#196: What We Ate This Week, How I Prepped, & What I Spent, Part VIII

Fall settles in as we map a full week of family dinners, pack smarter school lunches, and share the exact grocery spend that made it work. From soup and meatloaf to salmon and chili, we show how one plan and a few batch tricks stretch flavor, time, and budget.

• soup Sundays with tomato soup and sourdough grilled cheese
• meatloaf Monday with buttery mashed potatoes and a green
• quick Asian Tuesday chicken with coconut milk over rice
• hot sheet-pan salmon, rosemary mushroom cream, and leftovers strategy
• chili Friday and an easy family rotisserie Saturday
• three dozen hard-boiled eggs for snacks and gym mornings
• DIY lemon ginger shots to replace store-bought wellness shots
• Bento lunch system to pack eight lunches in two sessions
• nut-free lunch ideas and cleaner snack swaps for kids
• full grocery tally at $210 and $61 dining out
• small wins and mishaps, from missing milk to better ketchup

We’ll post the chicken with coconut milk recipe in the show notes.

www.daraboxer.com

Transcript

Welcome And Fall Meal Plan

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Raw on the Cooked, a weekly podcast that provides simple routines around the home plus raw and honest book reviews. My name is Dara. I'm a Midwestern stay-at-home mom to four young kids, and I thrive on simplicity. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode. Today I am going to do another installment of what we ate, what I spent, and how I prepped for my family of six. Today is actually our eighth installment of this episode. I love it so much. And the weather has finally turned. We are officially in fall. It is perfect fall weather, so I feel like I'm all about a fall menu. We are doing soup night Sundays, we are doing meatloaf Mondays, we are just going hard with the fall because I mean why not, right? So here we are. Um, and I used to in the past for these installments record what we ate for lunches and dinners. I think this time I'm really just gonna tell you what we did for dinner, just because lunches are usually a leftover schmorgis board. Um, for my two older kids who are in kindergarten and first grade, I have to provide them with a packed lunch. So I kind of wanted to tell you about how that's going and just some tips and tricks for that. And my goal as always is for you to walk away with some encouragement and inspiration for your meal planning and your prepping, your shopping, what have you. Um, because you know, eating and shopping and cleaning and cooking and all of that, I mean, that is just one of those loop tasks that will never end, right? Like every single day we have to eat. Maybe not necessarily three squares a day, but you know, if especially if you have other people in your life that you're cooking for that live in your house, like it is something you do need to think about. So I really hope that these episodes provide some inspiration and just you get to at least leave like with something, right? So, all right, let's dive straight in. So, for that Sunday's lunch, by the way, I'm recording this the week after, so this is like still pretty fresh in my mind, which I feel good about. So, for that Sunday, I will go over what we had for lunch because I feel like it's like a fun thing to do. We actually went to a pumpkin farm so my kids could pick pumpkins. We went to a new to us farm and they had a bunch of food trucks. So after we picked pumpkins and shopped at their market, we ended up eating at their food trucks. Um, we took my cousin, so for three adults and four kids, I believe we spent about$55 on tamales and nachos and fried Oreos and to go coffee from a coffee truck, and it was so good and so delicious. So that was really fun. And then for soup that night, we did a tomato soup, which I think is just really easy to throw together. You just need a yellow onion, you need a 28-ounce can of whole peeled tomatoes, you need a tiny bit of tomato paste, maybe some red pepper flakes, maybe some fresh basil at the end, you need some broth, and then you need a little bit of heavy cream at the end and an immersion blender, and you're golden. And pairing up tomato soup with homemade grilled cheese sandwiches with sourdough that you made yourself is just a chef's kiss. So delicious. I really like to throw in pickles for the kids. I just feel like between homemade tomato soup, homemade grilled cheese sandwiches, and a little side of pickle, you're like at a restaurant and it's just fabulous and so perfect. So that's what we did for lunch, or sorry, for dinner that Sunday night. My daughter seemed to be the only kid that enjoyed the tomato soup, which is a little unfortunate. Maybe someday my kids, my boys will be soup people, but um they they didn't seem to be super into it that night, which was unfortunate. Um, so as I had mentioned, we are doing meatloaf Mondays in the fall, and it is so good. I had a more complicated meatloaf recipe that I have since just like burned and thrown away. I am now doing my mom's meatloaf recipe, which is just amazing. I love it so much. It's so easy, and I wanted to share