The Plan:
Day 1: Blue potato and leek soup
Day 2: Easy gluten free meatballs with pasta sauce, Tossed salad
Day 3: Homemade pizza
Day 4: Grilled brats with sauerkraut, Roasted beets with garlic thyme dressing, Roasted delicata squash
Day 5: Grilled ginger-sesame chicken chopped salad
Day 6: Green pepper, mushroom, and onion quiche, Slow cooker applesauce
Day 7: Stir fry with totsoi, scrambled eggs, and rice
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)
- Brats, ground beef, and ground pork from Mastodon Valley Farm meat share
Into Storage:
- Extra pie crust (freeze in aluminum pie pan and place in a gallon zip top bag) This is great for pumpkin or apple pie this fall
- Pumpkin puree (freeze in quart sized zip top bags)
- Apples (store in extra fridge in a plastic bag with holes to target 90% humidity while still allowing ethylene gas to vent)
- Super greens powder (dehydrating my leftover chard and kale and then I grind it up and put it in an airtight jar to use throughout the winter in smoothies and to sneak into other foods)
Notes: 2022 Garden Review
We had our first killing frost last week and I spent some times cleaning out the gardens. Each year I like to reflect on what worked well and what didn’t this growing season. I write it down in my garden journal and then I can look back next spring and learn from my mistakes and successes. Here is my review this year:
New: 2 gardens, one tilled right into the ground and one a raised bed. A snip and drip irrigation addition.
Missteps: overwatered. I set my bluetooth Raincloud hose timer to water twice daily for short periods of time. We definitely had some dry spells, but this was waaay too much water and I didn’t realize it until I got my water bill! Luckily nothing perished. Next year I will dial it back. I ordered the dirt for the new raised bed garden too late because we kept waffling on how we were going to do it because the price was so high. It ended up that we weren’t able to plant in that garden until mid-June which was much too late for tomatoes and bell peppers to get well established and produce mature fruit to harvest before the frost.
What grew well: peas, carrots, kale, green beans, strawberries (still getting some!), pie pumpkins, butternut squash, popcorn, sunflowers, cherry tomatoes, thyme, mint, cilantro, chard
What did okay: cauliflower (very small), Roma tomatoes (got them planted too late and most of them didn’t ripen; I have a bunch of green tomatoes on my counter), basil, raspberries (they are slowly coming back after 3 terrible seasons following the flood in 2018)
What did not grow well: Broccoli (only one survived after planting in the garden; bought some seedlings at the store). Carving pumpkins (either an animal got the sprouts or it just died). Bell peppers (also got them into the new garden way to late and not enough time to get any to harvest). Brussels sprouts (my seedlings were small and I got them out late; 3 of them died and the one that grew is really small and no sprouts to be seen). Rosemary (I just can’t seem to get these seeds to work)
How did your garden grow this year? Time to start planning for 2023!!
CSA Breakdown:
For those of you also using Crossroads Community Farm, here is a breakdown of how I will use each piece of produce this week. See the first CSA post from this season for details of how I structure the plans.
1 Chinese Cabbage (1.0 head): chicken salad
1 Potato, Blue (inside and out) (1.0 bag – 3 lb): potato soup, leftovers will go into root cellar for storage
1 Bok Choi (1.0 count): I’m saving this to make a salad when we get sweet potatoes. If you want to use it this week, put it in the stir fry with the totsoi
2 Onion, Yellow (1.0 count): quiche, stir fry
1 Tatsoi (1.0 head): stir fry
2 Delicata Squash (1.0 count): roasted and served with brats
3 Beet (1.0 count): peeled and diced then roasted to serve with brats
1 Lettuce Head, Red Leaf (1.0 head): tossed salad to go with meatballs
1 Garlic, small (1.0 count): potato soup, roasted beets, stir fry
2 Pepper, Green Bell (1.0 count): quiche
1 Leeks (1.0 count): potato leek soup
