It’s nice to have a few meal options in the freezer for busy days or … new baby coming! When Hannah was born, several friends brought us meals, and I really appreciated not having to think about what was for dinner each night. This time, I tried to plan ahead and have a stash of meals in the freezer. Brett has a lot of good skills, but in the kitchen … :/

I doubled several dinners and froze the extra, but I also wanted to try an exclusive freezer cooking day (before Violet’s arrival). I found four recipes with several overlapping ingredients for efficiency.

– Sweet and sour chicken
– BBQ veggies and chicken
– Scalloped potatoes and ham
– Chicken verde soup

The first three recipes are prepared with raw ingredients then frozen. To prepare, you put the bag in the fridge the night before to thaw a bit then dump it in the slow cooker for 6-8 hours (with my favorite slow cooker liners of course). The soup is fully cooked and just needs to be thawed/reheated.

Here are the ingredients, ready for prep:

I did the potatoes and ham first because it was the easiest and didn’t have any “fresh” ingredients. Then I chopped all the veggies and made the sauces.

After assembling the veggies and sauces in the proper bags, I cut up 4 lbs of chicken breast and divided it between the recipes. Then everything was off to the freezer. From start the freezer, the prep and assemblage took me around three hours. Not too bad! Here are the finished, frozen meals.

That’s eight meals – four servings each so counting leftovers that’s really sixteen meals for us. I’m excited to taste the new recipes I tried. As much as I love cooking, I’m enjoying the extra rest time from not planning or preparing meals for a couple weeks.

We get our CSA veggie boxes every other week, but I haven’t been keeping up with the regular updates. So here are some iPhone pics of some yummy things I’ve been making lately with our local bounty.

Grilling night – I marinaded a pork tenderloin in some barbecue sauce we got from a local guy at the farmer’s market, and we put extra sauce over the top. I put purple peppers, onions and purple potatoes in a foil wrap for the grill. We ran out of grilltop space, so I roasted the mixed squash in the oven. CSA ingredients: peppers, onions, potatoes, squash. I think the purple potatoes are especially fun.

This was simple and tasty – pasta salad with whole wheat rotini, heirloom tomatoes, cheese and pesto. I also finally got something to work out with the bread machine I’m experimenting with, so the edible bread was a big victory. CSA ingredients: tomatoes, basil.

Pickled okra – No picture for this. I feel like there are only so many things you can do with okra. Like beets, they seem to have limited possibilities, so several weeks of them tend to stretch my creativity. But I adapted this recipe to what I had on hand with tasty results. CSA ingredients: okra, hot peppers.

Greek pitas – We love gyros, and I found an easy homemade substitute. I just season ground beef with cumin, garlic and oregano for a similar flavor. We put it in a pita with tomatoes, cucumbers and onions and added feta. On the side, I made hummus with kalamata olives to go with pita chips, and I sauteed green beans. CSA ingredients: tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, green beans.

Greek nachos – To use up some of the leftovers from the pitas, I made up “nachos” for a fun appetizer for another meal. I laid out pita chips and covered them with feta and kalamata olives. After they were slightly baked, I topped them with some pickled banana peppers. Yum! Hannah really liked these. CSA ingredient: banana peppers.

Salsa – I don’t have a picture for this either, but one week we had huge portion of tomatoes. This was a little difficult initially because Brett does not like tomatoes. Then my friend Meghan suggested salsa – duh! I can’t believe I missed the obvious with my fridge full of tomatoes, peppers and onions. I made a huge batch, and after we’d eaten it fresh for several meals, I cooked the rest and bagged it for the freezer. This was my first attempt at freezing homemade salsa, so I hope it turns out well.

Chicken tacos with verde salsa – I made my favorite shredded chicken in the slow cooker. For the roasted verde salsa, I borrowed this recipe from Tyler Florence. Hannah is literally inches away from me for most of my kitchen adventures, and I give her as many projects as possible. I found that husking tomatillos is an awesome job for a 2-year-old. It was very easy but gave her quite a sense of accomplishment. We assembled the tacos on corn tortillas with sour cream, chicken, cheese and verde salsa. This is one of Brett’s new favorites. CSA ingredients: tomatillos, onions.

We have a neighbor who has a small “farm” in his backyard and also manages a larger farm outside of town. They were experiencing a plethora of figs, so this generous neighbor came over with a basket. This was a totally new ingredient for me! And, I’m not gonna lie, my only experience eating figs so far in my life was Fig Newtons which probably doesn’t really count. With the help of Google, I found a website called Israeli Kitchen with a recipe for Fresh Fig Cobbler. I made a half batch, and it was gone quickly. It would probably be amazing with ice cream, but we didn’t have any on hand.

So there are a few of the recipes and meals I’ve been making with some of our local ingredients. One of the biggest fans of “veggie day” in our house is Hannah. She goes with me to pick up the box and can’t wait to see what we get each time. I told her today is another veggie pick-up day and asked her what she thought might be in the box. She answered excitedly, “Squash and peppers and squash and purple peppers and red peppers and spicy peppers…”

What have you made lately with your local produce?

Why we eat what we eat – Part of the benefit of buying more locally grown food is that we are enjoying produce in season. It tastes better, and it’s more natural. Tomatoes in March were picked thousands of miles away, before they were ripe. A true conversation between some of my friends illustrated how out-of-touch we have become to the natural seasons of food.

Friend 1: I bought strawberries at the store yesterday but they were all hard and sour. My daughter wouldn’t even eat them. I don’t know what was wrong with them. I think I’m going to complain to the store.

Friend 2: They were bad because it’s March. It’s not strawberry season.

Friend 1: Season? What?

We are fortunate in Texas to have long growing seasons. Even in January, the tables at our farmer’s markets are filled with cauliflowers, spinach, mustard greens, brussels sprouts, lettuce, kale, turnips, herbs and cabbage.

I still get our fruit at the grocery store; bananas will never be local or seasonal in Texas unfortunately, but again this isn’t about some sort of food legalism. It’s just about making choices and small changes to improve our quality of food.

Eating seasonally not only tastes better – it’s good for the budget! Many items can be found for half the price when in season. This isn’t a new concept – check out this article featuring my very own grandmother in 1948.

I wish my grocery bill was $7 a week. Anyway, my grandma (and probably many of your grandmas, too) grew up in a farming community where seasonal eating was a normal way of life, not a news-worthy phenomenon.

Some of the local, seasonal foods we’re eating this week: melons, cucumbers, peaches, squash and tomatoes. And yesterday, our neighbor brought us some figs from their backyard (and some of their extra eggs, woohoo!) – now that’s local! What’s local and seasonal in your area?

In the last year, we’ve made more of an attempt to “eat locally.” We have always enjoyed eating at local restaurants, but we wanted to take that a step further and eat food that was grown in the area. We found out that many of our favorite restaurants get their produce from the same farmers we buy from at the farmer’s market.

While most of our food money still goes to HEB and Costco, we are trying to put more back into the local economy.

Along with the farmer’s market, we signed up to get CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) boxes. With a weekly or bi-weekly subscription, local farms will fill a box with freshly picked produce to be picked up. Part of the fun is that you don’t know what you’ll be getting – just that it will be seasonal and local. If you’ve been following along, I’ve chronicled the contents and end products of several boxes. A great menu-planning adventure to me!

Some benefits of buying local:

• A typical carrot has to travel 1,838 miles to reach your dinner table. (source) Or I can buy one at the farmer’s market that traveled less than 50. The ones from our CSA travel 15 miles. That’s a lot of transportation resources saved.
• Farmer’s markets enable farmers to keep 80-90 cents on the dollar spent by the consumer. (source)
• The nutritional value of produce declines with time after it is picked. Therefore, spinach from the farmer’s market (or CSA) that was picked yesterday actually has more nutrients than spinach at the store that was picked a week ago. (source)
• Local food has more variety – purple cauliflower, mustard greens, heirloom tomatoes, and types of apples I haven’t heard of.
• It’s fun! We love to stroll through the tents and talk to people that grow food and make food and love food! This is a great opportunity for Hannah to learn about different types of food and feel more of a connection to what we eat.

This week: carrots, kale, fennel, potatoes, green tomatoes, basil, summer squash, mint, onions, cucumbers and beets. Ugh, this fennel is killing me. I hope fennel season is over soon. Anyway, the rest I was excited about.

Simple supper first: roasted summer squash with whole grain pasta and lemon basil pesto.

Seriously good.

The green tomatoes were a new one for me, and all I knew to do with them was the classic fried green tomatoes. So I found a simple recipe and gave it a shot.

This was grilling night, and Brett did hot dogs and our CSA potatoes (white and purple!). We also tried some “alcohol-removed” wine. Not a winner.

Another meal this week was a steak and mushroom stir-fry with a ginger soy sauce. Just used onions from our CSA box, but I had to take this picture of Hannah helping me cook. She helped me wipe off the mushrooms, then I set her up with this little cutting board and a plastic knife. It wasn’t sharp enough to actually cut anything, but she loved this!