with you how we do it. Um, so that way I'm sure she doesn't mind me sharing the recipe to the internet, to the entire world. It's really good, it's really easy. And remind me to go on a ketchup rant at the end. Okay, so for our family right now, I can still get away with one pound of ground beef for a meatloaf for one dinner, and it works pretty well. So we are doing one pound of ground beef. It's I usually do 80-20% fat. I just feel like the more fat the better. Um, I guess you could do 90-10 if you really wanted to, but I just think the more fat the better. So you're gonna do a pound of ground beef, you're gonna do one whole egg, you're gonna do a big squirt of ketchup, you're gonna add a little bit of broth, either vegetable or chicken broth or beef broth, whatever broth you have. You're going to add a handful of breadcrumbs, you're going to add salt, pepper, garlic powder, and onion powder. And I don't even just eyeball it, like make it look good. You're gonna squish all that together. My mom actually roasts her meatloaf in a loaf pan. So that is what I do too now. Um, so I line that with parchment paper, I, you know, pat it in there, press it down, uh, and have it in the oven at 400 for about 18 to 22 minutes. Um, before I pop it in the oven though, I just give it like a nice little like ketchup glaze on top, put it in there, and it is like golden. It's so good. And I like to pair that up with mashed potatoes. Um, my mom does like red-skinned baby potatoes, so that's what I've been buying. Um, Trader Joe's sells a three-pound bag. Pretty affordable. Um, so I'll just do the whole three pounds on Monday, and it will yield obviously a lot of mashed potatoes. Um, so I will save that for either earmark it for another dinner so that side dish is already done, or I'll pop it in the freezer and use it the following week or the week after, just like whenever I need mashed potatoes. I am definitely a huge butter and cream person when it comes to my potatoes. Um so I know this is gonna sound insane, and I'm so sorry, but it's so good. So for every pound of potatoes that I boil with the intent to mash, I will use about four tablespoons of butter. So if you're doing the math, for a three-pound bag of potatoes, I am using yes, 12 tablespoons of butter. I'm adding like a big splash of cream at the end. I'm doing a ton of salt and pepper and garlic powder and onion powder to complement the um the meatloaf seasonings and just calling it a day. And it is so good. And I will usually roast alongside asparagus or broccoli or green beans, whatever I have on hand or happen to pick up at Trader Joe's that day. I usually do my shopping on Mondays. So that is what we are doing on Mondays. It is meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and a green on Mondays, and it's just oh, it's so good. I love it so much. Okay, so Tuesday night for dinner. I have been doing Asian nights, so I will rotate between an Asian dish that I can make pretty quickly, pretty easily. Usually they involve a one-pot ordeal. Um, of course, you know, you have to make the rice, but that's so technically two pots, but you get the idea. So I made my signature uh chicken dish with red peppers and red onions. I love it so much. It has um coconut milk, it has uh some a little bit of brown sugar, a little bit of fish sauce, and it just oh, it's really good. It's really good. I'll post that recipe uh in the show notes so you have that. Oh, my ketchup brand. I meant to mention this earlier. So I grew up using Heinz ketchup. I love Heinz ketchup, and then I became an adult and realized that it is just corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup and just terrible ingredients in there. And until they change and get on the Maha train, I cannot buy Heinz ketchup. So Trader Joe's does sell a good organic ketchup that's just like normal, natural ingredients, very low sugar, very little scary ingredients in there. I will say I do like the Heinz bottle, that being it's like upside down and it's easier to squirt, right? Because like I just feel like it's a good bottle. So I have been like a psychopath buying Trader Joe's ketchup and then squirting it into a Heinz ketchup bottle. Uh, because I guess we had bought one over the summer, I don't know. And when that was empty, I started refilling it with Trader Joe's organic ketchup that doesn't have like any terribleness in there for you. So I feel a little bit better about that. So if you ever come to my house and you see a bottle of Heinz ketchup, know that it is actually not Heinz ketchup. So okay, moving on. Um, Wednesday night was salmon night, and for that salmon night, I decided to go with a mushroom rosemary cream sauce, even though I roasted the salmon in the oven, doing like my favorite. I love getting like a baking sheet, putting it in the oven, letting it go to 500 so the sheet pan gets really hot and it kind of like sears your salmon, which like like it so it keeps the fat inside the salmon, so you don't have like that white, nasty fat runoff off the side of your salmon. It's a really good method, it's an awesome method. I originally learned it from America's