Menu Planning Monday!

Last week, I talked about how I sometimes plan meals around an International theme.  Another fun way that I mix things up a bit is to plan meals around various cookbooks.  In the vegan, gluten free world, I find that a lot of cookbooks have a certain flavor or style… The recipes in one book might use a lot of nutritional yeast, while the recipes in another use a lot of nuts.  By using a different cookbook each night we get a variety!

Here’s the lineup of this week’s cookbooks:

Sunday – Vegan Vittles by Joanne Stepaniak
Monday – Ten Talents by Rosalie Hurd
Tuesday – Great Vegetarian Cooking Under Pressure by Lorna Sass
Wednesday – The New Moosewood Restaurant Cookbook by Mollie Katzen
Thursday – The Ultimate Uncheese cookbook by Joanne Stepaniak
Friday – On Friday night I’ll use my binder that is full of recipes I’ve collected over the years
Saturday – The Garden of Vegan by Tanya Barnard and Sara Kramer

Menu Plan Monday is the brain-child of Laura at "I'm an Organized Junkie."  Each week she posts her own menu plan and LOTS of other bloggers link their weekly menus to hers.  Click here to check it out!  Most of the menus are not vegan or gluten free but some are so there are plenty of ideas for everyone!

Menu Plan Monday – Efficiency Is Not Always My Strength!

Eating vegan and gluten free can be expensive.  Very, very, expensive.  And we are cheap.  Very, very cheap.  So, one of the places we shop for specialty foods is the Asian Food Market.  We can get all kinds of unusual items for a fraction of what they cost at the health food stores!

 

 

 

Of course, there is no Asian market in our tiny town.  So once in a while, when Papa the Farmer goes into Dallas for a handyman job, he comes home with a variety of foods that appealed to him.  Since he doesn’t usually know that he’ll be stopping at the Asian Market, he doesn’t ever go with a list,  That means we just never know what he’s going to come home with!

Last night he came home with this:

 

The trick is to plan my meals around what he brought home.  If I can do that, I will avoid having to go the grocery store, which involves a full day’s outing and a lot of buckling and unbuckling Little Farmhands in their carseats…

 

Of course, every day we’ll be having salad before our cooked food.  This week, looks like we’ll be eating a lot of bok choy and beansprouts!  Mmmm!

 

This week’s themes will revolve around various countires.  Since we have so much Asian food in the house, we’ll be having Chinese food twice this week!

Sunday – Brazilian

Monday – Chinese

Tuesday – Italian

Wednesday – Mexican

Thursday -  French

Friday – Chinese

Saturday - Leftovers

One of the items I am really excited to try is this:

Spring Roll Wraps made out of Rice flour!  Yay! for gluten free spring rolls!  When we switched to a gluten-free diet, I thought I’d never taste good spring rolls again!

(Too bad the instructions on the package are in Chineese…)

Menu Plan Monday is the brain-child of Laura at "I'm an Organized Junkie."  Each week she posts her own menu plan and LOTS of other bloggers link their weekly menus to hers.  Click here to check it out!  Most of the menus are not vegan or gluten free but some are so there are plenty of ideas for everyone!

Menu Plan Monday – The Vegan, Gluten Free Way!

Last week I wrote this article about menu planning for my friends at EasyLunchBoxes.com, so this week I am joining up with many other bloggers on the web to bring you:



Except here at the Good Old Days Farm, Menu Planning has a twist… It’s all vegan and gluten free!  So if you have the kind of diet restrictions or allergies that make people ask, “What can you eat?” this menu plan just might be for you!

I remember one time when I first got married, Papa the Farmer came home from work to a wonderful spaghetti dinner I had prepared.  (This was long before our Gluten-Free days!)  It was all laid out on the table looking beautiful and I was so excited about it.  He took one look at it and disappointment instantly flashed across his face.

“Don’t you like spaghetti?” I asked.

“Well…” he said very slowly.  I could see he was thinking about exactly how he should approach this conversation so as not to hurt the feelings of his new bride.  “I like spaghetti…. It’s just that we’ve already had spaghetti three times this week….  and it’s only Wednesday.”

Oops. 

I hadn’t noticed.  So these days, I give each day it’s own theme to ensure variety!

Sunday – Vegetable Casserole (Broccoli Casserole with brown rice and Salad with Olive oil and Lemon Dressing)

Monday – Beans (Pinto Beans on Cornbread topped with the usual Taco Condiments)

Tuesday – Soup & Salad (Minestrone Soup, Salad with Tofu Dill dressing)

Wednesday – Patties (Lentil Patties with Celery/Carrot Topping, Rice and Salad with Olive oil and Lemon Dressing)

Thursday – Beans (Italian Bean Casserole with Rice and Salad with French Dressing)

Friday – Chinese (Rice Noodles in a Honey-Ginger-Garlic Stir fry with Salad and Tofu Dill Dressing)

Saturday – We always share our meal on Saturdays with friends, so I only have to make one dish!  This week I’ll make Quinoa with onions and cilantro!

