Hi. It’s February- mid February. I never know how it happens, this whole time sprinting forward thing, but here we are. Again. Racing into the future.
I hope you are in the midst of a wonderful winter and that maybe just maybe you enjoyed a trip away from the gray/snow/slush/freeze/thaw mess that is Southern Wisconsin right now. (Unless of course you live somewhere with better weather. And then my dears, I hope you are enjoying that!).
We escaped the Wisconsin cold a couple weeks ago, and it lit up my whole year. Kyle and I hadn’t been on an airplane together since pre-pandemic times and it felt soooooooo good to get back out there as a family adventuring in that way. More to come on the trip because yes, I do have several delicious recommendations. I never would have imagined Northeastern Florida could be so beautiful and so very tasty.
But what I really want to talk about today is not that. I want to talk with you about what we’ve been eating lately, how I feel about food as a mom/busy freelancer with a very full/wonderful life that only sometimes has time to get excited about cooking, and then also very briefly chatter on about my garden a bit because even though yes, I know spring is still over a month away (and it’s currently snowing), I can feel that subtle energizing shift in the air I so love in mid-February.
Okay, so first, feelings about food. To put it succinctly, I went through a pretty massive cooking slump from mid-November until about the time we got back from vacation in early February.
November was rife with new work opportunities (I’ve started doing some grant writing for farms, food businesses, and amazing non-profits working in the food system and my friends, it is FUN!), a very restless toddler who had no interest or patience for time in the kitchen with mom, and some really hard family things. December was a cascade of different sicknesses in our household, waning energy levels, and some holiday fun/joy tucked into the spare moments of energy we did have. January was truly lovely but fairly packed with social plans alongside a lot of time spent making arrangements for a last minute family trip somewhere warm.
Generally, life was hard but beautiful, creativity was low, and cooking was not a priority. Recipe testing was even less a priority because I could barely come up with ideas for what our family should eat each day let alone come up with new brilliant ideas about what other people should be eating.
Somewhere in the middle of that very long period of not feeling inspired to meal plan or grocery shop (or really be prepared for mealtime in anyway), I stumbled onto a hack that really worked for us in times of lackluster creativity.
It’s called: stop being wildly creative and just eat the same dang things you love for dinner again and again in slightly different ways until you feel inspired to make something else.
Oh, and also have all the things you need for these meals on hand most of the time so you don’t have to worry about going to the store when you don’t want to. 🤯
Repetition. A formulaic approach. Choosing an easy path instead of a hard one. Friends, it may sound silly, but to me this felt friggen REVOLUTIONARY.
The 10 meals we relied on pretty much all winter (and are still largely relying on) utilized a small amount of local bounty we had on hand (things like storage roots from our fall CSA boxes) plus some odds and ends from the freezer (like the 50+ pounds of salmon we got from our friends up in Alaska, the corn my mom froze for me because she’s a goddess, and a minimal amount of things I was ambitious enough to freeze myself- that list is short), easily accessible local ingredients I love (mainly Vitruvian mushrooms by the pound), and microgreens Kyle grows for us in the basement.
Here are the specifics in case you’re in need of your own inspiration - pretty much every meal takes 30 minutes or less, except for the salmon bowls which is fine by me because it preps enough food for us to enjoy dinner and for me to enjoy a nourishing, healthy rice bowl pretty much all week.
