In the kitchen

In this episode, I share some of my meal planning strategies, including how I handle kid-filled weeks and kid-free weeks. I share some of my favorite cooking strategies, and why I prefer templates over recipes. See what ends up on our frequent dinner rotation and my top three most used kitchen appliances.

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Transcript

Welcome to the Get Yourself Together Chica Podcast, the show that helps you thrive, or, you know, sometimes just survive. I'm Rebecca Fernandez. In each episode, we dive deep into something that has an impact on our lives as women, whether that's money or love, motherhood or friendship, our careers, or just making space for joy.

This is episode number 20, and today, we are headed for my kitchen. We're gonna talk about some of my planning strategies for cooking and meal prep, how I handle kid weeks and kid-free weeks. I'll share some of my favorite cooking strategies, especially why I prefer templates over recipes. I'll also tell you what ends up on our frequent dinner rotation and what some of those templates look like. And I will share my three top most used kitchen appliances.

Be sure to visit the show notes at GetYourselfTogetherChica.com/podcast for links to anything that we talk about today. And you can email me at podcast @ getyourselftogetherChica.com to let me know what you thought of today's episode. 

But first, I wanna tell you what's been blowing my mind this week. I just about halfway finished reading the book, Pathfinders by J.L. Collins, which is a personal finance book focused on financial independence. And he made reference in there to a concept that he took from another book Loaded by Sarah Newcomb, which is framing up rather than “needs versus wants,” framing up your financial purchases or desired purchases into “needs and strategies.” 

And I thought, "This sounds familiar. Where have I heard this needs versus strategies before?" And it came to me today, "Oh yeah, that is from Marshall Rosenberg's Non-Violent Communication." 

And the idea is people are always trying to communicate about their needs. And if they frame them as wants, the need gets buried, but there actually is a legitimate need behind anything that we want. It just isn't always what we think it is. And so how this applies to personal finance, I thought was really interesting, which is, let's say that you are saying to yourself, I wanna buy a new car or I need a new car. Okay, well, what if the actual underlying need (and what is this a strategy to fill) is that you need a mode of transportation? Because that's probably gonna lead you to buy one type of vehicle. 

If what you need is a sense of approval and you wanna give off a sign that you've made it so that people will feel good about you, so they'll admire you... Well, then buying a car is a strategy to fill a very different kind of need in that case. And one might purchase a very different car. 

And I think what's helpful about framing things up in this way is you don't deny the things that you want. You're just more thoughtful about: am I pursuing a strategy to fill a need that I haven't even articulated to myself here? So if I'm feeling like I wanna go out to eat with my friends, what is the need that I am deploying this as a strategy to fill? Am I hungry and I don't have any food in my house? Okay, well, you know, going out to eat with friends right now might not actually not be the best strategy to fill that need, if it's taking me further away from some of my other goals. 

But maybe what I actually want is to spend time with my friends and I might decide, yeah, that's a good use of my money or I might decide, you know, I actually need to do some investing in building up other ways of spending time with my friends that don't cost so much money and aren't so bad for our health. 

So I just think that's kind of a mind-blowing concept to not be so judgmental about our desires for different things but to recognize, deep down we all have all different types of needs. And our physical urgent needs are not the only needs that we have. And we want to be thoughtful about what strategies we deploy to fill some of those higher level needs like acceptance approval being valued, because often buying something isn't really the optimal strategy to meet those needs anyway. 

I think there are two reasons why this is blowing my mind this week. One, I love the new framing and the new frame of reference for thinking about, you know, “needs versus wants.” But two, I love the application of this concept from nonviolent communication, which is how do you communicate what it is you truly need so that other people can meet you halfway and help you fill that need? I love how they can apply something from that domain and take it to a totally different place which, is how do you think about your own personal finances? Super cool. 

All right, let's jump in and go into the kitchen and talk about planning strategies, cooking strategies, et cetera. I love when other people share things with me about their morning routines, their rituals, how they approach meal prep or meal planning. And so I thought you might find it interesting to get a glimpse into my kitchen. 