You see?  We vegan, gluten-free people CAN eat well! 

Menu Plan Monday is the brain-child of Laura at "I'm an Organized Junkie."  Each week she posts her own menu plan and LOTS of other bloggers link their weekly menus to hers.  Click here to check it out!  Most of the menus are not vegan or gluten free but some are so there are plenty of ideas for everyone!

Menu Planning Tips!

 Sometimes I live in Survival Mode.  This week has been one of those weeks...

Over the past week and a half or so, North Texas has had some crazy weather!  We've had about 8 inches of snow and record low temperatures!  Here at the Good Old Days Farm we've been splitting wood and struggling with freezing pipes, pipes that spring leaks as they thaw out, a flooded field (from an underground pipe that burst) and finally our washing machine broke.  Our littlest farmhand wears cloth diapers, so we really need our washing machine!  Yay that Papa the Farmer was able to fix it all!  Today, the sun is shining (for now... more bad weather on the way!), things are fixed and I took a little time to go visit my friend Kelly at EasyLunchBoxes.com

Today we're talking about meal planning!  Sometimes I feel so much like that lady in this picture!  Around here, meal planning is a chore!  We are all vegan vegetarian and some of our family members have gluten sensitivities and nut allergies.  It can be a challenge to think up meal ideas that everyone can eat!  Planning my menus in advance has cut way back on the amount of time I spend standing in front of my pantry wondering, "What can we have for dinner tonight?" 

Menu Planning is smart for everyone... not just for mommies that have to deal with food allergies.  Why should busy people plan their meals?  How do you get started?  There are some great links to free menu planning forms and some nutritional hints that you might not have thought about.  So, won't you come visiting with me?



(Note:  Thank you to Kelly Lester from EasyLunchBoxes.com for today's great picture!  And thank you for the opportunity to guest blog on your site!  I always enjoy interacting with your readers!)

EasyLunchBoxes.com – The Lunchbox System of my Dreams!

When you live out in the country and you have multiple children aged 4 and under (which was me one year ago!)… leaving home is hard work!  Just getting everybody up, dressed, fed and in the van is a marathon event!  (Or should be, in my opinion.)  And that’s before we even get out the driveway.  So, grocery shopping takes us all day.  ALL DAY.  ALL STINKING DAY.

Let me digress for a moment.  When Papa the Farmer came home and said, “Let’s open a farm” it occurred to me that tilling the soil, irrigating, weeding, planting, pest control, harvesting, canning, finding customers, etc, etc, etc would be way easier than going grocery shopping with toddlers.  That’s why I agreed to it.
Anyway, back to grocery shopping.  It takes us all day, partly because we live an hour away from the healthy grocery stores and partly because we have to visit the potty anywhere from 15-30 times per outing.  So, we pack a lunch!  (Yes, we are the only family I know who packs a lunch just to go grocery shopping!)  Last year I was looking for “the perfect” lunch box…. I could envision it in my mind:  It would have several Bento-style containers that stack on top of each other and would be neatly contained in an insulated carrying bag.  (It has to be insulated here in Texas!)  Then everyone’s lunch could be pre-packed and it would be easy to just distribute lunches at lunchtime.  But alas, I could find no such lunch box.  I found some great lunch boxes for $50+, but let’s do the math:

$50 x 5 people in our family = more money than I am going to spend on lunchboxes! 
Scrap that idea.  I couldn’t even find something similar to “make do” with, so I ended up settling for some Walmart lunch bags with sandwich boxes that don’t exactly fit and the children can’t even get open with out help.

Then a couple of weeks ago, I found Kelly Lester!  She is the Mom-CEO of easylunchboxes.com!  She must have been reading my mind, because a year ago, when I was wandering around town dreaming up “the perfect” lunch box system, she was busy manufacturing it! 



Exactly what I had imagined!  Check out her website, for lots of yummy lunch ideas!  (This picture says “click”… On her website, you can actually click and it takes you to the gallery… Here I think you’d better click here to go to her gallery.

I immediately ordered 5 sets.  Of everything.  Now Kelly is an actress in California.  I don’t think she would be offended if I said she is a bit of a city girl.  She doesn’t know how much little farmhands can eat! She wrote back and said, “5?!  Are you sure?  Isn’t that a lot?”  Yes, Kelly!  I am sure!  5 Lunchboxes for my hungry little chow-hounds!  We are all so excited waiting for them to arrive!  Kelly is so sweet!  She is sending us lunchboxes and we will be sending her a big box of Good Old Days Farm soap!  I am working on a batch of soap for her now! 

Anyway, Kelly invited me to appear as a guest blogger on her website.  The blog post I wrote for her was about our top-secret recipe for delicious and healthy, allergy-free “fudge"… just in time for the holidays.  Here is the picture from her blog.  Didn’t she do a great job dressing it up?  It’s actually a fuzzy picture from Papa the Farmer’s birthday feast a few weeks ago!



You can read the fudge recipe here on Kelly’s site!