a week of meals no. 66
meal plan for the first week of Feb. 2025
Welcome to mama eats, a twice-weekly newsletter (Tues. & Sat.) inspired by a simple + seasonal home life. I’m a mother of three, avid reader, gardener, and home cook who focuses on nourishing, whole food meals with a focus on plants. This newsletter is my labor of love, and it means so much that you are here. If you are not already, and are able to do so, please consider becoming a subscriber to support my work here. This gives you access to all the archives and recipes (find the recipe index here), as well as cook-along videos which go along with most recipes.
Good morning lovely readers, and happy weekend. I hope you have the luxury of having a slow and cozy Saturday morning. It’s been a doozy of a week. Here, it’s a rainy dark morning, but I’ve got a few loaves of bread baking off in the oven, and it’s warming the kitchen nicely. Bread baking is the most delightful smell, isn’t it! When it comes out of the oven, I plan to run out to the farmer’s market, to restock us on vegetables and fruits, and then come home and clean the fridge out before the new produce goes in. After that, the usual Saturday chores.
I’m glad for the rain, we’ve been dry most of this winter- it’s been great for taking walks, though. This week, my walks were especially pleasurable, as there are some early blossoms that are barely unfurling around our neighborhood. Tulip magnolias, almond trees, flowering pear trees: they are all beginning to stretch out and bare themselves to the winter sun. Truly a delight of the senses and a joy bringer to remind us that spring is coming, and with it, a return of the light!
This week I’ve been reading Elena Ferrante’s Troubling Love (which I perhaps wouldn’t recommend? The storyline is bizarre but the writing is superb as usual) and Natalia Ginzburg’s essays from the collection entitled, A Place to Live (absolutely wonderful). It’s nice to have a few different types of books going at the same time so that I can match my mood. Mostly I swap between fiction and essays/poems/nonfiction. I’m more of a daytime nonfiction reader and a nighttime fiction, I have a hard time reading nonfiction at night- it makes my brain too active. Are you like this too? Or do you like to stick with one book at a time? What are you reading?
Here are a few winter-y themed picture books James I I have been enjoying, from the library:
This week, the meal plan includes lots of quinoa- I have been going through my pantry and trying to use up things that have been around a while, to clear them out without wasting. I’ve got a surplus of brown rice flour, too, and barley- any ideas? Besides plenty of quinoa dishes this week, there’s also a few good soups and salads, lots of chickpeas and tofu, plus pizza and chocolate and cookies to round it out.
Periodically I get messages asking if my kids all eat these dinners, and the answer is yes. We all eat the same thing. I particularly choose things that I know all of us will like, and if there’s something I know to be iffy with one of the kids (things with mushrooms, squash, caramelized onions, chiles) then I make sure it’s easy to eat around, or a side dish that they get served a tiny amount of, even if it’s something they’ve previously rejected. The rule in our house is that you have to taste it each time before you can say you don’t like it, and it’s served us well over the years- all three of my kids are largely well-rounded eaters. Even my middle child, who is more picky than any of us, has really come around to a lot of things he previously rejected, largely through repeated exposure, I think. I wrote a lot more about family dinner here, if you’d like to read it:
I wonder what you’ll be making and serving at the dinner table this week? Dinner can feel relentless sometimes, can’t it? It happens everyday, without fail. Often times I’m happy to make dinner, and find it a pleasurable wind down activity at the end of the day—and the meal plan helps me a lot with not feeling frantic about what’s for dinner— but sometimes I get into a slump of feeling beat down by the constant cycle of cooking, eating, dishwashing, planning, shopping… with three children I am always amazed by how quickly food goes in our house. I loved this piece my friend shared with me, from The Atlantic, entitled, “You’ll Never Get Off The Dinner Treadmill”, haha.
Without further ado, here are the recipes for the week.