So the first thing to know is that I do this pretty differently on weeks when I have my two teenagers here and on weeks when it's just me and my partner, in and out. And especially I do this differently when it's long stretches of time where we have his two teenagers here as well because four teenagers takes a little extra prep work to feed and plan meals around. 

But most of the time I am planning for just me, or me and my kids, with the occasional other dinner visitor, including my partner. 

So my general planning strategy is if it's just me, I will plan a handful of meals but I try to choose things that I like a lot and that freeze well because I recognize I'm gonna be more tempted to just eat out instead of cooking which is not very great for my health or my wallet. 

And I need something that I'm not gonna get sick of. I'm less inclined to wanna eat the same thing over and over again. So I try to cook something like a soup or stew or beans, something that will be very good the first day and then I can maybe have it again for lunch and the rest goes in the freezer. And I'll do that if I'm really organized and on top of things, I will actually do that maybe just twice, three times if I'm feeling really fancy on the weeks when I don't have kids and then I will rotate in and out other things from the freezer from previous weeks. I'm not always that organized but on a good day, that's how I do it. 

With the kids, my planning strategy is pretty different. So lately we have been doing a Friday family meeting. Friday is the day that they come over to my house and change from their dad’s. And so we will sit down after school. I'll usually have some kind of snack there so that we all can connect and I can hear about their week, and we have some food to eat and then we start to map out our week. 

So I will get the calendar out and usually my daughter has the neatest, smallest handwriting so she will make note of all the activities that are going on that week. Does she have Girl Scouts, does either kid have music practice after school, do I have my group, do I have yoga? So we all kind of have our own busy lives and I wanna make sure that we know going into the week where is everybody gonna be at dinner prep and dinner eating hour. 

So once we've mapped the week out, then we'll start to look at, okay, what nights are perfect for all of us to get in there and cook something fun? Or maybe it’s just me as cook and what nights do I need something fast and easy? Or something that can be repurposed from the night before. And lately also often the kids, if I am tied up one evening, the two of them will cook dinner and so we'll think about, okay, what meals would they wanna cook on their night? Or sometimes even just one kid will cook dinner if the rest of us are gonna be in and out or tied up. So that's been a really cool development. 

There are a couple things I'm also thinking about as we're planning that out, which is I'm always trying to make sure that we are prepping a little bit extra as we're making a meal, for things that will become what I think of as “make your own” components later in the week. So these are things that you can reuse them in parts in other meals. 

So maybe I will make twice as many of a vegetable when I'm making it, knowing that we can put it in burritos and bowls and other things like that during the week, especially for lunch or more informal meals where I don't have something planned. The idea being to prep it and cook it once and get twice the mileage out of it. And it's pretty simple to do that actually for vegetables or beans or grains. The key is whatever flavorings and seasoning you put in it, keep it pretty simple. So salt, pepper, garlic, onion, those are pretty safe spices and herbs that will go with anything. And then you can add more seasoning in over top of that when it's actually time to use it. So we do that quite a bit. 

I also make sure that we write our menu and what day we're eating what things on a little whiteboard that goes on the side of the fridge. That keeps everybody from having to ask me what's for dinner. It reminds me in the morning when I look at the fridge, like, Is there anything I need to make sure I get done earlier in the day today? So, you know, do I need to soak something? Am I gonna need a little extra time in the evening? Is my dinner plan actually a disaster… And I need to rework it because something has come up? That sort of thing. 

One of the general principles that I follow is I save complicated recipes and new recipes for weekends. I enjoy cooking, but I do not enjoy cooking on weeknights when I feel rushed and I'm in over my head. So if we're gonna do something complicated, we're gonna do something new if the kids request something that we're not used to making, then that is perfect for Friday night, Saturday or Sunday. 