test kitchen. I will like never go back to putting salmon on a cold sheet pan to then put in a hot oven. So, anyway, um I paired that up with rice that I had made the night before, um, green beans that we had left over from meatloaf night, and um a delicious mushroom rosemary cream sauce. Um, I used about half a pint of mushrooms and I saved the other half for the following night when I did a chicken marsala on Thursday. I used the mashed potatoes from earlier the week, that meatloaf Monday, and I put together a really easy little salad, just um mixed greens with feta, olives, tomatoes, cucumbers, and I decided to do a homemade Dijon honey apple cider vinaigrette, which was really delicious. On Friday night for dinner, we did a chili. I was really craving chili, and I totally dropped the ball because they meant to add a cornbread to that, and I just like did not have the ingredients for it. It was one, it was like a last-minute decision. Like, I was supposed to go to Trader Joe's that Friday and just got totally caught up, ended up going to a different grocery store and like just didn't even have my list. It was such a mess. So that was on me. That was on me. And then for Saturday, my in-laws were in town, and my mother-in-law went to a grocery store, did like a rotisserie chicken, pre-made baked beans, pre-made mac and cheese. I did request for something green. So she threw together a salad and I brought over the honey Dijon apple cider vingourette that I had leftovers for that salad, and it was fine. Um, the pro, I mean the big positive for that dinner was the fact that I didn't have to cook or really clean up anything. So that was very nice to be like taken care of in that way. Um, and that is what we ate for that week. Um, so other things that I prepped and made as the week went on. Um, you all know that we do we go through so many hard-boiled eggs around here. I probably boiled about three dozen in the course of the week. It's super easy and quick for me to throw together for you as well. They're also just a such a good snack, good protein. I mean, who doesn't love an egg? I just feel like it is like the most perfect food group ever. So I like and we go through so many eggs, not just hard-boiled, but on Tuesdays and Thursdays, those are my gym mornings. I learned that I love to fuel my body with just a bunch of scrambled eggs. So for breakfast, I will make that for the kids as opposed to their usual like toast or cereal or whatever. And so we've been doing a lot of scrambled eggs, a lot of hard-boiled eggs. Um, of course, I kept my sourdough starter alive. I think I make I've been averaging about one loaf a week. Um, anything more, I just feel like I can't really handle at this point. Um, so just feeding the starter and keeping it alive, uh, putting together discard in a jar and keeping that in the fridge. And when that gets full, I will do discard pancakes for my son. He he says that he likes them, but then sometimes when I make them and like have them in the morning for him, he's just kind of like, oh, is there anything else to eat? And I'm just like, no. Um, so another thing that I've been doing, I used to buy Trader Joe's has these like little juice shots. They're really awesome. And I felt like I had one every single day from like January until August. And I swear to God, it kept me so healthy. Like I had pneumonia or bronchite, or just like something terrible in January. And between then and August, I was not sick at all. It was amazing, and I like totally attributed it to those juice shots. And then of course, I got like super sick in August. It was like a whole thing. I got my brother and his girlfriend, it was just not a good, it was not a good situation. Anyway, so I don't swear by them anymore, but I do like them and I do miss them. But when you realize that you like one a day, it and they're like two dollars each, and then my husband started drinking them, and so now we were spending like$14 a week on juice shots. I was kind of like, this is crazy. So I started making them myself. So I basically using pre-made ginger cubes, thank you, Trader Joe's, um, and a bunch of fresh lemon juice, a sprinkle of cayenne, and a little bit of honey. I've been doing them myself, and I just keep it in a mason jar and I just take like swigs of it as the week goes on, then wash it and like start over again. I'm sure that's like really unhygienic and like disgusting, but I don't know. Like, what can you do? I'm not gonna like wash a glass every single day. I feel like that's like bananas. Who has time for that? Um, so I made our lemon ginger shots. My husband actually doesn't like the ones that I make. Um I keep the I make them way stronger than the Trader Joe's ones, and they were already strong for him, so he just like no longer does it. If he's not feeling well or like feels like a cold is coming on, I'll buy him a handful if I'm shopping that week. But like other than that, I feel like we can just, you know, not blow like$50 a month on juice shots. Um, so and occasionally I'll have a ton of cucumbers and tomatoes. Like my my boys go through so many. Um but sometimes