Camping Recipes for Burn Bans

Hi there, readers! This is Cindy, and I am kicking off this week’s series of blogs and podcasts with a discussion of a family favorite…camping. More specifically, I’m talking about camping without a campfire. The drought this summer has meant that many counties in Texas are under burn bans, and that makes a campfire or bonfire quite dangerous as high winds and dry vegetation can quickly carry a single spark and turn it into an out-of-control wildfire. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go camping or that you can’t cook all those yummy camping foods. On this week’s podcast we talk about the multitude of ways you can prepare some of our camping favorites, so tune in (you can listen right here on the blog by clicking over to the “Listen” tab!), and feel free to share your favorite tips either here on the blog or over in our MMC Chat Facebook group.  We’d love to hear from you!

For today’s blog, I will share with you a couple of easy-peasy recipes we used while camping with Girl Scouts. Enjoy!

Download a PDF of Both Recipes!

Quick and Easy Dinners

This week we're talking about quick and easy dinners, which means something a little different in my house. I've been collecting favorite family recipes in a binder (more on that below) which I thought would be a quick weekend activity for our home binder. I am collecting all the recipes for family favorites that we return to often. Originally, I thought it would be a quick weekend activity, however, I have found that it is a more daunting task that I have had to put a lot of work into.

To be honest, I do not use a recipe very often, and when I do, I find myself veering from the directions; I am a free spirit in the kitchen. I have a good palate, comprehend food pairings well, and have enough knowledge of various cooking methods that I can easily create my own recipes from what I have on hand. I am open to learning new skills and techniques, and have great interest in how to make an ethnic dish that I have tried at a restaurant, but I particularly enjoy cooking creations from my head. It is hard to believe, but before I married Travis, I had been feeding myself delicious meals with very little use of recipes for almost 15 years! I had started an extensive collection of recipes, but still found that experimenting was more enjoyable.

Unfortunately, since I don’t get the opportunity to cook dinner as much as I would like these days, I sometimes have to show Travis how to cook something that I am craving. But if I only know how to make it off the top of my head, it can be a real challenge when I am not physically there to show him how to do it. Travis, by comparison, is my exact opposite when it comes to cooking - he needs a recipe for guidance and he sticks to it. He is still learning and honing his skills as the family cook. If I just rattle off instructions to him, he will make something completely different than I was expecting.

As part of my Cultivate What Matters goal in 2022 of creating a Home Binder, I am transcribing the recipes and how-to’s into our home binder so that Travis will have access to them easily. I am also still collecting my mother’s recipes that I loved growing up. I want to share some of the ones that she does not cook as often with Travis and Reyna. They have not experienced her Tuna Casserole, Western Corn and Beef Pie, or Hoppin’ John, all three of which were probably my all time favorites when I was growing up.

There are also new favorites that I want to incorporate. I went to a gathering with craft friends about a year ago, and one of my friends brought in this fresh vegetable and tortellini salad. It was a cold salad that she served with Italian salad dressing on the side. It was so delicious that I decided to go home and replicate it. I have been tinkering with the ingredients ever since, and I love it because it is such a flexible salad where any of the ingredients can be swapped, doubled, reduced, etc. You can get a free download of the recipe card here. 

I wanted to share my update on the Home Binder and thought that also sharing a recipe that I just added to it seemed fitting. Please be sure to check out the Podcast on Wednesday when we talk all about our favorite quick meals. Let me know if you try out my recipe in the comments.

Organization Makes for Quick and Easy Dinners

You may not have noticed, but Amber and I switched things up a bit the last two weeks. We usually post our blogs in a certain order so that the podcast hostess has a blog post on the Monday before the podcast airs. Sometimes things just don’t work out that way, and this week has been one of them. I got upside down and backwards on a couple of big projects and totally failed at getting my blog for this week written in time. Luckily, Amber had hers ready to go, so she was able to swap with me. So in the end, everything worked out okay, but this is exactly the reason I wanted to do a podcast and blog about quick and easy dinners – because sometimes I’m just too darned busy to cook.

