a week of meals no. 31
meal plan for May 12-18, 2024
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, barring the recipe at the very end for quick pickled vegetables, which is viewable by paid subscribers. 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.
Good morning dear readers, and happy Saturday. Today is lovely and calm weather after several days of high winds this week.
This week, I read How to Love Your Daughter by Hila Blum. I found it a beautiful exploration of mother-daughter relationships, and especially interesting to me, as a mother to a daughter of 15- there is a centering in the novel around the daughter’s teenage years, which are so deftly decribed. The book opens at evening with the mother, Yoella, secretly watching her grown daughter’s family from the street as they move about making dinner inside. We find that the mother and daughter have been estranged for years, despite the daughter being “one of those girls who was endlessly loved by their parents” - the mystery of why is not revealed until near the ending. It is slightly claustrophobic, pyschologically tense, a slow burn. I would recommend it.
I finished most of the book on the beach, alongside a good friend who also was reading (her book was Clear by Carys Davies, which she also would recommend). It was a wonderful start to my week- I left Joel in charge and we were gone the whole day- it hit the reset button on my mind, which I so desperately needed. On the way to the beach, we passed through Point Reyes and stopped at Point Reyes Books, a small independent bookstore that I had passed by many times on trips to the ocean, but had never gone into before. The curation there is perfect, to my mind- so many authors and titles that I have enjoyed or which are on my TBR list, and they have a much more extensive poetry section than I usually see. If you ever pass by, I would recommend stopping in. To the beach, we brought pasta salad (gf pasta, cucumber, tomato, arugula, olives, artichoke hearts, parsley and chickpeas + shallot vinaigrette), hummus and vegetables, flasks of tea and decaf coffee, and biscotti. We saw whales, seals, and thousands of these by-the-wind-sailors (a creature related to jellyfish) washed up on shore. Days like these are the true luxuries of life.
In food news, I have signed up for a CSA box from Terra Firma Farm- somehow I cannot get streamlined on making it to the farmers market every single week, and I have really missed our weekly fresh produce pickup from our favorite Picnic Table Farm (they have taken an indefinite break as they search for their forever land). It has been years since I’ve had a true CSA and I am so excited to both support a local farm, and be surpised every week with what’s in my box. I am thinking to start a series here of things I cook from my box contents. Would you be interested?
In this week’s meal plan, there’s strawberry tart (will share this recipe later this month), raspberry banana bread, a white bean salad packed with spring vegetables, and penne alla vodka. If you have extra strawberries to use up this week, I shared my strawberry lemon jam recipe recently. I made a small batch on Tuesday with leftover u-pick strawberries, and it has been so nice to have a fresh jam to spread on toast or dollop onto yogurt.
In addition, here are some foods I’ve enjoyed this week:
the meal plan
weekend prep: make hummus, soak and cook white beans
Sunday: white bean salad with spring onion vinaigrette + einkorn sourdough
Monday: carrot and white bean soup (pureed- perhaps something like this) with spinach pesto spelt rolls (a dinner bun dough rolled out like a cinnamon roll, with spinach pesto as the filling)
Tuesday: roasted vegetable and chickpea burgers on spelt buns, oven fries
Wednesday: tofu bowls (sauteed soy sesame tofu, a few frozen dumplings, black rice, quick pickled cucumber and carrot- recipe below for paid subscribers- green onions and cilantro to top)
Thursday: penne alla vodka with a fun twist + butter lettuce salad with dill leaves, avocado, sliced radishes, shallot vinaigrette
Friday: pizza night- potato pizza with oregano in lieu of rosemary + kale caesar
Saturday: silken tofu and soba noodle salad with spring vegetables
weekend bake: tarte aux fraises
midweek treat: banana bread with raspberries and coconut- based off this recipe (I have this cookbook, Real Food for Babies and Toddlers by Vanessa Clarkson, which is out of print- but if you can find it secondhand, I highly reccomend it if you are cooking for babies or children. So many good, wholesome, whole foods recipes that are easy and delicious)
weekend breakfast: almond flour waffles with strawberry rhubarb compote
cocktail: negroni sbagliato
Leaving you with a poem + some garden roses xx
What does it mean to be a poet in war time? Hin Joudeh What does it mean to be a poet in war time? It means that you apologize. You apologize excessively to the burned-out trees to the birds without nests to the flattened houses to the long cracks in the road's midsection to the children, pallid in death and before it and to the face of every grieving or murdered mother What does it mean to be safe in a time of war? It means you are ashamed of your smile of your warmth of your clean clothes of your yawning of your cup of coffee of your undisturbed sleep of your beloveds alive of your satiety of accessible water of clean water of your ability to bathe and the coincidence that you are still alive! Oh God I do not wish to be this poet in a time of war!
For paid subscribers, find the quick pickled veg recipe for the tofu bowl below: