Happy Monday to you! I hope that your Easter celebrations were meaningful and special even though they were most certainly not what you had intended.

We enjoyed the day with online church, dress-up pictures like always, a nice long walk, a little board game action and a special meal that was easy to put together. Here are a few pictures of our day and then I’ll share my meal plan for the week below.

Now onto our meal plan for the week. If you’ve caught me on any of my Facebook or YouTube lives lately, you’ve heard my spiel about groceries already, but for those of you who haven’t heard, here’s a little background on my grocery shopping and what I’ve been able to find around here…

I stock up all the time so when all this coronavirus stuff started, I had a lot of food in the freezer and pantry – meats, vegetables, pantry staples, all of it. But like the rest of the world, we are not eating out (not that we ever did a lot, but usually once a week) and everyone is home for every single meal and everyone seems to be much hungrier than normal. Plus, I’ve been in the mood to bake and create recipes so my kitchen has been extra busy. So even though I had plenty of food in the house to feed us for several weeks, I’ve been heading to the grocery store once a week.

My parents are local and are allowing me to shop for them so they don’t have to, so I just keep a running list of what I’d like to have and when they need things, I go to the store for all of us.

So far, this has worked out well and I’ve had plenty of options to make creative and satisfying meals.

But now the experts are telling us the next two weeks are expected to be the worst we’ve seen. I think we all recognize that these experts are trying their best, but no one really knows for certain what is going to happen. However, I’m taking all the precautions I can and will try to not go to the grocery store for the next two weeks – at least.

Without a weekly trip to the store, our fresh produce will be gone, but I do have a couple cans of green beans, a couple bags of frozen vegetables, a jar of applesauce. And I planted my garden this weekend. We most definitely will not have fresh vegetables in two weeks time, but I did plant some spinach so we may have fresh greens. It’s really too late to plant greens in North Carolina, but I did it knowing we don’t have super hot weather coming in the next few weeks and that I needed to grow absolutely everything I could. So hopefully, those spinach leaves will do well for a little while, because I am going to need them.

All that to say…I have a good selection of ingredients now, but next week will likely be a different story. I do have a good cache of gluten free baking mixes so we may be eating a lot of cake. 🙂

Here’s what’s on tap for this week (some of these recipes are available for free and I’ll link to those. The others are all available with my recipe membership, which is available here. My intention here is not to sell you something or frustrate you with recipes you can’t easily access. It’s simply to give you ideas, to hopefully spark your imagination and let you see what meals you might be able to put together with what you have on hand.):

Monday: Fish tacos with grilled cod, AIP tortillas, tropical salsa slaw and sautéed vegetables.

• Cod is frozen from a Costco run a couple weeks ago
• tortillas are made from lard and pantry staples
• tropical salsa slaw from a fresh mango, fresh cabbage and canned pineapple that’s been in my cupboard way too long
• sautéed vegetables are the scraps of what’s left from last week’s grocery trip: a couple zucchini, a few mushrooms and a shriveling pepper

Tuesday: Mexican night – ground beef and chorizo with leftover AIP tortillas, guacamole, chips and salsa plus green smootie

• Ground beef was a score from Whole Foods last week
• Chorizo has been in the freezer for a while – I just brown the beef and chorizo together, add salsa and a little broth and that’s our meat mixture
• guacamole comes from avocados I’ve had stashed in the fridge for a couple weeks plus some lime juice and cilantro that needs to be used up pronto
• green smoothie will be made from spinach, cucumber, green apple and a little frozen pineapple just to add to the vegetable quotient of this meal

Wednesday: Spinach salad with grilled shrimp

• Fingers crossed for enough spinach from the garden to make this salad – if not, we may need to change this up to maybe broccoli salad because I do have some fresh broccoli
• Shrimp is frozen from Costco – I plan to skewer it, season simply with salt and pepper and send one of my men out to grill it
• Salad will be completed with some apple and candied walnuts
• Simple dressing of olive oil and balsamic vinegar and a little honey
• I may make croutons or garlic toast with a the leftovers (if there is any) from a new gluten free bread recipe I experimented with over the weekend

Thursday: Breakfast – bacon, eggs, Paleo Bisquick biscuits or pancakes (this has been a long experiment I haven’t perfected yet) and fruit – whatever is left in the fridge and if that’s nothing, then I have one bag of frozen berries I will defrost.

• Eggs and bacon are self-explanatory. Although, my stores had been out of bacon until this past Thursday when I went so I bought one package and stashed it in the freezer.
• Paleo Bisquick is a blend of palm shortening, almond flour and a few other things to make what will hopefully be an all purpose baking mix that will allow us to make quick biscuits, pancakes, muffins, etc. I have a good muffin recipe already and biscuits that taste good, but are flat and the pancakes have just been a fail, so I’ll work on one of those with this meal.

Friday: Usually pizza night in our house, but we’re going for a different type of family-favorite meal this week – burgers with buns, onion rings and canned green beans.

• Ground beef just pattied up and grilled
• I found gluten free buns at the store last week so that will be a special treat. I like to butter (or ghee) them, toast them, then steam them for a few seconds so they’re a little toasty on the outside and soft in the middle.
• Onions rings are a marvel I’ve been working on with a tiger nut flour crust and they’re baked. So delicious!
• Green beans from a can because I’m sure I won’t have anything fresh left by Friday night!

Saturday: If I don’t have leftovers, my plan is to make my husband lasagna with the sauce from our favorite Italian restaurant (lasagna is his favorite food ever and they’re amazing sauce is the key). This was where we had our first date and where we went for every special occasion – until we entered gluten free life. I believe they do offer gluten free pasta, but it’s just not the same experience and so we haven’t been in many years. However, I plan to order their sauce only for takeout and use that to make lasagna at home. Not sure what I’ll use for noodles – maybe zucchini if I have to go to the store for my parents. We may even just eat the sauce as soup! I’ll make more gluten free bread and we’ll be in heaven. We’ll just count the tomatoes as our vegetables and be happy. 🙂

I had one of my YouTube viewers request a live “cook with me” where we make Chicken Pot Pie. I have one precious package of chicken breasts in the freezer so I’m planning on doing making that one day next week (week of April 20th). If that sounds fun to you, be sure to head over to my YouTube channel, subscribe and hit the bell icon so you’ll receive notifications when I post over there so you don’t miss the live streams. I’d love to have you join me. It’s so fun to chat with everyone live.

Ok, that’s it from here. I hope this is helpful to you. Please reach out it there is something I can do to help. Remember that I am a functional medicine health coach so I specialize in helping people manage their health using functional medicine – food, exercise, sleep, stress management, lessening environmental toxins and more. I know this is a strange and stressful time and I am here to help! You can go to www.totalwellnesshealthcoaching.com and set up an appointment with me.

Until next time, keep on keeping on! We’re all in this together.