Welcome to mama eats, a twice-weekly newsletter inspired by a simple + seasonal home life. This week’s post, a week of meals, is free to all readers. I try to provide as much free content as possible, however, this newsletter is a labor of love and I am a busy mother to three. If you have the means, and find value in what I share, please consider becoming a paid subscriber, which also gives you access to the growing archive of posts older than a month.
Hello friends, welcome the weekend and another “week of meals” newsletter. As I sit down to write to you, the house is so quiet. The children are all sleeping, Joel’s already at work, and I’m enjoying the cool morning air float in. It’s a wonderful, gentle pause after a very full week. We had back to school night for one child, baseball practices start for another child, a night at urgent care for me, and of course many other things in between. Due to my stint at urgent care, we skipped our usual creek day, and my goodness how I felt that! It has been such a boon to incorporate a dedicated time each week for spending unstructured time in nature. It got me really meditating on how much rituals mean to me, those bits of the week that you can count on, little footholds to cling to, especially when things get slippery. The little things are really the big things. The beauty of the morning light streaming through the windows, bathing the fruit bowl in golden light. The same soup you make every autumn, gracing the table and filling little bellies, the candle lit at every meal. Even the folding of the laundry, the Thursday mopping- all of it anchors me to the here and now, the pleasure of being here, alive, in this beautiful world. I wrote a little about our planning and rhythms in our house this week, if you missed it. In it, there’s my master document with the things I like to do to celebrate each month and each week. It’s so easy, especially when life is busy, to let these things fall to the side. We’re all tired, we’re all busy. But a life without these little joys, without these ways you create magic in the ordinary, is incredibly bleak.
Speaking of bleak…I finished Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Talents this week, which is the sequel to Parable of the Sower, which I read and reviewed last week- you can read that here. Sower is dark, but with hope woven through. I found it a challenging read- Talents is so, so much darker than Sower- lots of you reached out to say that it gave you nightmares, kept you up at night, and that you couldn’t get through the whole thing. Sexual, physical and emotional abuse, loss, enslavement, and separation of mothers from children features quite prominently in it. She imagines a very dark future, with a hopeful uptick at the very end, but still…I would say, if you plan to read it, know what you are getting in to. Also, a sidenote, but I just about died when I read “make America great again” as a tagline for a right wing politician running for president in this book…it was published in 1998! Anyways, I’ll be thinking of these two books for quite a while.
Things eaten and enjoyed this week:
In the meal plan this week, we’ve got enchiladas, again- this worked out so well last week to make a double batch on Monday, and then reheat the second batch later in the week when things are busier. There’s also a huge favorite of ours, a quinoa vegetable stew, tacos, pasta, and a few sweets + a bourbon cocktail to round the week out. It’s going to be a delicious one.
the meal plan
Sunday: quinoa vegetable stew (one of our late summer favorites, I’ll attach a screenshot of the recipe page below)
Monday: enchiladas verde (making a double batch for leftovers)
Tuesday: sweet potato tacos, guacamole and chips
Wednesday: leftover enchiladas from Monday
Thursday: roasted red pepper pasta, something like this, with a mixed greens salad with apples and candied walnuts on the side
Friday: pizza night, using Alice Water’s dough recipe from The Art of Simple Food, you can find the recipe online here. Toppings TBD but I’m thinking corn and shisito peppers on one, veg pepperoni and olives on the other.
Saturday: chickpea salad sandwiches and sweet potato oven fries
weekend bake: ginger peach pie
cookie: pistachio amaretti
weekend breakfast: baked french toast with roasted peaches
cocktail: apple butter old fashioned
Thank you so much for reading, it means so much to have you here, truly. I hope you have a lovely rest of the weekend and a good week ahead, and that you are enjoying the seasonal shift. The gentle wind and golden light of September is making me so happy! I’ll be back on Tuesday with a soup recipe. Till then, here is a poem that I loved reading this week. xx A
Octavia Butler was so prescient, her books are terrifyingly accurate! So underrated.
The quinoa veggie stew looks great, will definitely be trying that as the weather gets warmer here in Sydney!