like I I end up buying like three pounds of between tomatoes and cucumbers per week. And a lot of times my boys will eat them up completely, and other times I'm just left with like a ton in the fridge come Monday. So a lot of times I'll make an Israeli salad, which is one of my favorites with leftover cucumbers and tomatoes, and that's just basically like a ton of cherry tomatoes chopped up, the little Persian cucumbers chopped up, a lot of fresh parsley, a lot of fresh lemon juice, a ton of salt, and a pinch of pepper. And that's kind of it. It's so good. I love an Israeli salad. So that is just one of my favorite things to make when I have extras. Um, and yeah, that's kind of all I made that week. Um, other than like washing fruits and vegetables and you know, keeping up with that demand with the kids, just because between all the kids, they go through so much for their lunch boxes and their snacks, and I make them a snack plate after school. And so um, I wanted to tell you a little bit about our system for school lunches. So I had mentioned before that we are doing um, yeah, uh school lunch uh Monday through Thursday for my two kids. And the school started offering hot pizza lunch on Fridays. Of course, you do have to pay for it. And at first I was kind of hemming and hawing. I was like, oh, I don't know, like, is this worth it? Like six dollars per kid per Friday, like it adds up really quickly. But then I was like, no, I I feel like I should cut myself a little bit of a break and just go for it. And so I have. And so it has reduced my lunch packing to eight lunches per week. And so each kid, we have one of those bento go boxes, and like, yes, they're it's just plastic, and I I do feel like bad about it because I just feel like this generation of children, like they're just filled with microplastics, and like sometimes you can avoid it, sometimes you can't. I probably should have just sprayed for metal bento boxes like years ago, but I didn't. I'm like totally invested in the Bento Go system at this point. I feel like I mean, I guess I could just scrap the whole thing and start over again, but I've just like I I don't know, maybe that could be like a project when I have like a little bit more free time. But anyway, so what we have we have each kid has a bento go shell, and we have goodness, probably four inserts per kid. And so that way, and the inserts are much cheaper, they're like$12 as opposed to like a$30 lunchbox, and plus the shells are like enormous, like you don't probably don't have the storage for, I don't have the storage for it. Um, but each lid comes with an insert. So what I can do is on Sunday, I will make a total of four lunches. That's two per kid. So that gives me, so I pack four lunches on Sundays, and that buys me lunch on Monday and Tuesday for the kids. And then on Tuesday, when they come home from school, I make another four so that they're all set for Wednesday, Thursday. And they stack really easy when you pop the lids on. Um, and I put the ones that are like ready to go the next day in the shell in their like little lunchbox cooler. So it's like a whole, it's a whole system. And what I've been doing for them lately is just on Mondays and Tuesdays, they each essentially get the same exact lunch. Like we're doing bagels and cream cheese as their main spread. The tough thing about my kids' school, and this is like a little depressing, and I I just like hate where we are as a country with all these allergies. So, this school, like I'm sure most people's school, there we're a nut-free school, which drives me crazy because I just feel like a handful of almonds or a handful of cashews or pistachios like go such a long way with like such good vitamins and nutrients, and that's just not an option. So, um, or even like a peanut butter sandwich, which is you know everyone's favorite, right? Like that's no longer an option. And um, I don't know, it's just like really sad. So we are just doing like either bagels and cream cheese or tortillas or um, goodness, like some turkey and cheese with some sourdough. And um, I usually fill up, they have like a little tiny circle. I like to fill it up with like a little piece of dark chocolate or maybe a dark chocolate-covered pretzel, just something small, something too like, you know, something sweet. And then the rest I try to make sure is really healthy. So grapes, blueberries, uh, clementines, um, celery, carrots, tomatoes, bell peppers, hummus, like just a ton of stuff. Um, it's really hard to find snacks for children that is just not laced with, again, high fructose corn syrup or seed oil or, you know, quote unquote natural flavors, right? Which is like code word for like we can put whatever we want in it because this is like a not a proprietary whatever, uh, meaning it's just filled with poison or something with like, you know, a bio-engineered, you know, something in a laboratory with like God knows what chemicals are like destroying the kids' bot. It's just so hard. It's so hard to be a parent in 2025 and just like knowing that like the deck is just so stacked against you. Okay, so anyway, that is like a