I also try to have at least one, if not two, emergency pantry meals on hand. So that could be a frozen vegan gluten-free pizza because we have some dietary restrictions in this house. That could be pasta with, you know, marinara sauce, all in the pantry. It could be a box of frozen leftover soup that I've put in the freezer from a previous week. It could be maybe a grilled vegan cheese and a quick tomato soup. But the idea is have at least one or two sort of emergency meals that can be pulled together in 15 minutes or less. That saves us many, many a run to Moe’s, or I guess for some families it would be other types of fast food, because it's gonna be faster and less expensive to just make it now. You know, if the recipe gets blown up, if something's gone moldy or gone bad in the fridge, or we just run out of time, we always have a plan B on hand. So that's my planning strategy. 

When it comes to strategies for cooking, I am a very strong proponent of using templates rather than recipes. And so I'll share some of my favorite templates with you in a minute so you get a feel for what I mean by that. But what I'm constantly doing is I'm looking at multiple recipes that are kind of similar and sometimes even at restaurant dishes and I'm sort of deconstructing them to figure out what is the basic underlying template for this that I could reuse many times over whether I have all the individual ingredients or the recipe in front of me or not. 

So some of our favorite templates, one is what I think of as pasta plus. So that is some form of pasta and then I will typically add at least one vegetable so it could be broccoli, could be asparagus, it could be roasted butternut squash, just something that goes nice with pasta. And I will often add either some kind of cooked bean, white beans, chickpeas, there's lots of beans that go well with pasta or maybe some cubes of tofu and then some kind of sauce. So it might be marinara sauce from a jar 'cause that's easy and everyone likes it. It could be something like maybe like an olive oil, garlic and lemon sauce that I just throw together very quickly in the pan. Could be something fancy like a vegan cheese sauce like you might put on macaroni and cheese but that's the basic kind of template. And I know, okay, I know how to cook these beans, I know how to cook the tofu, I know how to cook the vegetable and I can look up the recipe for sauce if needed. It all comes together pretty nicely. 

So that can produce anything from an Italian meal to a very sort of comfort food like macaroni and cheese with broccoli. That can give us something Asian like peanut noodles. One of our favorites there is to make the rice noodles, make a peanut sauce which is about a million Thai peanut sauces on the internet you can look up and customize to your liking. And then we will often cook some mushrooms. My son introduced me to you can just throw a bag of coleslaw mix, no sauce or anything, just the cabbage and carrots and whatnot. You can throw that right in the pan and it melts beautifully into the peanut noodles and they're wonderful. Sometimes we'll do broccoli or cauliflower or carrots. I might throw a handful of edamame in there or some tofu if I'm feeding more people than just me and that's a wonderful one. And it's also really good reheated the next day. So or cold, I like it cold as well. If you're gonna eat it cold, I would say it's really good if you put some of those spicy, spicy crushed pepper on top of it. So that's pasta plus. 

The next one is tacos or burritos or some variation of the two could be, like a burrito bowl, et cetera. So if you think about Moe’s, Chipotle, Qdoba, those types of restaurants, they have really mastered this concept of, like it's the basic template you put in it, what you wanna put in it. 

So for us, if you haven't figured out by now, we don't eat meat and we very rarely eat seafood. So most of what we do is plant-based. But for us, that means I will typically prepare one vegetable that goes in the taco or burrito. Cauliflower is a favorite, but almost any vegetable will work. I might make two vegetables if I'm feeling fancy or I have extra veggies on hand or if somebody at the table really doesn't care for one of the vegetables. For example, my partner does not like bell peppers but a lot of our kids love them. So if I'm making bell peppers, I'll throw him a bone and make him some other vegetable that can go with the tacos as well. 

And then I will put some kind of protein in it. So that could be some kind of bean, really. Any kind of bean will work, could be lentils, it could be tofu. I have also from time to time, we might do shrimp if we're feeling like it's a special occasion or a fish. You can use quinoa as a protein. There are quite a few recipes out there for how to kind of season it up and it makes in tomato sauce and some tacos seasoning, et cetera. And it actually turns into a fantastic taco filling. It's kind of ground meat-like, I guess. 

