A week (almost) of Crock Pot Meals

Our family is in a rut. A dinner rut. Here's how a typical weeknight goes in our house:

I get home with Olivia around 4:30, let the dog out, and follow her around the house for some time, trying to prevent her from dying while she roams from electrical outlet to sharp corner repeatedly, usually while running and screaming, all the while I'm realizing exactly how exhausted I am after a full day of teaching. I then factor said exhaustion level into how lame our dinner is going to be. Will we have canned or frozen veggies? Are there enough leftovers in the fridge that we can all scrounge something together independently? (Of course not, we've done that the past 3 nights). Nothing comes into my head.

Rob calls. Either between clients or at the end of his last one for the day: "Do we need anything from the store?" A simple question. But do you think, at 5:15, or 6:28, or ever, I can think of a coherent response? Nope. So I say, "Not that I can think of, but maybe." Rob: "What's the plan for dinner?" Me: "I don't know, what do you want?" Rob (equally exhausted): "I don't know, what do you think?" And around we go, until he gets home, and the only thing that is certain is that we're all 3 hungry and there is absolutely NO dinner on the table.

Long story short, our dinners lately have, well, sucked. Lots of microwaving, take-out, pre-packaged, very little fresh, plant-based, or healthy going on. Lately, spaghetti and meatballs has been our gourmet. Salad is a bonus. Even if we go to the grocery store, we have to go every day because there's been ZERO planning done so we're always missing something. It's exhausting, and not at all delicious.

On Sunday, I had a stroke of creativity and sheer genius. Where that came from, I'll still never know. But as I thought about what barriers I had to preparing meals like I used to do before our little bundle of joy, lack of time, energy, and attention came to mind. So, what can I do to get yummy, healthy, home-cooked food onto the table while maintaining my sanity and keeping my child from eating dishwasher pods and poking her fingers into electrical sockets? Boom! Crock pot.

So, to Pinterest I went. I have pinned SO many slow-cooker recipes it's not even funny, but I've only made like 2 of them. So I started there, and came up with a plan to use the Crock Pot 4 out of 7 days this week to prepare meals for our family. Plus freeze half so we can have them later, too. Here is our (almost) week of Crock Pot meals:

Sunday: Vegetable Soup... technically this was not done in the slow cooker, but I made it the same day, and it will contribute to our meals for the week
Monday: Chicken, Corn, and Potato Chowder (with bacon, because duh.)
Tuesday: Beef Stew
Wednesday*: Turkey Chili
Thursday*: Chicken "Tortilla" Soup (tortilla in quotation marks because there's not actually tortillas in it. So it's super inauthentic, but it is also yummy.)
Friday: Dinner out? Like I said, almost a week of slow-cooker meals.
Saturday: Leftovers, if there are any. Otherwise, back to square 1. I have no clue. C'mon, I haven't planned like this in over a year!

Armed with my plan, I went to the store, and spent only about $55! Admittedly, we had 6 packs of chicken from Costco in the freezer, and I forgot a few cans of this or that. I also did not buy the beef for the stew until the day before. (It ended up being in the neighborhood of $14 for nearly 2lbs) But still, I thought that was pretty good for a week of dinners (and leftovers for lunch!). And after my tiny monster went to bed, I threw on some Harry Potter, opened a beer, and got down to prepping for a week of delicious, *mostly healthy* dinners.

Harry Potter, Pinterest, Oregon Beer, and dinner prepping. Not bad for a Sunday night as the rain sets in.

So here goes, each day with each recipe. Enjoy!

Sunday: Vegetable soup. This is something I improvise every time, but I have a basic recipe that I follow from memory:
1 can beans (this time I used Pinto, because that's what I had, but Kidney is my favorite)
1 can diced tomatoes
about 1-2 cups chicken broth (like I said, I improvise!). Vegetable broth would work just as well
1 large zucchini
2 handfuls green beans
1 small onion (yellow is my favorite, but I used white this time)
3 carrots
3 stalks of celery
2 bay leaves
about 1 tablespoon Italian seasoning
about 1 tbsp garlic powder
salt and pepper to taste

Instructions:
I have thrown this into the slow cooker all at once many many times on low for 6-10 hours and it turns out great, but tonight I did it on the stovetop. Sweat the onion, celery, carrot, and spices over medium heat with some olive oil until there is a little browning - just enough to add some richness. Then pour in the chicken broth to de-glaze, add the other ingredients, and pour in water to cover all the veggies. I tend to add salt as I go, or later when I eat it in individual portions, to taste. I bring it to a low boil over medium/med-high heat for about 10-20 minutes until the zucchini become slightly translucent, then simmer for at least 1 hour. After that, I put half into individual containers for lunches, and the other half into one big container to freeze for later on.

Veggie soup, cooking away on the stove. Slow cooker works just as well.

All packed up for lunches and the freezer!

So there it is, Veggie Soup, all ready for the week ahead!

Monday: Chicken, Corn, and Potato Chowder.

I love creamy soups. As a kid, I loved clam chowder... minus the clams. So I loved potato soup. And Trader Joe's used to make this corn chowder that was just phenomenal. Imagine my joy when I found a recipe for Potato Corn Chowder! Enter my husband, who doesn't consider anything a meal if there is not meat involved. So I took this recipe and modified it a little, adding chicken and, of course, bacon. Because what recipe wouldn't be made better with bacon? The healthiest? No, but still, leaps and bounds better than what we were doing.

