23: What We Ate for Meals Last Week

In this quick solo episode, Sarah shares some of her meals that her family shared last week, including opportunities to improve upon for next week's meals to make things easier, and also highlights what worked well for busy weeks. She also shares some easy recipes for you to try!

Your meals don’t have to be Pinterest-worthy — simple, repeated, even imperfect meals still get the job done.

Don't forget to leave a review for the podcast. I’d love to hear what you all ate last week! Tag me or send me a message with your easy wins.

Chapter markers:

1. Introduction to Meal Planning- 00:00:00
2. Easy Dinner Ideas- 00:03:00
3. Enticing Curiosity at the Table- 00:06:00
4. Using Leftovers Creatively- 00:09:00
5. Balancing Meals with Busy Schedules- 00:12:00

Try these recipes:

- Sweetpotato Chicken Chili

- Pumpkin Protein Oats

Transcript

Sarah Schlichter (00:11.818)
if you need some easy dinner ideas or inspiration or just want to pull the curtain back on what other families are doing for dinner, then this episode is for you. So I thought it would be fun to kind of pull back the curtain and share what my family actually eats in a week. Some wins, some opportunities for improvement, some easy button meals and kind of experiments that were always running because...

Feeding kids is never really an end goal. You're not done. You don't succeed and win and then you never have to think about it again, right? We know that it's something you have to do day in and day out for many, many years that I'm told go way too fast, but it's still sometimes those days feel very long. You're doing it sometimes three meals a day. Either way, by the time dinner comes around, sometimes I'm just like blacking out and forgetting.

what I'm doing in the first place. So this is a look into our meals last week. I'm kind of going to go day by day. I made some notes as to why we chose certain meals the days we did based on our activities, which is always one of my first tips when you're looking to start meal planning or start planning meals out for the week. It's great to...

have a template, know, maybe you have a favorite blogger or a cookbook that you use or an influencer who does certain meals each night of the week, but you want to be able to cater that to you, your family and your schedule. So for example, if you have activities certain nights, maybe it doesn't make sense to do that night as you know that dinner recipe that takes an hour from start to finish. Or if it does, maybe there's a lot of prep you can do earlier in the day.

So I'm a huge fan of mental planning. So even mentally planning what I'm gonna have for dinner later is really helpful for me. Sometimes I can start it like maybe for tonight, for example, I'm gonna make a roasted butternut squash kale salad with like pumpkin seeds and apples. It's a fall day and I'm really feeling these fall hearty salads and I've seen a lot of pictures of them for inspiration. So I'm like, you know what?

Sarah Schlichter (02:24.652)
The butternut squash is on my grocery list this week. I'm getting kale. We are doing this. So I already know I'm doing that tonight. So I probably will roast my butternut squash, maybe during lunch or something, just so that's done, because I know that is going to take the most amount of time. Otherwise, I can just massage the kale and cut up apples and add pumpkin seeds and make a quick vinaigrette dressing. Like I can do all of that in minutes. So I'm not worried about that part. So mental planning really helps.

Okay, so in terms of breakfast, we actually don't really plan breakfast ahead of time. We are a big oatmeal family. We'll switch up the toppings. Sometimes I will do overnight oats. I personally was really into this pumpkin protein overnight oats recipe that I just put up on the blog. I can link that here, but if you go to bucketlesstummy.com and search pumpkin overnight oats, you'll find that those were great. Those, I realized that as a busy mom, like I don't

want a sit down breakfast in the morning. I have limited time as it is. Sometimes I want to get a workout in, so I need something quick. Overnight Oats does that for me. So kids will do hot oatmeal. Sometimes they'll do overnight oats. But I did test some sheet pan eggs last week and those went over really well. I was kind of surprised. Like this was my first go around. I'm testing a recipe for the blog. The kids loved it and I added mushrooms.

peppers and onions and lots of cheese, of course, and they asked for seconds. So I made that again this week, honestly. So last week we went with the oatmeal and she pan eggs. We'll also have like a day of waffles. I'll add peanut butter and hemp seeds to add more staying power, protein and fiber. But breakfast aren't really a challenge for us. So let's start with

Monday. Well actually Sunday we had chili and we are kind of in football season now and that's one of our rituals. My husband loves to make this chicken sweet potato chili recipe. I have it up on the blog. It is delicious and usually we'll eat that Sunday and then we'll have leftovers another week. So that's what we did Sunday. Monday, last Monday was a super busy day. I actually had to go into DC in the morning for a new segment so I had all of these meals to bring with me.

