Family Meal Plan #25
Welcome to our family menu!
This is a real reflection of what my family actually eats—some weeks I’ve got recipes to share, sometimes there are photos, and other times it’s just me giving you the rundown of what I made. I hope these menus give you some fresh ideas or inspire you as you’re planning your own meals. Feel free to adapt or follow along however it works for you—because meal planning should make life easier, not harder!
From one busy home cook to another, let’s make dinner a little less stressful together.
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On this menu:
(see below for a few notes about some of the meals)
This one is a little different because this wasn’t just one week - here is a list of some of the things that have been on our dinner table lately, in no particular order:
Pasta blanco (white pasta), creamed spinach, nuggets
Teriyaki tofu
White pasta, nuggets, creamed spinach, and a big salad
Slow cooker butter chicken, with coconut tofu saag
Yellow coconut curry chicken meatballs with udon noodles
Moroccan spiced pork butt with roasted vegetables
Moroccan spiced roasted veggie soup
A bit more detail about some of the meals:
White pasta, creamed spinach, nuggets.
Not every meal is gourmet. Sometimes nuggets from the freezer are where it’s at, paired with some quick and easy pasta and spinach and it’s a balanced meal that everyone loves.
The pasta: I like to call it pasta blanco because it feels fancy, and my Italian family told me that’s what they call pasta served with butter and cream. But let’s be honest, we’re basically talking about buttered noodles here. This version is a staple in my house, I make this at least once a week, often twice. I use my no drain pasta method - butter, 1 pound of pasta, 4 cups of water, a couple pinches of salt, cream. Melt the butter, get the pasta coated, add the water and salt. Simmer, stirring occasionally, until the water is mostly absorbed, then add a bit more butter, a splash of cream, and more salt if needed. It’s quick and easy. I make this for the kids but every time I serve this and adults are around the adults devour even more than the kids. It’s just simple and satisfying and comforting, and goes with basically everything.
With this meal I made a quick and simple creamed spinach. This is just a bag of frozen spinach in a pan with about a tablespoon of butter and a little salt, stir it around until the spinach is getting hot and some of the liquid is cooking off, add a bit more butter, a splash of cream, a dash of nutmeg if you have it, pepper, and a little parmesan cheese if you like.
Teriyaki Tofu bowls
This teriyaki tofu is one of the easiest things I make and maybe one of the most popular in our house. If you think you don’t love tofu, I encourage you to try it this way. Tofu really just takes on the flavor of whatever you cook it in, so cooking it with a really flavorful teriyaki sauce makes it taste amazing. For this meal I literally just slice the tofu, put it in a baking dish, and pour teriyaki sauce over the top, and cook in a hot oven (375-400) for 15 -20 minutes until the sauce is bubbly and the edges of the tofu are getting a bit browned.
You can do this with a favorite bottled teriyaki sauce or make your own. It’s surprisingly easy to make, you can try my favorite recipe here. I usually try to keep a jar of this in my fridge at all times, because it makes for such an easy weeknight dinner. It’s an easy recipe to customize to suit your tastes.
I serve this with steamed rice and a variety of other toppings & sides. This time we had broccoli and edamame (both from the freezer), spring greens, sliced tomato and cucumber, steamed rice, and furikake. Furikake is a Japanese seasoning for rice that my kids love - there are different varieties but our favorite is this one that is a mix of dried seaweed, sesame seeds, a little salt and sugar. It’s a simple way to make a scoop of plain rice a lot more interesting.
Slow cooker butter chicken, and a coconut saag with tofu.
I very loosely followed this recipe for the butter chicken. I used riced califlower so it all cooked into the sauce, and I never bother with unsalted butter for things like this, salted butter is better. I also used pieces of pre-cut frozen chicken breast, I got a bag of them at Costco and it made this really easy. For the saag - which is a greens/spinach dish - I mostly made it up as I went along, but this recipe is pretty close to how I made mine, with frozen spinach and minus the chili paste and sugar. I really liked both of these and will definitely do them again. Maybe next time I’ll take a picture.
Yellow coconut curry chicken meatballs with udon
I’ve been obsessing over the idea of this meal for a few weeks, ever since I saw this recipe. I didn’t really follow that recipe, but I made up my own and I was very happy with it. We all love meatballs here, so it’s fun to try new ways to make them.
This dish will work with essentially any asian style chicken meatball recipe you like, and any coconut curry recipe - just make those two and put them together with some veggies and serve over noodles. For mine I didn’t really follow a recipe, but I made the meatballs with mostly ground chicken and a little ground pork, green onions, mushrooms, ginger, garlic, panko breadcrumbs, and soy sauce. I browned the meatballs first in the oven before adding them to the curry sauce. I made a fairly basic yellow curry sauce with lots of onion, garlic, ginger, turmeric, cumin, coriander and a bit of salt, some chicken broth and coconut milk, and thickened with a little corn starch. I added the cooked meatballs to the curry sauce along with some chopped up bok choy and green onions, and then served it all with cooked udon noodles. It was seriously delicious.
Honestly you could probably do this with frozen meatballs from the store (I just wouldn’t buy an “Italian” style for this) and a packaged curry sauce and I bet it would be almost as good and take you about 5 minutes to throw together.
Moroccan spiced pork butt and roasted veggies.
Pork butt is one of my favorite things to cook when people are craving a big pile of meat. And this was also one that was taking up space in my freezer. I’ve done this one a few times and it never disappoints. I shared a basic recipe here for how I do the meat, and here is the spice rub recipe I use. I cooked the meat on top of a pile of chopped veggies - this time it was cauliflower, sweet potatoes, red and yellow peppers, onions, and garlic. I like to serve this with flatbread, chopped tomatoes and cucumbers, and a few sauces. This time I did a simple tzatziki style cucumber yogurt sauce with preserved lemon, and a roasted carrot lentil hummus.
The hummus was a happy accident. I made a roasted carrot hummus a while back that I loved and I was going for something similar to that. Basically you just take any favorite hummus recipe and swap out some or all of the the garbanzos for roasted carrots and garlic. It’s an amazing flavor. This time I intended to do it with the roasted carrots and garbanzos, but after I got everything else in the food processor I went to the pantry for a can of garbanzos only to find that I didn’t have any! So I used a can of lentils instead. It turned out great actually and I will totally do that again. I doubt anyone could tell the difference.
Moroccan spiced roasted vegetable soup.
Honestly my family doesn’t love the roasted vegetables with the pork as much as I do, so there’s always a lot leftover. For the second time now I have turned all those soft roasted veggies into an amazing soup. This is so easy - literally just dumping all the leftover veggies in a pot, with a lot of the juices from cooking, and enough broth (this time I used homemade chicken broth) to get the consistency right. I heated it all up and pureed with my immersion blender, added a dash more seasoning, and that’s it.
That’s the week!
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Wishing you a delicious and stress-free week ahead!
– Lisa