I chopped and prepped everything, tossed the veggies and broth into one bag, chicken and bacon into another, and tossed it into the fridge for Monday morning. I measured out the flour and put it into a little tupperware so I could toss it in the next day.

"The Before"

 Monday morning, I emptied the chicken and bacon into the Crock Pot with the flour, and mixed those up together. Then I poured in all the other ingredients EXCEPT the cream (following the instructions in the recipe) and turned it on low. When I got home, I switched it to Warm because it was done, but it would be a while before everyone in the family was ready to eat. Rob gets home late, so Olivia and I often eat first, then keep things warm for him, another reason the Crock Pot is essential for our family - things don't go bad or get cold or turn gross from being kept warm.
Here's how it turned out:

Yummy!

*A few things I should note about making this soup:

• The recipe calls for heavy cream - use that. I thought I could get away with whole milk and a little bit of corn starch slurry to thicken it, and it looked right and thickened up, but wasn't as good as I had hoped
• Cook the bacon before you put it in. I didn't, and although the soup got the bacon flavor, the bacon pieces themselves weren't very appealing in texture. Rob suggested waiting on the bacon altogether and using it as a garnish, which would have been equally as delicious, I think.

All in all, though, not bad for a crock pot dinner and we served it with some french bread and salad. So easy! And it was nice to have a meal ready to go on a Monday night.

Tuesday: Beef Stew

The Before. No beef yet - wanted to buy it on Monday night right before

This is another one I frequently improvise, but for this week, loosely followed This Gluten Free Recipe for Crock Pot Beef Stew... but took out the mushrooms and used regular flour so it wasn't actually gluten free. The best modification I made though? I subbed half a cup of the beef broth it calls for with a little less than half a cup of red wine. Made for a richer, more hearty stew, if you ask me. I added a few more veggies, too, since I had them: zucchini and corn. Because in my mind, more veggies can never hurt. Confession, though, I was so hungry I forgot to take a picture! I guess you'll just have to take my word for it: it was really delicious!

Wednesday: We fell apart. I forgot to put one of my bag-o-ingredients into the crock pot! We had Little Caesar's Pizza. Let the judging commence.

Thursday: Turkey Chili
I am often asked for my recipe for chili, as I'm known to serve it often. This is another one of those improvising things, so I'll do my best, but mostly I just adjust as I go.

One of our favorite meals at our house. After it's cooked, of course. ;)

1 lb ground turkey
1 can each: Black, Pinto, and Kidney beans, rinsed and drained
1 can diced tomatoes
about 1/2 can of tomato paste
1/2 diced onion
any diced veggies you like - I think I threw in a small diced zucchini this time, that's one of my favorites because it's easy to "sneak" in just to up the veggie count a bit. I may have tossed in some carrots too
garlic
salt and pepper to taste
1 small can sliced olives
chili powder
cumin
about 1 cup chicken broth or water with a little extra salt
about 1/2 cup or less of beer - I used an IPA this time, and I do like to use a "real" beer (no coors or budweiser here!)

So that's it. With the exception of the ground turkey, I threw everything into a bag, then the turkey and bag contents into the crock pot on Thursday morning. Viola! Thursday evening we had chili with cheese and sour cream, and it was so nice to have something to take to work the next day.

Here is the "after"

Hearty but not too heavy, I love turkey chili!

Friday: Confession again. Olivia and I spent what felt like the entire afternoon on Coburg Road, going one direction or the other, and I caved. We got take-out on the way home. And it was delicious, and we all fell asleep early. Oh well.

Saturday: Chicken "Tortilla" Soup
So this one is really not authentic at all (hence the quotation marks), but I've made it before, it's simple and cheap, and it's pretty yummy. Unfortunately, this is the one that I failed to prep except, basically, for the chicken, because I didn't buy enough ingredients at the store. Here is the recipe I started with, and I added lime* and cilantro. However, I didn't have any of the other ingredients left to add to the bag, so had to go back to the store for everything but the chicken and the enchilada sauce. :P Oh well, here's what I started with:

I did write the missing ingredients on the bag, so I could quickly check it before hitting this store - or in the event that we had another "what's for dinner?" conversation and Rob headed to the store on his way home.

*Even the best laid plans get derailed. As you can see in the photo, I tossed the limes into the bag with the enchilada sauce after squeezing their juice into the bag. That was a mistake. This morning, I got all the other ingredients necessary, tossed them in with everything in that bag, and turned on the Crock Pot. Rob went to the game. Olivia and I were home alone. I invited my parents for some delicious tortilla soup at our house, and took off the lid to taste the soup... and spit it out immediately. While in the bag with the enchilada sauce all week, the limes had gone bad, and the whole soup was ruined! This recipe, apparently, is NOT one that can be prepped ahead of time.

Olivia and I had the craziest dinner, but it was still nutritious and yummy. But it was definitely NOT Chicken "Tortilla" soup. What's life if you can't laugh at yourself, right? We treated ourselves to some ice cream for dessert as a reward for our resourcefulness at dinner prep.

We take our ice cream very seriously.

So there you have it, folks. I started the week pretty idealistically, but we still did 3 days of crock pot meals, and attempted the 4th. Lesson learned, limes, lesson learned! The best part is, we have another 3-ish days worth of dinners and/or lunches waiting in the freezer. I'm not sure what I plan to do next week, as this Sunday won't give me as much time as last Sunday to prep, but I'm happy to be back into a pattern of planning and cooking real food again. This was just the jump start we needed!

This isn't my typical type of post, but I hope you enjoyed it, and perhaps there will be more like this to come!