Sarah Schlichter (04:48.958)
by the time I got home, it was like the afternoon and I was spent. So I definitely did not feel like doing more cooking on top of that. So my go-to lately has been these cottage cheese taco bowls and you can do them with anything. You can do them with rotisserie chicken, which is what we did that night because did not need to cook it. You can do it with beef. You can do it with pork. You can do it with beans. I mean,

Tofu, take your pick of protein. So we just did that. And honestly, all you do is assemble these bowls. what did I do? Corn, canned corn. I think I still did black beans, some rotisserie chicken, some red onion, some romaine lettuce, cottage cheese. And I love to mix the taco seasoning in the cottage cheese and it gives it so much more flavor. And

And I think we had roasted sweet potatoes. So that is such an easy meal to just put it in a bowl for kids. I do serve it deconstructed because sometimes they're weird about food touching. Completely normal, by the way, if your kids are like that. Sometimes I just roll my eyes because I'm like, well, at some point you're gonna graduate to having your food touch and realize it's not that big a deal. So.

That was a hit because each kid can kind of decide how much of each topping they want. and we have tortilla chips on top for a nice crunch. So chips and salsa were on the table and I am counting that dinner as a win. The kids did pretty well with that. Tuesday, we did do the leftovers from Sunday. So we made the chili chicken and sweet potatoes and that is such.

You can make it in the instant pot, also in a slow cooker, but even just on the stove and like a Dutch oven, it's 30, 30 to 40 minutes. It's super easy. So chock full of nutrition, protein, fiber, all of that. So I will put that recipe in the show notes. Wednesday, I was testing a new recipe for the blog. So I actually tested that during the day. It was a pumpkin pasta and it turned out pretty good, but I wasn't

Sarah Schlichter (07:05.58)
I wasn't over the moon about it yet, so I still have some things to do with that. But basically it was just a pasta recipe and I added like a creamy pumpkin and some milk and cream in and the kids did okay with that. We added extra Parmesan cheese on theirs. I added kale in mine and I enjoyed it. But again, I want to try that recipe again and maybe do like a baked pumpkin pasta. If you remember the viral like

goat cheese or feta cheese pasta bake where you would just take a block of feta cheese and put it in in like a nine by 13 pan and you can put some cherry tomatoes and you just like put that in the oven and it gets all cheesy and melts and then you just stir the cooked pasta in. I was thinking something like that for this pumpkin baked pumpkin recipe.

But anyway, again, pasta, we usually have some sort of pasta once a week and it comes together pretty quickly. Again, I'm all about like 30 minute meals or less in this season of life. and that was a fun way to kind of switch it up. And I did talk to the kids about there is pumpkin in this pasta pumpkin. As you see, we see pumpkins outside right now, but you can also eat the flesh of pumpkin. We bought this canned pumpkin from the store.

Sometimes mommy mixes it in her oatmeal. Do you want to try it on a spoon? Isn't it cool how it makes our pasta look a little orange? So kind of making those notes along the way. I would love for them to try it, but I'm trying not to pressure them. What I'm trying to do is entice curiosity, always enticing curiosity. That's kind of the name of the game with me. So I ask a lot of questions at dinner and usually they will try something. Whether they have a second bite after, I really don't care.

For me, I'm just focused on are they trying it? Are they giving it a fair shot? So that was Wednesday. So Thursday, we had activities last week. So I already knew it was gonna be an easy meal. So on activity nights, like it's just not worth making.

Sarah Schlichter (09:13.932)
something from scratch, we do something super easy. So it might be breakfast for dinner, which we do a lot. somehow serving breakfast at dinner is so much more exciting for kids. Like it's a home run. It's a win every single time. So we might do breakfast for dinner or Kodiak cake pancakes. There's a sheet pan pancake recipe on my blog that I love as well. But for this night, I think we did quesadillas. Again, super easy. We had cheese, we had beans.

