Day 1: Egg scramble w/ peppers and carrots, Chocolate PB banana smoothie
Day 2: Avocado toast, Pepper strips, Fruit salad
Day 3: Tuna Salad, Carrot and celery sticks w/ ranch dressing
Day 4: Homemade pizza, Tossed salad w/ pepper, carrots, and olives
Day 5: Chicken chili verde, Cornbread
Day 6: Ham & Bean soup (from frozen supply), Muffins (from frozen supply)
Day 7: Baked potato bar w/ steamed broccoli (sour cream, cheese, salsa toppings)
Notes: I’ll be out of town this week so I went into super easy food prep mode for my family. You’ll notice I didn’t provide any new recipes. Sorry about that, I’ll try to go back and add the chili recipe when I get a chance. Most of the meals don’t need a recipe, though since, again, these are really easy meals to pull together. Scrambled eggs w/ veggies; mashed avocado on toast; canned tuna with mayonnaise, frozen soup and muffins from my freezer supply. You get the idea.
Green tips: I live in Wisconsin. Most of the time I love it, but every year when February and March rolls around I have the winter blues. Not only are the temps still cold and there are still a few feet of snow on the ground (yes, feet), but February to April is also a food desert here. While there are a few greenhouses in the area, it is nearly impossible to find fresh fruits or vegetables grown locally this time of year so I end up buying produce from California and Mexico. Eating locally is economical and environmental since there are less costs and carbon spent storing and shipping food. And it really is great to support your local farmer and know where your food comes from. Although I can’t eat local this time of year, it gives me the perfect opportunity to do some planning. Here are some things I am doing to prepare for the growing season so that next year we can keep eating locally all through the winter. It takes a little bit of investment up front, but well worth it in the end!
- Signed up for a 20 week food share at a local farm (community supported agriculture = CSA). To find a local CSA near year you check out www.localharvest.org. Now is the time to sign up. I’m thinking of doing a winter CSA this year too, which goes November-December.
- Garden planning to supplement my CSA share. We eat a lot of vegetables and the CSA doesn’t supply a lot of herbs.
- Mark the calendar for berry picking. We go through a ton of frozen strawberries and blueberries through the winter and they are sold in multi-layer plastic bags consisting of different number plastics and therefore cannot be recycled. I’m planning to make time for family trips to the berry farm to load up and freeze the extras.
- Find farmer’s markets near by. I need to take stock of what I want to load up on and freeze since we only get a weeks worth of veggies at a time from the CSA and I cannot grow enough storage produce in my little garden. I only have one bag of green beans left and I like to use them in soups so I’ll have to plan on freezing more this year. I also need to freeze more corn cut fresh from the cob as I ran out in December along with making a bunch of my tomato sauce.
- Canning research. I have not been brave enough to try this yet. I usually make refrigerator pickles, but I would like to try canning tomatoes and/or tomato sauce this year. Anyone do this already?