The beets – I roasted them the last two times so I wanted to do something different this week. I roasted them whole, pureed them, and did a beet risotto. I’m finding risotto is like stir-fry or quesadillas – you can throw anything random in it.

It definitely wins the colorful award for the week. I topped it with some baked kale chips (a whole-family favorite). There were some leftovers which I served with some roasted chicken the next night. Really good together.

This week we got beets, carrots, fennel, kohlrabi, onions, basil, kale, chard and a salad mix. Two of these were completely new to me: fennel and kohlrabi. I’ve heard fennel tastes like licorice, and I’m not a licorice fan, so I was not optimistic. And kohlrabi? What the heck?

Luckily, our CSA provider posts a lot of recipes for the weekly ingredients, and I found one for Roasted Root Veggies that used the beets, carrots, fennel, kohlrabi and onions. I modified it slightly and ended up burning the beets. Oooops. Anyway, the finished product was pretty tasty (once you took all the beets out).

Someone snuck her finger in the picture, silly girl. I’m not sure how I feel about kohlrabi. It’s rather bland-tasting, but some of the pieces had a very woody texture that was inedible. I’m not sure if we got a weird one or if some are just like that. The fennel was not as bad as I expected; with the other vegetables it added some good flavor. Hannah just picked out the carrots and declared they were tasty.

The chard went into a Crustless Chard Quiche (sans bacon). I served it with the salad mix. This was probably Brett’s favorite of the week, and I’ll definitely be making it again! Hannah ate a few bites.

Also on the menu this week was a creamy basil-tomato soup (made-up recipe). Neither Brett nor I really like tomato soup, but we liked this!

Immersion blender = love! I used the basil in this obviously and also snuck in some kale for a nutrition boost. Hannah liked this, too.

Some CSA onions and carrots went into this Crockpot Coconut Chicken Curry. I followed the advise of another blogger and only used half the chicken and subbed potatoes and carrots to up the veggie factor – more economical and actually more authentic. I didn’t get a picture of this, but it was really tasty. The adventures continue!

Yeast scares me. It intimidates me with its bubbling and kneading and rising. So far, I have only tackled a couple yeast recipes – pizza crust and an easy focaccia. Recently, I wanted something to add to a pasta dinner and decided to be brave and try a French bread recipe that my mom made a lot, from the More-with-Less cookbook.

I’m not writing this as a bread tutorial, just to share some pictures of Hannah and I tackling the project together. She was a very willing helper and wanted to carry around her piece of dough for the whole day.

Kneading

Rolling

Silly face

Sorry I didn’t get any of the finished product, but it was good! The recipe makes a lot, so I got several meals out of it. We ate it in nice warm slices, then I made garlic toast, then I made french toast, then I made French bread pizza. Quite a bit of work and time (in my opinion), but lots of payoff!

I took Brett to his first Vietnamese restaurant in 2003, and he was hooked. Our favorite menu item is “bun” which is a noodle bowl, nothing involving a bun. This seems fairly straightforward – some kind of grilled meat or tofu on rice noodles, but the magic is in the sauce. Sweet, tangy, spicy.

A few years ago, I was able to track down a good recipe from an unexpected source. Emeril Lagasse – BAM – apparently makes a lot of Vietnamese food. So I’ve been making his sauce for years with a couple alterations. This link is to his sauce on the Food Network, here’s my version:

Nuoc Cham Sauce

• 2 small garlic cloves, minced
• 1 tsp. crushed red pepper
• 2 Tbs. sugar
• 2 Tbs. fresh lime juice
• 1/4 c. rice vinegar (or whatever you have on hand)
• 1/4 c. fish sauce
• 1/4 c. water
• 1/4 c. shredded carrot

Combine all ingredients in a glass container and mix until sugar is dissolved.

The noodle bowls are good with meat, but I usually just do tofu because it’s a great blank canvas for the yumminess of the sauce. I get vermicelli noodles from the Asian foods section (also where you can find the fish sauce).

I topped the cooked noodles with some stir-fried tofu, cilantro and green onions, and plenty of the magic sauce. For Hannah, I just mixed some noodles with shredded carrots and topped with tofu. She ate half the tofu and liked playing with the noodles, then we gave her the leftover cheeseburger from lunch.

This is fun to do for a “homemade take-out” night or just something to mix up the menu plan.  And it was a great, light dinner after stuffing myself with a double cheeseburger and french fries for lunch.