The Plan:
Day 1: Whole roasted chicken, Lemony brussels sprouts, Roasted potatoes
Day 2: Homemade chicken noodle soup
Day 3: Homemade pizza
Day 4: Stuffed squash
Day 5: Egg roll in a bowl
Day 6: Butternut squash Chili
Day 7: Grain bowls (quinoa, roasted beets, roasted sweet potatoes, walnuts, dried cranberries, mustard balsamic vinaigrette), Homemade applesauce
This meal plan was curated using local foods that are in season now or preserved during the peak growing season in the U.S. Midwest. The plan is an exact replica of what our family is eating this week unless we are out of town. Meal plans are developed using whole foods and my meal planning system (click here!) and are meant to be healthy and easy to prepare. Most recipes will take no more than 30 minutes of active cooking time. Occasionally meals may require all day slow cooking, advanced prep, or some oven time. Recipes are provided when available. I sincerely hope this will help with your own meal planning!
Pantry Shuffle:
Out of Storage: (preserved when in season and coming out of my root cellar, freezer, canned, or dehydrated stash)
- Ground pork, whole chicken from Mastodon Valley Farm meat share
- Brussels sprouts
- Onions
- Carrots
- Green cabbage
- Celeriac root
- Potatoes
- Acorn squash
- Butternut squash
- Fennel (the last that I have)
- Garlic
- Diced tomatoes (frozen supply)
- Beets
- Sweet potatoes
Into Storage:
- Homemade chicken broth (I freeze in quart sized portions in reusable zip top bags, but you could also use wide mouth Mason jars making sure to only fill to the freeze line)
Notes: Cold & Flu Season
No doubt you have illnesses traveling through your family, just like mine. With recent large gatherings and holiday stress, it is pretty much inevitable this time of year. We’ve had the sniffles and coughs for the past 2 weeks. It is time to bust out the my magical homemade broth.
Making your own broth from scratch ensures that you will extract all the wonderful vitamins, minerals, and collagen from the bones and vegetables, without all the yucky added ingredients that you find in grocery store products. While chicken noodle soup may not cure your sickness, it can help keep you hydrated, sooth a sore throat/congestion, and provide you with nutrition that can support your immune system (protein, vitamins, and carnosine which studies have shown may reduce inflammation that causes your symptoms)
The secret to getting the best broth is simple. Time. The longer you simmer your broth the more concentrated it will be. And this makes for a wonderful base for soup reminiscent of your grandmother’s (or maybe great grandmother’s) healing concoctions.
I make my homemade broth from whatever bones I can get my hands on. Typically that means I make bone broth after holiday meals (turkey). But, I will also make it after roasting a whole chicken, like I plan to do this week.
You may have noticed from my meal plans that I don’t eat a lot of chicken. This is completely opposite from the average American that eats over 99 pounds of chicken per year (2022), according to the National Chicken Council! This is up from 28 pounds per person per year in 1960. Not a surprise then that chicken is the number one meat consumed in the US.
There are a number of reasons why I am bucking this trend. First, I don’t consider most chicken farming to be humane (factory farms are the reason our consumption has more than tripled in the past 60 years). Second, chicken is quite expensive, especially if you are looking for organic or free range chicken. Third, most store bought chicken is placed in Styrofoam trays and wrapped in plastic wrap, and I think you all know at this point that I am not a fan of plastic, especially when it is in close contact with my food!
We rarely buy chicken at the grocery store anymore. I don’t feel comfortable eating chicken from sources that I don’t know. So instead, I purchase whole chickens from the small, local farm that provides us with our meat share. That way I know exactly how the animal was raised and what it was fed.
Leading back to the homemade broth…I have a deep respect for the animals that we eat. When I make a whole chicken, we consume as much as possible and then I make my broth so that no part goes to waste. This is historically how people since have co-existed with other animals. It is only recently that things have gone awry.
You can get a brief overview of how I make my broth in my Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup recipe. There is also a quick version if you don’t have any bones, but you won’t get the same nutrition. Hopefully in the next couple of months I will finally post my detailed recipe for homemade bone broth. In the meantime, feel free to shoot me a message if you have any questions.
Hope you all stay healthy this cold and flu season!