On the podcast, each of us named off quite a few recipes that we consider to be quick and easy. They’re the kinds of things that we can rummage through the pantry and find enough ingredients to make in a pinch, or maybe even plan to make when we know we are going to be busy. For instance, every Thursday, I host an all-day-long Zoom meeting with my crafty friends. We work on our crafts and visit just like we did in person before the pandemic. I never want to stop crafting and visiting with my friends to cook dinner, but I do have a husband and niece to feed, and sometimes it’s my turn to cook, so I usually go for something quick and easy so I can get back to the good stuff – crafting. Last week it was tuna salad, but this week I’ll be whipping up those tacos we talked about on the podcast. I like having a large repertoire of things to cook because I get bored eating the same stuff all the time.

One of the things that helps me come up with lots of different options is having a good recipe database. I’ve been collecting recipes for years from books, magazines, and the internet. I literally have boxes and boxes of recipes I’ve saved. Some I’ve cooked, and some I’m not even sure why I saved them. In any case, finding the ones I really like can be a challenge, and I particularly don’t want to spend more time looking for the recipe than I do actually cooking it. That’s why I decided to make a database to collect my recipes.

The form I created for entering my recipes in the database.

A "recipe report" generated by my database with a field for a photo and "ratings" by my family.

You can opt for one of the many recipe software options out there…just do a Google search for “recipe software” and you’ll be sure to find an option to suit your needs.  I started my database years ago, before there were any good software options, and I wanted to be able to customize it to my needs, so I made a simple database in FileMaker Pro. Over the years I’ve created custom layouts and printouts for my recipes, added input fields for my family to “rate” the recipe, and even put a place-holder for a picture in case I ever wanted to “publish” my collection as a printed book. The whole database is searchable by any field, including category, ingredients, source, or even just a specific word. The other day I did a search for “Cheesy” in the title because I couldn’t remember what the recipe was called.

A "List View" of my database, sorted by category.

What’s really nice about having the database is that I can see a running list of all my favorites (only my favorites go in the database), I can sort them by category, and then look quickly down the list of options for something that I can use. It also makes it very easy to print and share a recipe. I shared my tuna casserole with potato chips recipe on our website. You can download a copy here.

Besides looking through a ready-made list of go-to recipes, the other way I prep a quick and easy dinner is by looking through the pantry. Unfortunately, my pantry is tiny, and with 3 adults in the house who have different breakfasts, lunches, and snacks, the pantry gets really full. Sometimes, it gets so full that I can’t even tell what’s in it. Bottles of sauces get shuffled to the back of the shelf, and before you know it, they’ve expired because I didn’t see it there. One of the ways I combat that is to use the free Pantry Check app. As I bring groceries into the house, I simply scan the barcodes, and it adds the item to my inventory list along with the product’s expiration date. Depending on my settings, I can get notifications about items getting ready to expire as well as reminders to update my inventory. And, if I’ve been lax about adding/removing items as I use them (or if I just want a fresh start), I can tell it to clear the inventory. Simple as that. 

List of categories

Items within a category

Oops! These are expired!
Time to toss them out!

For me, staying organized with my recipes and the contents of my pantry is an important part of making sure the meals I cook are quick and easy when I need them to be. How do you store your recipes? Have you used a recipe database? Do you have a go-to system for staying organized in the kitchen? I’d love to hear about it! Comment below, or join us in our MMC Chat on Facebook!

Say Hello to HelloFresh

A few years ago, if you had asked me to tell you how to eat healthy on a budget, I would have laughed in your face. Hi, this is Cindy again, and oddly enough, that’s exactly what I’m here to do! This week we’ve been talking about several different ways to eat healthy on a budget, and I’m here with more info about one I mentioned in the podcast on Wednesday.

For me, one of the biggest obstacles to eating healthy is often the time it takes to prepare a healthy meal. How many times have you come home from work and thought to yourself, “What am I going to make for dinner?” only to decide that you’re too tired to cook, or you’ve still got work to finish, and you just don’t want to spend the time figuring it out and then cooking it. Admit it, it’s a lot faster and often cheaper to order that pizza, or slide through the drive-thru at Taco Bell or McDonalds. I mean, “Dollar Menu”...right?

The answer to that dilemma is always “plan ahead”, but even that takes time. I used to spend at least an hour every Sunday planning out my grocery list for the week; I had to look through the pantry and freezer to decide what’s there that needed to get used before it went bad, and compare it to my recipes to see what I could make out of it. And then once I had my list, I had to go to the store to get the supplies. That could take an hour or more, and more often than not, involved multiple stores! I won’t even mention what happens when I can’t find an ingredient (COVID shortages are real!). Wow! That’s making me tired just thinking about it. It sure makes that pizza sound pretty good right now.

