I've done this a few times now, and I feel like I've always been showing fairly best-case scenario months. This month is a little different! This is what cooking for my family looks like when we're traveling for a week, there's a big holiday, and I've been alternating across periods of injury (start of the month), illness (late month), and being completely overwhelmed (pretty much the whole month!). Many of these dinners were picked solely for easiness level.
November 1: Gnocchi with corn and miso and broccoli on the side. I made this in the afternoon and then it was prefectly ready for us after we finished seeing Neal Shusterman at the Orem Library for Miles.
November 2: Cauliflower soup and onion poppy-seed focaccia. Another thing to make early so it was ready after dance!
November 3: I was in the middle of making an apple cake and getting ingredients out for my carrot ramen when I got a text informing me that Molly had invited a friend over to bake after school. Which was 10 minutes away. I had to shelve my apple cake while they made kitchen sink blondies, and then my kitchen was a disaster during prime dinner-cooking hours so we got burritos instead.
November 4: Packing for vacation and getting all my grading done was very stressful. I had no energy to make the pretzels I had planned on so we ended up with a very casual dinner of quesadillas for Gerrit and the kids and hummus and crackers for me.
November 5: We got Noodles and Company after our long drive to Disneyland. It was not great but it was very convenient.
November 6: A whole array of skewers, hummus, and breadsticks for lunch, juice and a sausage wrap for a snack, and then pizza, salad, and pasta for dinner in Disneyland.
November 7: Mac and cheese cone and chili cone for lunch, popcorn, churros, and shawarma for snacks, and then a great dinner that I have no pictures of because people ate most of it while I was in lines. We did birria, street corn, beef curry in a bread bowl, popping yuzu lemonade, potstickers, chicken udon, a Baymax macaron, and a brownie sundae.
November 8: Boysen apple freeze and pretzel twist for a morning snack, a cheeseburger and BBQ chicken for lunch with brownies and peanut butter squares, and the best dinner with muffaletta, beef po'boy, green gumbo, macaroni and cheese, red beans and rice, cornbread, and a lemon beignet.
Mickey gingerbread!
November 9th: We ate spaghetti, burgers, mushroom soup, and an enormous Princess Peach cupcake at Toad's Cafe, a frozen butterbeer in Hogsmeade, and then we had ice cream samplers for dinner at McConnell's
November 10th: We stopped for lunch and pastries at Farmstead in St. George, and then one of the nicest things I have ever done for myself is to have this butternut-lentil soup and a loaf of multigrain bread from various October dinners in the freezer for myself when we got home. All we had to do was thaw it.
November 11th: Kale caesar salad with soft-boiled eggs and corn muffins. This is so easy and a crowd pleaser.
November 12th: I also had this pork spoon roast in the freezer. I was going to serve it with kale and parmesan polenta, but we found out that we had some young neighbors coming for the day so I served it with buttered noodles instead. Elliott said that was better anyway!
I also had this chocolate hazelnut swirl cake, but it came out of the oven after our neighbors had to go back home.
November 13: A lovely picture from the magazine of the tofu mushroom lettuce wraps that I forgot to take a picture of myself. I've found that it always works better to have tortillas available for the kids, because lettuce wraps can get really leaky.
November 14: I went to a Relief Society activity so I did not get to eat any of these lion's head meatball burgers (basically just an Asian pork burger with slaw) but I was very jealous. I had soup and it was fine.
I made myself falafel salad for lunch that week and ate it the whole week.
November 15: This picture of Caesar salad French bread pizza is also from the cookbook! We also have gooey butter cake ice cream and that was great.
November 16: These shawarma chickpea and cauliflower pitas were another dinner chosen because they would work well if I made it in the afternoon and then we ate it after dance.
November 17: I was going to make bagel bread with creamy chicken, broccoli, and rice soup. I made the bagel bread in the morning when thigns were going well. Things got very hectic afterwards and we ended up with pasta and jarred sauce instead.
November 18: Everything fell apart and we ate frozen dumplings! Molly was going to make cookies while I was doing some Christmas shopping. She accidentally forgot the flour, so we had a large mess, plus I also needed to make new cookies, so at that point I was not making any sort of dinner.
November 19: We brought pumpkin gingersnaps and chips to our family reunion, which also had several veggie trays and a variety of Papa Murphy's pizza.
November 20: Turkey burgers with pickled cranberries and sweet potatoes. The pickled cranberries were very strong but the burgers were good in general.
November 21: Roasted vegetables with white beans, arugula, and farro. I needed something easy since all the holiday cooking was coming up.
November 22: Gerrit put these bo ssam (Korean BBQ pork) sandwiches in the slow cooker for me while I was making pies and it was a great decision.
November 23: My contribution to Thanksgiving was roasted carrots, cranberry sauce, pretzel stuffing, brussels sprout bake with potato chip topping, sweet potato souffle, cheese plate, and seven pies (pumpkin, pecan, coconut caramel, buttermilk, raspberry Nutella, pear-cranberry-ginger, and banoffee)
November 24: I don't cook on the day after Thanksgiving. Everyone had leftovers of their choice.
November 25: It's the pumpkin pancakes I was going to make weeks and weeks earlier!
November 26: Everyone loved the crispy beef and bean wraps and roasted brussels sprouts.
November 27: These are bok choy peanut noodles. I didn't have quite enough bok choy so they also have regular cabbage, but they were still pretty good.
November 28: I loved this curried vegetable skillet pot pie much more than I thought I would. The potatoes in the filling were especially good and the topping looks fancy but it's just a sheet of puff pastry.
November 29: This top picture is speculoos babka, which smelled astonishingly good and was much more successful than the first time I tried to make babka. We had it with steak and corn tacos, which were picked to be easy.
November 30: I made klobasniky (sausage kolaches) because they would sit well during dance. I don't know if I used the wrong sausage or what happened, but the bottoms on these did not cook and then we had an elaborate system of trying to reheat them in the oven and the microwave after they'd already been out of the oven for three hours. Not so fun!
Look, we could even see him! This is not the norm for orchestra concerts.
