Cooks in the Kitchen: Week 2

Now that I’m back to work full time, I’m hoping to spend even less time in the kitchen, as such this week I’m breaking out the crockpots and hopefully cooking two weeks worth of food. Because of limited time, space, and crockpots, there’s not a whole lot of variety here, but I do have some meals still stashed in the freezer I can swap out. Also, I know I won’t be making any of these recipes within the next month or two which helps to space things out and spice them up. Most of the time I find I don’t mind consistently eating the same thing for a week or so. I tend to cook at least one one-off meal over the weekend and I do add spices or sauces to the dishes during the week if I’m not particularly interested in something. Adding eggs to soup is a particularly easy favorite of mine, also coconut frosting on baked goods. Though as I was saying, I went with one dish a week for each of the two larger meals, lunch and dinner, and stuck with my usual breakfast variations.

For breakfast I’ve picked up sweet potatoes and frozen broccoli as well as a couple dozen eggs (I eat 2 or 3 each morning) as well as a couple of pounds of ground beef to cook in a crockpot along with some mixed Italian peppers and onions.

For snacks I’m making a double batch of pumpkin muffins to freeze as well as sweet potato brownies, both of which are new recipes since I can’t resist trying new things even if I already have a similar recipe.

For lunches I went with two separate meat and vegetable dishes since I was having a hard time finding well balanced one pot meals that weren’t soups. I have nothing against soups, but I prefer something a bit more solid for lunch since it’s easier to transport and less messy and faster to eat. Pork butts are on sale this week, so I went with a roast as well as another chicken and gravy recipe since I’m curious to see how this turns out in a crockpot instead of the oven. Vegetable wise I’m going with a root vegetable stew cutting out a portion of the liquid to make it less stew like, and a dill cauliflower mash, which I know will be amazing both because the preparation is ingenious but also because cauliflower mash is one of my all time favorite things.

For dinners, I wanted something lighter since dinner is my smallest meal of the day while I’m working. This time around I went with two more soup like dishes since warm easy food is always extra nice after a long day. Despite the pumpkin muffins, I picked out a pumpkin curry and a sweet potato soup.

I’m not planning on making any mass alterations to any of the recipes. I am going to leave the white potatoes out of the root vegetable stew, but everything else is amenable as far as I can recall. I’ll make sure to leave a note in my next update as to how it all turns out, so take a look at that if you’re curious.