I like to make some kind of sauce to go with tacos or burritos. So that might be a cashew-based mayonnaise type sauce like a chipotle mayonnaise made out of cashews or it could be a cashew sour cream. That's very popular in our house. I might use something from a jar if I'm in a hurry and we've got something in the fridge leftover. So really any kind of sauce will do and you don't have to season it all kind of text-mex style either think about places where you've had fusion, what do they call it, cuisine fusion tacos. So they could be Korean style tacos. They could be any number of other influences depending on what sauce you have on hand. 

And then usually I do some kind of grain to go with that. So either brown rice or I mentioned quinoa, I might prepare it actually more like a grain than as a protein. But technically quinoa is a pseudo cereal. So it is more on the protein side of the house than on the carbide side of the house. So if you can't eat a lot of carbs and or you need more protein, have a look at quinoa. It's actually quite good. 

So the next two templates that I make quite often are bowl templates. So either an Asian bowl or a Mediterranean bowl. And again, think of some of your favorite restaurants, places like Cava, do really good with the Mediterranean bowls. Pretty much any Asian restaurant you go to will have a meal that essentially is an Asian bowl. But for us, that is, there's some kind of bed to the bowl. So for, it's kind of an Asian inspired bowl. We typically do brown rice. If it is some kind of Mediterranean bowl, then we will do quinoa or rice or greens, maybe lentils. There's a lot of options there. 

Then there will be some sort of sauce. So I have a document where I save lots and lots of sauce recipes anytime I try one that I like. And it's pretty simple and easy and healthy. It goes into the mix. There are also plenty of sauces you can buy too, if you don't particularly care about how much sodium or sugar unhealthy ingredients are in it. Then there's plenty and a pinch that can be purchased. You can also make a very simple curry sauce. So there's lots of options there. 

Same as the tacos and burritos I'll make one, two, maybe three veggies if I feel really fancy. And I will make some tofu or edamame if it's an Asian bowl. If it's Mediterranean, I will typically do some dips. So I might have some hummus. I might buy or make garlic toum, which is a very tasty white garlic dip, maybe baba canoe, which is actually easier to make than you might think. Or again, you can buy a lot of those things. I often will go through, if I go into Trader Joe's, over in the dip section, there are all kinds of interesting little things that can be repurposed almost an entire week. So if we're having tacos, I might use some of that garlic sauce there. If we're making Mediterranean bowls, some of it might go there. And then if I'm not watching closely, one of my teenagers will eat it by the spoonful out of the container anyway. So it rarely goes to waste. 

Another template that we use a lot that always seems to surprise people who are not vegetarian is we eat a tremendous number of beans, especially dried beans. So I have a lot of different ways that I make beans and rice or beans on toast. And just about any kind of bean you can imagine. So we will do black beans, pinto beans, black eye peas, red beans, kidney beans, yellow canary beans or Puerto Rican beans, lime beans, the little ones, lime beans, the big ones. I'm a member of the Rancho Gordo Bean Club, which means every quarter, I get a shipment of these really unusual heirloom beans. And I never know what I'm going to get. So we're always being introduced to new ones. 

So if you think of beans as one food, as in “what we should need beans tonight, because we just ate them last night?” Let me encourage you to go place an order from Rancho Gordo and open your eyes to the world of beans out there and how different they all taste from each other. Back when I ate meat, I generally thought of vegetables as one fuzzy category. And if I had one on the table, they were all kind of interchangeable to me. And I definitely thought of beans that way. But they actually have a lot of difference from one variety to the next. So to us eating lime beans for dinner one night and then having kidney beans the next night, those are two very different meals. 

