Enough meal planning!

Normally I love the weekly ritual of planning meals and making my shopping list. I look for one-pot type recipes, or search for recipes that include the main and the side, or try to complement the main with the side. Normally I just need five to seven recipes each week because I cook a 2 portion dinner at night and then pack up the second portion for lunch the next day.

But I had a busy Saturday and I wasn't in the mood to meal plan before I went grocery shopping. I just wanted to go out and get it done!  This is a bad plan even if you're living on premade frozen food, but it turns out it's relatively easy on GAPS, probably because the choices are so limited. Here was my strategy:

1. Arrive at store unprepared, with no mental list and no paper list
2. Cruise the meat and fish section and select 5 protein sources (I picked up an organic chicken, which counts as at least three dinners for one person, ground beef, rainbow trout and salmon)
3. Walk through the veggie aisle and select 5 main veggies (for me today, this was kale, cucumbers, snow peas, cauliflower, zuchini)
4. Now that you know what your main veggies are, go back through the veggie aisle and pick up accoutrements for flavor and color (I needed onion, garlic, ginger, mushrooms, bell peppers, tomato and mint)
5. Pick up the standard stuff you buy every week - eggs, kefir, whatever.

I should mention that this works so well because I'm lucky enough to live in a city with a great local chain of markets that focus entirely on real, fresh food.  They actually defeat the standard "shop the edges of the grocery store" rule because the centre of the store is about five aisles of produce.  And the produce always looks great.  How often does kale just leap off the shelf at you?

So with this, I've come up with the following meals for the week

• zuchini mushroom lasagne with broth based tomato sauce
• mashed cauliflower with roast chicken legs
• trout with kale and orange pepper poacked in chicken broth
• chicken breasts stir fried with red and green pepper and mushrooms
• minted cucumber salad with grilled salmon and grilled yellow pepper

Not bad for an ten minute dash through the store! 

My next post will talk about my other strategy for meal planning.  And it will explain why I did NOT feel like doing it today.

Tired of chicken broth - solutions

I'll preface this by saying that I spent several weeks in November on the Intro, and then another week at the end of December.  

I couldn't eat another spoonful of broth at this point.  Perhaps I've limited myself too much to chicken and turkey broth. But fish stock does not appeal to me.  While I love fish, the concept of miscellaneous fish parts boiling together in a pot makes me want to gag.  Beef is an option.  But at this point the notion of eating more stock does not appeal sufficiently for a trip to the butchers...in horribly frigid weather.  Finally, I`ve just had it with pureed vegetable soups.

So I've come up with a few solutions to sneak stock into my meals.  Last night I made a sausage stew using cooked plum tomatoes.  As the sausage fat and tomato juice simmered in the bottom of the pan a wave of inspiration hit.  I topped off the stew with chicken broth and it made a delicious thin tomatoey sauce that had no chicken taste.  Tonight, spurred by this success, I used the rest of my tomatoes to make a chicken stock based marinara sauce which I used in a lasagne. (A zuchini noodle lasagne.) 

As for quick lunch fixes at work (all-imporant for an urban professional with unappealing leftovers...) I`m lucky enough to live in a city that has an abundance of pho places.  Pho is avietnamese soup made with various types of meat (including tendon meat!) and vegetables. Hold the rice noodles and its perfect for the GAPS protocol...but even pre-GAPS, its really about the delicious broth.  Best of all, the flavors are totally different from any of my homemade broth recipes, even my chicken/ginger/lemongrass broth. 

So in a nutshell, plain chicken broth wears out its welcome fast.  It`s worth having a few ways to hide it in your GAPS recipe arsenal.

Update:

I've been on GAPS for a few more months now, so I have a few more thoughts getting broth in when you're fed up with it.  I also thought summary bullets would be useful:

• add to sauces, such as tomato sauce
• use as a base for stews (kind of obvious)
• use instead of milk to scramble eggs
• in some cases, it could be used instead of milk for general cooking
• use as a base for stir frys 
• this works great for asian-style stir frys, but if your just boiling or cooking veggies and you don't mind some extra liquid, try this.
• use in savory baking
• I haven't experimented with this yet, but I have a theory that you could use broth in something like zuchini muffins
• A pizza crust recipe that I snagged off another blog calls for yogurt.  I bet I could sub in a thicker broth instead
• if you're not on GAPS, and you're consuming soaked or unsoaked grains, rice cooked in broth is delicious (too bad its not allowed)
• Update - cook lentils in broth!