This week, I’m trying a new method (based on a plan from a book I picked up used on Amazon, Katie Brown’s Weekends) to decrease our meal preparation issues during the work week and to also try to get us to eat more veggies, less meat. Don’t get me wrong, we LOVE meat. That’s sort of the problem. In Texas, steak is about the same price as chicken or other “more healthy” meats (and both are quite cheap), so which do you think we get? If you said the animal that goes Moo and tastes like heaven, you are right.

Since moving to Austin, we eat meat (usually beef) at almost every dinner. And, since we all also eat small amounts at lunch (hello, leftovers), it’s probably a bit of overkill in terms of fat, cholesterol, whatever. Really, I’m just trying to talk myself into this new plan, can you tell? I can’t even tell what I’m typing anymore, as the tears of thinking no-meat are welling in my eyes.

Anyways, the deal is after dinner yesterday (probably a bit counterintuitive, but it works out better for me this way) I roasted a whole pan of vegetables. Squash, mushrooms, asparagus, sweet potato, carrots, some onion…you get the idea. I can’t remember the last time I saw so many veggies in a big roasting pan at my house with nothing else, so even getting that far was clear progress. It wasn’t as much of a pain in the rump as I expected (obviously, the roasting part isn’t hard, but there is some prep work since everything needed to be washed, chopped, tossed in olive oil, etc.) We’re talking MINIMAL work (my favorite kind during the evening). I roasted everything at 375 for 35 minutes and voila! We’ve got our main course ingredients ready for this week.

Tonight we had frittata with some of the mushrooms, carrots, onion and asparagus in it. It was terrific and even Benjamin cleaned his plate. Tomorrow we will use some more of the veggies in a primavera pasta dish that uses red raspberry vinaigrette for a sauce base and Thursday evening we’ll make stir fry with whatever’s left over.

I don’t know that we’ll do this every week, but if we can aim at once a month and gradually branch out to every other week, I think it would make a pretty positive difference in our diets. We usually like to think of ourselves as healthy eaters because we pretty much make everything from scratch and tend to use mostly organic, mostly healthful ingredients (okay, okay, cheese is a major exception–but I am NOT cutting that out). But of course, we could do that with veggies as center stage. In theory.

(Side note: I didn’t know much about Katie Brown before this book but she does have some good recipes. Check out her Web site and Podcasts at http://www.katiebrown.com/ if you are interested.)

Do you have any dinner hacks to share? If so, please share ’em!

Let’s get roasted,
Freckles