Planning Tools

Welcome back all! I hope you've been eating well these past couple of weeks!

 Before I share some more recipes with you, I thought you might like to see a few of the planning tools I use each week! 

The first part of this whole meal planning process is picking out your meals for the upcoming week. To do  this, I use the 'Weekly Meal Planner' below. This link will take you to my simple google doc format.

Weekly Meal Planner

Next I go through each recipe I've planned to use and I fill in my grocery list:

Grocery List

I've printed these two documents back to back and keep them in a drawer in my kitchen so I always have them when I need them! After I've been to the grocery store, then I hang the page on the my fridge so I know what meals we have in the freezer for the week!

Hope these are helpful-- now on to the recipes!

Week 4

Breakfast: Blueberry Muffins

Lunch:  Cashew Chicken Rotini Salad

I'm using walnuts in this salad instead of cashews!

Dinners:

In honor of the A&M win against Arkansas, our first meal this week is pork chops. In case you missed it, here's the recap:

1. Pork Chops 'n Potatoes

2. Creamy Bacon Ranch Chicken

3. Sloppy Joes 
This is just your old fashioned recipe in the crock pot- nothing fancy here!

With our schedule this week and left over meals from last week, we only needed about 3 more meals- woot woot! I love when that happens!!

Happy Eating!!

Zucchini What??

   So, if you've done any searching on Pinterest lately you'll see it's inundated with zucchini recipes! I found one this week that was really intriguing, zucchini brownies. A veggie in a brownie, what?!? Just the sheer irony of it made me want to try it. Since Saturdays now meaning college football (Gig 'Em), I decided this was the perfect day to experiment with this recipe. And guess what--- they are DELICIOUS!! 

My husband, a professional brownie critic, tried one and loved it. He was quite sure there was no way it could have been made with a vegetable! 

This picture doesn't do it justice but you seriously need to make these for your next football watching party-find the recipe here:zucchini brownies

I'm not a huge frosting fan but this was a perfect match for the consistency and taste of these brownies! I made mine a little thicker by adding a bit more powdered sugar. Also the recipe says you can add between 1-5 tbsp of water if needed, I only needed to add 1.

-OK back to meal planning-

Week 3

I tried to include more recipe links this week! Hope this helps!

Breakfast: Quinoa Breakfast Bars

This is one of my favorite breakfast bars, maybe because it goes perfectly with a cup of coffee! I also love it because it makes a huge batch. This time I split the recipe and put half of it in the freezer so we can eat it next week. 

Lunch: Blueberry Chopped Chicken Salad

I reallllly don't like onions so I didn't put them in this salad. I also chose to  use a Greek Vinaigrette instead of the suggested dressing since I already had some!

Dinners:

I actually only had to prepare 4 dinners this week because we still had freezer meals left over from last week we haven't eaten yet!

1.Zesty Italian Chicken

2. Cheesy Chicken Quesadillas

3.Ham 'n Beans

4. French Dip Sandwiches

This dinner (pictured above) was one of my favorites! It's SuPEr yummy and very filling! 

Thanks for stopping by and happy planning!!

Intro to Me and Meal Planning

Welcome to my first EVER blog post... eeekkk! Just a little excited over here! Let me first introduce myself and the meaning behind this silly blog name! My name is Natalie and I am a kindergarten teacher who loves teaching little humans as well as pretending to be a professional chef. I love trying new recipes and hoard kitchen gadgets. Making my grocery list and going to the store are one of my favorite parts of the weekend- not yours, huh? My weeks are very busy and when I get home I am close to unconscious. If I'm ever going to eat anything except Whataburger, Chikfila or Rosa's then I have plan out each weeks lunches and dinners ahead of time. This blog will explain how I plan out my weekly meals and the system that I've found that works best for me. 

When I was thinking of a blog name, of course the kindergarten teacher in me thought of the song "On Top of Spaghetti" thus formed "The Run Away Meatball". And because I know it's been a while for all of us since we've heard that song you can enjoy a refresher here: 

On Top of Spaghetti

The Method-

So, let's get started! Here's the method to my madness:

Breakfast: Honestly, I normally eat a banana and peanut butter each morning for breakfast but since I'm trying to not carb deprive my skinny-as-a-rail husband, I try to make him something he can easily grab on his way to work. This means that I will usually make some type of muffin, loaf of bread or bar for the whole week.

Lunches: For lunches I choose one thing and make a large batch of it for the whole week. This is very easy to do especially with salads. Since we are currently just a family of two, I will normally plan for my husband to take dinner leftovers for his lunches throughout the week. If you don't normally have left overs from your dinners, then of course you could make an extra large batch of salad for any additional family members lunches.

Dinners:  I need something FAST when it comes to dinners! Otherwise I will take advantage of the Fuzzy's Tacos that is dangerously close to our house-yum!! The best way for me to accomplish this is freezer crock pot meals. Each Saturday I will mix up each crock pot meal and put it in a large freezer bag with instructions on it. At night I pull one from the freezer and put it into the fridge to thaw. Then each morning, I take it out of the fridge and pop it in the crock pot. Then when I get home, Voila dinner is served! Too bad there isn't a magic dinner fairy who will make meals magically appear on the table, sigh.

One thing I highly recommend you have before you start this process is divided lunch containers. You can find these on Amazon. These are the ones I bought: Lunch Containers

They were 10 for $15 and I LOVE them. They are easy to wash, dry super fast and can be microwaved! I will tell you that the one thing I dislike about them is that they don't snap close as quickly as I'd like.

Week 1

Below is the meal plan I used for the first week of school! I've included a few recipe links so you can make your grocery list!

Breakfast: Banana Nut Muffins

Lunch: Southwestern Chopped Salad with carrots and strawberries.

I added grilled chicken to the recipe and substituted the cilantro dressing for Chipotle ranch.

Dinners:

1. Beef Stroganoff

2. Sweet 'n Tangy Meatballs

3. Chicken Teriyaki

4. Sausage 'n Peppers

5. Broccoli Soup

6. Chicken Alfredo

7. Leftovers

If your are interested in some freezer crock pot recipes all you need to do is look on Pinterest for a plethora of ideas. All of the above dinners came from recipes I found there. Here are a few of my favorite sites that I frequently pull recipes from:

New Leaf Wellness

Passion for Savings

Mommy's Fabulous Finds

Week 2

Below is the meal plan I used for the second week of school.

Breakfast: Starbucks Banana Bread

Lunch: 

Spinach Strawberry Salad with a hard boiled egg, carrots and cherry tomatoes.

Dinners:

  1. Vegetable Beef Stew

2. Balsamic and Brown Sugar Pork Chops

3.Hawaiian Chicken

4. Pot Roast

5.Chicken Florentine Crescent Ring

6.Creamy Mexican Chicken Pasta

7. Leftovers

ALL of these recipes can be found on this awesome blog called Lambert's Lately.

She even has a grocery list for you to print out!! WHAT?!? Is anyone else in HEAVEN over this?!?