Salmon rice bowls with roasted sweet potatoes (some of ours from the 2021 farming season are somehow still good LOL), many, many storage radishes, and all the scallions, cilantro and avocado I can keep in the house (plus sometimes also kimchi, pickled onions, microgreens, and always a sriracha mayo drizzle on top)
Noodle dishes (ramen, udon, vermicelli, soba, whatever) with local cabbage and lots of mushrooms (and/or ground pork or beef based on the day) plus a sticky, sweet umami-rich sauce (that’s not totally divergent from the sauce in this recipe, but sometimes is totally different) with lots of black sesame seeds, Kingfisher Farms chili oil, and sometimes also a fried egg
Roasted mushroom tacos, revised from Ottolenghi’s Flavor cookbook, with a ton of roasted onions and peppers from our freezer added plus a handful of other make-it-easier changes
Curried carrot soup (or the exact same soup, essentially, made with butternut squash)
Bon Appetit’s Pasta Alla Vodka with all of that pizza sauce I made post-partum when Lilly was tiny and I wanted to feel productive/useful, but didn’t know how to leave the house which reminds me that I found a hack for making insane quantities of pizza sauce/tomato paste from tomato seconds and need to tell you about that too
Burgers, sheet-pan fajitas with ground beef, sheet-pan loaded nachos with ground beef, or cabbage patch soup with ground beef (did I mention my mother gifted us 30+ pounds of ground beef for Christmas)
Not nearly enough roast chicken, but sometimes, very occasionally, roast chicken
There have also been a lot of smoothies, a lot of charcuterie boards/snacks/car lunches (giant kudos to Driftless Provisions for always keeping our fridge stocked), and a pretty intense/non-stop/amazing bagel & lox phase in January.
It’s been delicious, simple, and given me the space to find inspiration again. I even checked out two cookbooks from the library- and actually started reading them (aka not just looking at the pictures like I usually do). It’s been fun to read about other people’s approaches to food and get excited about food in a new way. I’m still sticking to my formula for the most part but getting really excited to let a few new meals and ideas start slipping in, and even get excited about cooking/creating for the fam instead of the “when will it be done and cleaned up” dread I really felt late last year.
Last night we made a variation on this one pot Healing Curry Butternut Squash Lentil Soup that reminds me very much of something I loved from our honeymoon. And I made a granola bar recipe from the new Molly Yeh cookbook that tastes just like cookie dough but is 90% made from healthy, nourishing things (which I’m hoping will help me get a curb on my sweet tooth which has been a bit out of control since Christmas).
So that’s our food life. And now, real quickly, let’s talk SPRING for just a second because I have been dreaming and imagining and getting insanely excited for year two of my life as a gardener. Last year was a great, last-minute, half-assed attempt at having a garden that yielded enough to preserve 20 jars of salsa, eat a lot of eggplant and cabbage (which my CSA didn’t really provide), and even freeze some jalapenos and poblanos.
This year, we have bigger goals (mainly having way more produce going into jars, freezers, and our basement) and a lot more strategy involved.
Kyle built us five raised beds in the backyard so all the plants that demand consistent harvests (and/or that we love to pick and enjoy daily) can be grown right here at our home. There will easily be enough space for herbs, edible flowers, scallions, kale, chard, snap peas, beans, a jalapeno plant or two, and a couple cherry tomato plants. I haven’t started mapping things out yet but there’s many other things I hope will fit in there (fennel, leeks, early radishes and other roots, a cucumber plant or two, maybe a zucchini plant too if it doesn’t demand too much space). I’m sure this planning will be followed up with a negotiation period between Kyle and I about what deserves space and what doesn’t (to which he will very likely be right).
Other vegetables that are more tolerant of being visited once a week, take up too much space for our raised beds, and/or have more of a one and done kind of harvest situation will live in a small plot at the farm. Things like plum tomatoes for canning, onions for curing and storing, potatoes for winter, sweet corn, cabbage, and winter squash (and maybe, just maybe some watermelon!). This plot will have drip irrigation and landscape fabric so we don’t have to drive 30 minutes round-trip just to check on things. (Thank you Kyle!). We’ll also be starting everything from seed ourselves this year which is something I have deeply missed in our year away from the farm.
I truly can’t wait for our little family to grow our own food again, in a small, low-key, low pressure kind of way. And we can’t wait to continue last year’s garden explorations with Lilly. She loved it a lot more than I expected a one year old to and it will be even more fun with so much available to harvest right here at home.
Anyway, that’s all for now. Many more recipes, stories, and gardening/spring excitement to come.
Much love, as always,
Lauren