We had, I think we did some beef ones. And then when I serve quesadillas, I always have like side options on the table. And it's usually, if this is the end of the week, like it was, it's usually kind of mismatched. They might not necessarily go together, but it's like what's left in the fridge. So I think we had a little bit of canned corn left. So I put that in a bowl. I chopped up some apples and kiwis and I had that in a bowl.

and some carrots and hummus on the table so it's kind of like a fend for yourself. Choose your own adventure as another dietitian says and I really like that term but that was an easy button for us. And then Friday last night I think my husband and I went out on a date. Yes we had date night and Friday is typically pizza night in our house so again like that takes away any mental energy.

If it's not a pizza night, it's usually like a clean out the fridge night. There's no way I'm really cooking anything from scratch on Friday unless I'm really excited about a new recipe or something. But this also makes it super easy when you have a babysitter because the kids know what to expect. They know it's pizza and a movie. So that's what they did. And we went out to dinner that night, which was great. So when I break it down this way, I really feel less stressed about meal prep because

In my mind, I really only prep three meals a week because one meal is usually leftovers, one meal is something easy like breakfast for dinner or tacos or quesadillas or fill in the blank, whatever that looks like for you. Sometimes I do ground meatballs. I actually think that's super easy, but one night is always that too. So if I focus on just making dinner for three nights,

Sarah Schlichter (11:31.683)
That just feels so much less intimidating to me. It feels doable and that just works for our family. The weekends, we just figure it out. Maybe we eat out or get takeout or if we've had a slower day at home and I'm able to make something from scratch, I do it and I'm happy to do it because it's less rushed. So if you are someone who's like wanting to meal payout but you don't know where to start, start with one meal a week and then you can maybe move up to two or three.

But again, even just mentally saying each night what you're gonna have and mentally putting out those standards or expectations like tonight is soccer. There's no way I'm gonna cook something from scratch. So maybe I can put together some peanut butter and jellies or turkey sandwiches, put it in a little snack box with some other sides and that's our easy dinner tonight. And there's no reason to feel guilty about that. As a parent, you do have to consider

everything that's going on and having a picnic meal is often fun and easy. So that was our week. Looking back, things I would do differently or opportunities to kind of make future weeks easier maybe is a better way to say it. We could have doubled the chili recipe like yes we had it for leftovers but it would be easy to just kind of double all the ingredients and have like

double batches and just freeze one. So next week, this upcoming week, that would be just another meal to take out of the freezer. I'm big on just doing, just you're doing the work. You might as well make two of something to have for later. So that's something I could have done. I could have also.

frozen some of the pumpkin pasta for later. That's another thing I could have done, but honestly I'm not losing sleep over that because it came together quickly enough and I do want to make some tweaks to that recipe. Breakfast again isn't really something that I stress or takes a lot of my time, but making yogurt parfaits like the night before, just putting the yogurt and maybe some chia seeds or flax seeds or even like some frozen fruit in the little jar and then

Sarah Schlichter (13:46.848)
adding granola the morning of could be really easy if I wanted to save a little bit of time. That might work for you. Like if you're again, struggling with feeding yourself in the morning, doing something like that earlier in the week or the night before could make a difference. But thinking about next week, my goal for next week really is to keep that same rhythm of planning three meals, having one easy button dinner, one leftover figure it out dinner, and just

adjusting to the seasons. I feel like changing seasons can just have a lot of different things associated with it and I don't need to put more stress on myself than needed. So in a nutshell, this episode was just meant to encourage you. Your meals don't need to be Pinterest worthy. You can repeat the same meals. You can do simple meals. You can do one pot meals. You can use frozen vegetables, frozen grains, canned beans. Keep it simple.

Feed your family however makes sense for you and that is all that matters because the kids are gonna be happy that you're spending time with them, to be honest. So I would love to hear what you ate last week. If you like these kind of episodes, I can definitely do them more. I promise sometimes our weeks are more exciting with the meals we're eating, but also they don't have to be.

And then if you haven't given the show a rating, please do that. It would make such a difference for me. It's so amazing for me to read the reviews that come in. I really would love to know if this helps you, what you're struggling with, how I can help more, what episodes you would like. And I'm also trying to brainstorm some sort of community that I can have with this podcast. A way that there can be touch points for all of us.

know, brain dead at the end of the day, what should I make for dinner? Some community where people can just share their ideas, whether that's a Facebook group or whether it's something else where I can provide more exclusive resources to you. So I am going to be thinking on that and we'll keep you updated, but make sure you hit subscribe. Please rate the show, share it with a friend who could use this and I'll talk to you next time.