a week of meals no. 78
meal plan for the last week of April 2025
Welcome to mamaeats, 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.
Dear friends, we find ourselves at Saturday again and at the tail end of April. Happy week-end! I wonder how your week has gone, was it busy or slow, did it feel eternal, or have the spring flowers been making you feel like you are walking on sunshine? For me, it’s been a long week but a good one. School was off on Friday, so it made our weekend feel extra spacious, which is always nice. The roses in the garden continue to exhilarate my senses every day, truly—as more and more of them open up, the garden is absolutely full of color and scent and fluffy pom poms of blooms. It is so luxurious to be able to cut large bouquets to fill the house, to give away, however many I like. I have also been admiring the irises, although we have none growing in our own yard. They are all over our neighborhood, the greenbelt, and in my grandmother’s yard. One house, in particular, has large dark purple bearded irises all in a row underneath large ruffly dark bright coral coloured roses. The combination is incredible! I pass by it daily on my walks and bikes and no matter how many times I see it, I still slow down to stare. Do irises make good cut flowers, I wonder? I know Van Gogh painted them in a vase, so maybe.
In the garden this week…I made my tulip bulb order— yes, you must order now, when the bulbs have just finished here, for the next season! (When I mentioned this to my grandmother, she said, ‘I guess that’s why I never plant tulips’ - lol). I usually plant tulips in pastel shades of pink, apricot, cream, and white—but this year, for a change, I chose a mix of brighter colors, inspired by one of James’ books, Spring, by Gerda Muller:
In reading news… I am still slowly making my way through May Sarton’s book of journals of her seventieth year, At Seventy. What a delight to read a chronicle of her simple, meaningful days and her musings on aging and what makes a good life. Everytime I read, I find myself nodding along in agreement or wanting to write down a sentence or two. I particularly loved the wording of this sentence, which she writes after having a visitor stay a few days:
The constant remaking of domestic chaos into the order that keeps a house alive and peaceful takes a lot of doing.
So true, isn’t it! I also continue on with my reading of the Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist. This week, Karen Jennings’ Crooked Seeds. I devoured it in one day and am still processing what I think of it. The writing is stark and gorgeous, and pulled me into the story immediately, from the first sentence. It’s not an easy or comfortable read; culpability, and the legacy and trauma of apartheid in South Africa contributes to the storyline. The main character, Deidre, is selfish and manipulative, bitterly resentful. She continually exhausts both the reader and the other characters in the book. Yet, the story is incredibly engaging and hard to look away from, and the message of reckoning with the past instead of covering over it is greatly important.
The meal plan has got lots of good things this week- a delicious spaghetti, tacos, peanut noodles (a warm weather favorite here!), soup, and buckwheat chocolate cookies. I hope you find something here that entices you. Here are a few recently enjoyed foods: