots of stuff.” Perhaps that is how many of us encountered them in our past! But so many amazing women over the years have worked hard to perfect recipes that truly are delicious that can be prepared ahead of time and frozen without loosing their textures and taste, that today it’s far easier to create things you will truly enjoy. This past month I took one week and made 36 meals to put in our garage freezer. Yes, that’s a lot. But I did NOT make 36 separate recipes! If you’re not remotely interested in cooking feel free to skip this but here is how I did that, and a few of the recipes I made (that we’ve made dozens of times and can verify they are delicious!)
First, I have two cookbooks specifically dedicated to freezer cooking that are my main go to resources for recipes. I’ve shared them before but they are both by Polly Connor and Rachel Tiemeyer. Their first one is called From Freezer to Table and their second book is From Freezer to Cooker and both are fabulous. They do a ton of educating in there about what can be frozen best, how to do so and all the tips. Their second book is all recipes that can go from the freezer straight into either a crock pot or instant pot for cooking (they include instructions for both appliances for EVERY recipe). So I sat down in early August and made a list of what recipes I wanted to make this time around. I started with their cookbooks and then added in a couple other recipes I’ve come across over the years that I know freeze well. I went through each recipe and worked on the grocery list to make two of every recipe. Here’s my “secret”—most recipes say they serve between 4 and 6 people. I know this will change as the kids get older and develop more of an appetite, but for us usually one recipe serves us twice. Chuck isn’t a huge meat eater any more, I eat a little but usually prefer sides and salads, Asher really struggles with most dinners for a variety of reasons and Aidan is hit or miss with how much he wants in a given day. So if a recipe calls for three chicken breasts, that’s going to feed us two dinners—we would eat about 1.5 chicken breasts for a meal. I totally know this doesn’t work for every family but if you end up with a lot of leftovers that no one is excited about the next day because it’s “too soon” to eat that again, ask yourself if freezing half of the recipe before baking might give you two meals still but one that can be used later down the road. Doubling a recipe and then splitting it into smaller portions to freeze stretches that meal into more than one especially if you’re adding salads, bread, rice, pasta or a roasted veggie with it (unless you’re feeding teenage boys, in which case I don’t even know how to help you yet but I’ll be there shortly!)
After I made my grocery list, planning on doubling every recipe I was going to make, I placed my Walmart grocery order, got all the groceries put away, and chose a couple recipes to do each day for a few days. Within about 4 days I had all the meals made and in the freezer which is the absolute best gift to give oneself. One night Chuck took the kids out for a couple hours to a movie so I cooked that whole time and got several done, and the others I just did in pieces throughout the week.
To get anyone started who might be remotely interested in trying this out, or if you already do a lot of meal prep but just need some new recipe ideas, here are the things I made this time around.
If you only try one recipe, these Chicken Parmesan Meatballs are absolutely incredible. They are made from ground chicken with various Italian seasoning and then when you form the ball you pop a little mozzarella ball into the middle of each one. Friends, when I tell you biting into these is maybe one of my favorite things I’ve made EVER, I am not exaggerating. To make this for the freezer, I doubled this recipe and formed each meatball. I placed them on a baking sheet on parchment and put the whole baking sheet in the freezer until they were solid. I then divided the raw frozen meatballs into 4 freezer bags which will give us 4 meals of these meatballs. I made the first bag this week, simply putting the frozen meatballs into my crockpot around noon with a jar of marinara. I cooked them on low all day and at dinner only had to cook a box of pasta and make a salad.
I made two bags of Greek chicken. And by “made” I mean I put 1.5 chicken breasts in a ziplock and poured in about a cup and a half of Greek Salad dressing and put them in the freezer. For cooking I just thaw in the fridge overnight and pop it in the crock pot to cook, shredding it when it’s done and serving on top of pita with hummus, veggies, feta and the chicken. See, freezer cooking isn’t always “cooking” :)
Other recipes I made (and we’ve tried ALL of them before so I’m not telling you something is good when we’ve never tried!) were Mississippi Pot Roast, Ham and Gouda Sliders, Tomato Soup (this is a fabulous freezer meal that makes a ton), homemade chicken taquitos, taco meat, cilantro lime chicken nachos, cheddar chive burger patties, beefy quesadilla packets, honey balsamic chicken (frozen raw in the marinade ready to throw on a grill), and the Ultimate Chicken and Bacon Sandwiches (in the cookbook From Freezer to Cooker).
If anyone has any favorite freezer meals they adore feel free to pass along the recipe, I’m always looking for new ones! Here is to getting dinner done easier my friends!
**Three**
My Alexa is one of my favorite partners in the kitchen; I ask her all the time to set timers, convert pints, quarts and other measurements I never understood, and most importantly she plays me music while I cook or tidy up. One night I asked her to play one of my favorite stations, the Ben Rector radio station on Pandora. It is a wonderful mix of great background music for a mellow night at home. This song came on that I hadn’t heard, so I asked her “Alexa, who sings this song?” and she said Peter Bradley Adams. I hadn’t heard of him but asked her to play his music. I can already tell this is going to be the soundtrack of my fall, his music is the perfect mellow folk--pop sound that I adore. Give him a listen next time you need something new and feel free to pass along any other recommendations in that folksy pop singer songwriter genre I might not have found yet!
**Four**
The kids and I still read novels aloud at bedtime, and I hope to do so for as long as we can. So much research shows that even after kids can read themselves it is still so valuable to continue to strengthen their auditory muscles by reading aloud to them. This is totally just anecdotal, but a mom I follow on Facebook mentioned that last spring her high school senior son’s AP Language Arts teacher called her one day and told her that her son had gotten the highest scores he had ever seen on the listening comprehension and memory recall portion of the AP test. (I don’t know how you test for that but apparently it’s a thing!) He had apparently asked the high school kid if he did anything to practice that skill or prepare for the test in some way and the 17 year old kid said “well my mom still reads aloud to all of us every night, we read novels together and my siblings and I listen, and well, I kind of love that time.” The English teacher was blown away that this mom kept reading aloud to her teens at night, years beyond when they could read on their own, and said it clearly had a huge impact on her kid’s ability to listen to something, process it and recall it at a rate his classmates couldn’t.
That story has stayed with me for months now, and has continued to inspire me to not just turn them loose in their beds to read alone at night even though they totally could. I know schedules will change and it will become more difficult, but I want my boys to be able to say the same thing when they graduate, that mom still put novels in front of them every night in the form of read aloud time. Right now we are reading The Cricket in Times Square, a book I never read as a kid, but one we are all enjoying. I track the novels we’ve read aloud together, starting in 2020 when we really started reading chapter books together and this year we will hit 50 novels read aloud. I’m proud of that honestly. There are so many things I don’t do as a mom, we all have strengths and weaknesses. But I’m proud that in the last 4 years we’ve read 50 books together—everything from the Ramona series to the Narnia books, classics by Kate DiCamillo and the Harry Potter books. So many memories have been made as we’ve laughed together, teared up together (looking at you Christmas Pig!), and my favorites are when something shocks them enough that they both audibly gasp aloud (when Reepicheep reappears in The Last Battle is the moment that comes to mind, man what a moment!). So here’s to continuing to turn pages, cuddling up around a novel, and creating those memories as we cheer on our favorite literary characters.
**Five**
And lastly for your day today, if anyone needs an absolutely amazing breakfast recipe, The Lazy Genius’ granola recipe is the best I’ve ever had. I’ve mentioned The Lazy Genius a few times, if you aren’t familiar with her, Kendra Adachi has an amazing podcast and two books now helping people be “a genius about the things that matter [to them!] and lazy about the things that don’t.” Her granola recipe is a staple around here for Chuck and I, Chuck eats it daily. I try and make a batch each week which lasts us about a week if we’re both snacking on it and it’s the easiest thing ever. So if you need a delicious new recipe to try, check this one out here!
