Meal Planning Tips & Favorite Recipes

It's been another successful year of cooking at home. We posted a blog about meal planning last year, detailing how we organize meals in our Google Calendar and log ingredients on our shopping Wunderlist.

The newest tool we are using is Asana, which, among many other things, allows us to organize recipes for quick reference. It allows us to pull up a recipe without worrying about broken links for websites that have since been taken down! It's rare that we use a recipe as-is more than once and it was becoming tough to keep our changes straight, so it also allows us to alter the recipes as we go, without printing anything out or writing it by hand.

Our Meal Planning Asana project is setup as a board, rather than a list, which organizes the recipes into sections as individual “tasks,” or recipes, in this case. We currently have five sections for recipes, from main courses to proteins and baked goods.

When adding recipes to Asana, I copy the recipe from its source, record its location, then pare it down for two. This is also when I add the grouped ingredient list to Wunderlist and clean up both for readability and share-ability, because I like to share good recipes with anyone who might enjoy them.

With that in mind, below are a couple of our favorites for you to try, one a longtime staple and one new. Happy feasting!

OUR FAVORITE VEGETARIAN RECIPES

Roasted Red Pepper & Tomato Soup

Recipe adapted from Budget Bytes

Total cost: $5.41 recipe / $1.35 serving
Prep time: 10 minutes
Cook time: 15 minutes
Servings: 2 (1.5 cups each)

INGREDIENTS

• 1 Tbsp butter $0.22
• ½ yellow onion $0.40
• 2 cloves garlic $0.24
• 1 Tbsp all-purpose flour $0.02
• 1 - 15 oz can crushed tomatoes $1.38
• ½ - 12 oz jar roasted red peppers $2.49
• 1 cups vegetable broth* $0.26
• ⅛ tsp dried basil $0.03
• 1 pinch dried thyme $0.02
• 5-8 cranks of pepper $0.05

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Dice the onion and mince the garlic. Add the onion, garlic, and butter to a large soup pot. Sauté over a medium flame until the onions are soft and transparent (about 5 minutes).
2. Add the flour to the pot and continue to stir and cook for 1-2 minutes. The flour will form a paste with the butter and onions and begin to coat the bottom of the pot. As soon as the flour that is stuck to the pot begins to turn slightly golden, remove it from the heat.
3. Add the crushed tomatoes (with juices), roasted red peppers (without juices), and vegetable broth to the flour paste in the soup pot. Blend with an immersion blender until smooth.
4. Add the basil, thyme, and some freshly cracked pepper to the soup and stir to combine. Heat and stir over a medium flame until the soup begins to simmer. Use the spoon to help dissolve any flour stuck to the bottom of the pot as you stir.
5. Once the soup begins to simmer, turn off the heat. Add the milk, if using, and stir to combine. Taste and add salt if needed (this will depend on the salt content of your broth).
6. Serve with quesadillas, grilled cheese, or chicken & asparagus on the side.

* We use Better Than Bouillon soup base for our broth.

Southwestern Skillet Sweet Potato Breakfast Hash

Recipe adapted from No. 2 Pencil

Prep time: 10 minutes
Cook time: 25 minutes
Servings: 3

INGREDIENTS

• 2 tablespoons of olive oil
• ½ small onion, diced
• 1 small green bell pepper, diced
• 1 sweet potato, peeled and diced
• 1 - 15 oz can of low-sodium black beans, drained and rinsed 
• Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper
• ½ teaspoon of garlic powder
• ½ teaspoon of smoke paprika
• ½ teaspoon of chili powder
• ½ teaspoon of cumin
• 3 eggs
• Lime juice
• ½ avocado, diced

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Preheat oven to 400°F. 
2. Add olive oil to skillet and sauté onion and bell pepper with a pinch of salt and a few turns of freshly ground pepper. 
3. Cook over medium heat until they start to soften. 
4. Increase heat to medium high and add sweet potatoes to skillet. 
5. Drizzle sweet potatoes with additional olive oil, just enough to lightly coat, and season with one teaspoon of kosher salt, freshly ground pepper to taste, garlic powder, smoked paprika, chili powder and cumin. 
6. Cook sweet potatoes, stirring occasionally, until crispy on the outside and tender on the inside, about fifteen minutes.
7. Once potatoes are ready, stir in drained and rinsed black beans.
8. Then make wells in hash for three eggs.
9. Crack an egg in each well and bake in oven, just until eggs are set. Start checking for doneness after five minutes. 
10. Spritz with lime juice, sprinkle with avocado, then serve.

* Non-vegetarian variation: add leftover cooked meat when you add in the beans.