So typically the way I prepare beans is I will do them in my pressure cooker, the Instant Pot. I'll talk more about that in a little bit when I get to favorite appliances. If I'm desperate, I might use canned ones, just rinsed off, but it's really no trouble to make them myself and they do taste a lot better. But I'll prepare them that way. We put all kinds of seasonings in them. 

I might cook up a bag of some sort of baby greens, like maybe spinach or kale, and mix that in with the beans for those who like that, especially if I chop it pretty small then it, you know, sort of masquerades as an herb and everybody eats it. I might chop up a tomato and put it in there. 

I might saute some broccoli and put that on the side and serve that up with, there's some crusty bread or a bowl of brown rice, maybe corn bread. Sometimes I'll make arepas, which is like a Venezuelan kind of corn pita pocket, but basically any kind of carb alongside some beans and we are a happy family. 

I also love soups. So I have a basic chowder template that I've come up with and depending on what I put in it, that becomes potato chowder, corn chowder, sort of cheesy vegetable chowder. Mine is based around cashews, raw cashews make a really nice vegan chowder, but certainly if you eat dairy, then chowder recipes are even easier to prepare. 

And the way that I came up with that template was just like I said in the beginning of this episode, I just looked at five or six different vegan chowder recipes side by side and I wrote down, okay, what are the core ingredients across these and then what are the variations? So if you look in my family cookbook where I scroll down our favorite things, there is a potato, a potato soup or potato chowder recipe and at the bottom of it, there's all kinds of variations. Here's how to turn it into corn chowder or broccoli with cheese soup or that sort of thing. So you certainly can do the same. 

And then also have a basic soup that becomes chickpea noodle soup, chickpea and rice, veggie with beyond sausage, kale and bean, all kinds of sort of clear vegetable tomatoey type soups and those are always a hit in this house, especially if they come with some fresh bread, which we like to make sometimes. My son also makes the most excellent gluten-free focaccia and so that is a big hit when he makes that, we usually eat too much of it. So we don't make it very often. 

So that brings me to my three favorite kitchen appliances. Number one, if I have to rank them, would be my Vitamix blender. No, they did not sponsor this podcast. I have had this Vitamix since, well, it's been 10 years now. I actually just looked it up the other day and I wanted one for 10 years before that. I burned out four different blenders in the decade before I finally bought my Vitamix and I absolutely adore it. I actually wanted one ever since I was a kid and I saw the ads for the Vitamix in Mother Earth News magazine, which my dad was a collector of. So highly recommend if you use your blender a lot, if you make smoothies, if you grind up raw nuts quite a bit, like I do, I put almonds and I put cashews in a lot of the things we cook. If you want the perfect green smoothie, it has no chunks of spinach in it. Many, many other reasons why, but I love my Vitamix, use it probably every day. 

My second favorite kitchen appliance is absolutely my electric pressure cooker, the Instant Pot. I use that. I would say at least three times a week. So I make quinoa in it. I make brown rice as much faster to make in it. I make steel cut oats in it, rolled oats even 'cause it's just less messy. I will, many times, put a soup in it and just kind of let the soup do its thing. So basically, I'll just prepare it like I would on the stove top, but then I will leave it on saute and then I can switch it to warm when it's done and it is a little bit less temperamental than dealing with a stove. 

I also certainly use it to cook all manner of dried beans. So that is often where I'm pulling it out during the week is for making some beans. And you actually don't have to pre-soak your beans if you use an Instant Pot. I do still prefer to do it that way. I think they taste a little better, but it's not a requirement. And there are lots of ways you can quick soak them using the Instant Pot too. 

So, and then my third favorite appliance is a newcomer to my kitchen. It is my air fryer. And I was skeptical when these first came on the market, I thought is this gonna be one of those appliances that I see by the dozen at yard sales? And I do see a lot of them. I do see a lot of the Instant Pot too, but I use my air fryer at least twice a week. It's my favorite way to cube up and cook tofu. So I just cube it up and put it right in there. And it's perfect and doesn't soak up a bunch of oil like tofu on the stove can. And it is also my preferred way to make any kind of French fries, whether those are frozen or just making them from potatoes with a little bit of oil. It's just much easier than dealing with the cleanup that comes with oven roasting things. And I think they turn out a lot nicer. So I don't use it for that many different things, but for us, we eat a lot of tofu in particular. It's really nice to be able to whip that up quickly. And sometimes I'll do other veggies in there too. 