Luckily, budget-friendly can also be time-friendly. My favorite time and budget-friendly option right now is HelloFresh. This is a paid meal service with some excellent healthy options and hearty portions. All of the food comes right to your door, complete with the recipe to prepare a delicious meal. You pick the food, you pick the days and the portions, and they deliver sanity. Seriously. 

Stuffed Bell Peppers with Couscous is one of our favorites

What makes this service healthy is the choices. HelloFresh offers your choice of at least 25 different meal options every week, many of which are low calorie, carb-smart, and even vegetarian. The portions are appropriately sized and quite filling. And best of all it is mostly fresh ingredients—not canned veggies or processed meats — just good food. 

I signed up for HelloFresh (no, this is not a paid endorsement) at a Pinners Conference in 2019. I was curious and thought I’d give it a try. The food looked delicious, the prep work looked easy, and the price was right -- the average plan costs about $10/person per meal. I didn’t think hubby would like it much, but, hey, he wasn’t the one spending all his time sweating over the hot stove.

I was blown away by my first box. The ingredients were fresh and portioned to the exact amount I needed (no measuring), the instructions were simple and straight-forward (no figuring out whether to cook the veggies first or last), and the food was delicious. The meals were also scalable; I could add a third plate by slightly increasing a few ingredients or adding another side. This proved helpful when my niece was home for dinner once per week, since I had only ordered meals for two people for most nights.

I started with three meals a week for two people, and it took a huge burden off my shoulders when it came to cooking meals. Hubby stepped in to help me one night early on, and we discovered that we actually enjoyed cooking these meals together. The instructions are so precise and well written that we can work together effortlessly without stepping on each other’s toes, and the time together in the kitchen has been a great way for us to unwind after work and share the stories of our day without unloading on each other. Now it’s a ritual to cook our HelloFresh together, and then we cook on other nights by turns (and we still do take out), so neither of us feels like the burden of meals is on one person’s shoulders. And because we plan our meals in advance (up to 6 weeks!), we've eliminated a lot of the planning and shopping time that used to bog me down.

HelloFresh is also eco-friendly.  According to their website, the carbon footprint of HelloFresh meals is 25% lower than meals cooked at home with store-bought groceries. Most of the packaging is recyclable, and everything is shipped “carbon-offset”. Oh, and there’s less food waste -- none of that buying a whole package of celery to make one meal only to have it go to waste in my fridge because I didn’t need it for anything else. If the recipe calls for two scallions, they send me two scallions, not a whole bunch.

Another great thing about this service is it is really easy to customize to my needs. I can increase or decrease my meals whenever I want. I can put them on hold, or even cancel them completely -- there are no commitments. These days we’re down to two meals a week for four people, having switched our plan to accommodate the revolving door of a niece, my mother, and a friend that have stayed with us the last two years. These meals for four run me about $80 plus tax, and it is totally worth the time and sanity it brought back to my life. My son, Steven, took me up on the offer of a free box early on, and he loved it so much, he’s been a subscriber for almost two years, too. He’s single, so he orders 3 meals for two people every week, which allows him to cook one night then have leftovers the next, all week long, so he only does one carry-out night a week. For a single person, that’s awesome! And even better, the simple instructions and great recipes have actually helped him learn to cook. Heck, even my husband and I, both highly experienced cooks, have learned a cool thing or two.

But really, my biggest take away from this experience has been this — time is money, and for someone who is self-employed like me, every minute I spend in the kitchen is time I’m not working on my business or doing something I truly love. My time is really valuable to me. If I can still eat healthy without spending more than I would spend on traditional meals, then I’m all for it. 

If you think you might be interested in trying HelloFresh (or one of the other meal delivery services), I encourage you to give it a try. HelloFresh offers a wide variety of meal options, including vegetarian, low-carb, and low-calorie foods, all for the same price, and you get to choose every single meal they send you.  You can also choose to up-level a meal or two for a set fee, but I’ve found the regular choices to be quite sufficient.

Have you tried HelloFresh or another meal service? Share your experience in the comments!
And if you’d like a recommendation or two, head on over to the Facebook group to continue the conversation!