topic for another day. The point is, is I tried it really hard to pack my children healthy, good snacks because I swear to God, every other day there's like a party or a celebration, and parents bring in like just the grossest, like riddled with like food dye and just like horrible things for my children. So to combat that, I try to feed them healthy things like dried apricots, dried cranberry, like right, like I try so hard to go healthy. The consequence, you know what? We should really just save kids' snacks in general and like clean eating for children for another episode. But that is what I have been doing. I have been gifting myself pizza Fridays so that I'm only packing lunches twice a week on Sundays and again on Tuesdays, which buys me the following two days. And when they come home from school, I am rotating out their snacks, I am rotating out the lunch boxes, filling up water bottles, and so I can unpack and repack bags. Probably at this point, I've got it down to a science. I can do both bags in like less than five minutes. Ideally, in a perfect world, my children will be doing this themselves, but I again I just feel like there's a lot going on. We have so many children running around, there's homework to do, it's just like a whole thing. So for now, I'm helping them out with that. Okay, and so that is sort of what I've been doing for school lunches. Um, occasionally they'll request like plums or pears or like a some a special fruit or or what have you. But for the most part, I I feel like my children do a really good job of eating what I pack them, and I feel very proud of that, especially because I'm sure their friends bring terrible things that look way more appealing than what I'm packing them. But you know what? Again, I'm gonna save this for another episode. Okay, so the money. I feel like that's you know what you guys are here for. The money. Okay, so um I spent about$25 at the farm market um at where the pumpkin patch was. The farmer's oh, it wasn't really a farmer's market, just like the market. I don't know, whatever you want to call it. So um that was a little surprising because all I bought was a gallon of apple cider, a jar of honey, and green beans, and somehow it cost$25. But it was delicious. The apple cider was so good. We loved it. I never buy my kids juice for the record, except for on the Sabbath, they get grape juice. Other than that, we're like a milk water family, but I mean, I don't know, it's fall, so I didn't want to deprive them of apple cider. I spent$139 at Trader Joe's on my big Monday shop. Um, we spent, and then I spent another$46 at the grocery store for a midweek shop on Friday. So that was a total of one$210 for groceries for the week, which really wasn't that bad, all things considered. I had mentioned earlier that I completely screwed up um with a different grocery store. I forgot my list, including I forgot to buy milk for the weekend, which was like a huge oversight because again, for children, we drink milk like crazy. And so come Sunday morning, I was just out of milk and I happened to have a lot of half and half. And so that's what we did. We supplemented milk for half and half. My five-year-old loves half and half. It is like his favorite thing in the world. So he actually gets really excited when we run out of milk, which is pretty rare, by the way. Um, my uh one-year-old and my three-year-old, they were like, okay, okay. But by Monday, I could tell they were like kind of into it. But anyway, I prefer not to do that, obviously, because half and half is like three times more expensive than regular milk. Um, I told that story to the cashiers at Trader Joe's, and they were appalled. They were just like, oh my god. They're like, Well, I guess you have to do what you have to do. I was like, what? Like, no, like half and half is like it's like more richer, it's creamier, it's like so much better. Like, what are you talking about? Anyway, um, I thought it was funny, but I guess I'm alone with that. As for dining out, um, really, just you know,$55 at the farm uh that Sunday with my cousin, which was so worth it. I know I just talked about eating clean and healthy and just like, you know, pooping all over like sugar and glucose and like certain ingredients. And here I am like talking about like nachos and tamales and fried Oreos from food trucks. But you know, it's a balance, right? And then um I did spend six dollars on a chai latte earlier in the week before baby gym class. Um, so that was delicious and totally worth it. Um, so that was it. Just like$61 worth of dining out. And again, I was really proud of it. There were no like emergency takeout meals. There was, you know, no, well, I mean, we ran out of milk, but what can you do? And like the thought of going to Trader Joe's on a Sunday made me want to die. So I was just like, you know what? My kids will be fine with half and half for a day and a half, and they were like they're they're alive, like it was fine. So thank you guys so much for tuning in. I hope again that this episode gives you some sort of insight and you learn something from it. See you back here next week.