All right, so that brings me to my go-to smoothie templates. I have talked about this before, but just very quickly, I have a smoothie pretty much every morning for breakfast. It's one of my favorite things to do when I get off of a plane after travel. I miss my smoothies. And I make them in the same basic way. I have essentially three different templates. 

So the base of any of my smoothies is at least one whole banana that's been frozen and peeled, by the way, don't put the peel in there. A big handful of raw or natural almonds. If you don't have a Vitamix, you probably need to soak those overnight so you don't destroy your blender. And a small handful of raw buckwheat groats. I like that for fiber. It seems to do good things for my stomach. So that's kind of the base. 

To that, for my berry smoothie, I will add a cup or two of frozen berries, typically strawberries and blueberries, but really any kind will do. And then just enough water to blend it up. Sometimes I will add in one peeled chopped orange, or maybe a little bit of peanut butter, and then I add goji berries into that 'cause they're good for your vision. So that's my berry smoothie. 

The green smoothie starts with that same base of a frozen banana and some almonds and some raw buckwheat groats. But to that, I will add maybe sometimes I'll add another half of a banana frozen, and then I will add a cup or so of frozen pineapple and mango, and another peeled, halved orange, and maybe one or two cups of some kind of baby greens, usually baby spinach or baby kale. And frozen is fine. When the bag, I feel like it's been in the fridge a little too long. I will move it into the freezer and it becomes smoothie-full. I also put in about a tablespoon of flax seed, I like what that does to the green smoothie. 

And my last one is my most dessert like, and that is my chocolate peanut butter milkshake smoothie, sometimes with a little bit of coffee flavor too. So in that case, I use that same base of whole frozen banana, but I put more frozen banana in there. At least two whole frozen peeled bananas, sometimes two and a half if I want a really big one. I also put in that same big handful of raw almonds, and a little handful of raw buckwheat grotesque. Then I add a very big generous spoonful of peanut butter, tablespoon of flax seed, and at least two tablespoons of cocoa powder. If I am feeling like I want a little kick or I just happen to have some leftover coffee, if that is cooled off, I will add maybe a half a cup or more of leftover cooled coffee to it. And then I fill up the blender enough to let it blend smoothie with either soy milk or almond milk or oat milk and blend it up. 

It makes the most amazing chocolate peanut butter, banana, coffee, frappuccino smoothie thing. It's like a milkshake. I mean, at least if it's been many years since you've had an actual milkshake, I don't know if it actually tastes like a milkshake. It does to me. 

Anyway, so that's a little glimpse inside my kitchen. I hope it's been helpful to you. 

Well, it's time to tell you what's been bringing me joy right now. This week, we booked a trip to Spain, which as you know, going on an international trip, actually two of them with my partner has been on my 24 in 24 list and one of them needed to be to a Spanish-speaking country. So I'm excited about that one, ticking a couple boxes there and we are gonna go to Madrid this time where neither of us has been before and we're gonna fly into Madrid out of Barcelona, can't wait so excited to be there. 

We are also going to be having our March date night at one of our favorite restaurants in the whole world in Barcelona, Botafumeiro. They have amazing paella, we cannot wait, already put down my deposit to secure our reservation because it's not easy to get in there. 

Well, Chicas, that's all for today. For more episodes or links to the resources I might have mentioned, visit GetYourselfTogetherChica.com/podcast. If you liked today's episode, please share it with your friends, post it on social media. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss any episodes. I would value so much if you would leave a review on Apple Podcasts or whatever app you listen to podcasts. Until next time, Chicas.