recipes – Naphtalia

In the past nine months or so, I have been “backwards meal planning.” I have been simply writing down what we eat each day (save a couple months of not) in attempts to eventually create a full year meal plan for our family. I made tabs in a spreadsheet for each month and marked feast days and birthdays, plugging in the things we do each year for that feast/birthday. Eventually, I will have the year filled, can edit at will and print a month’s meals at a time to post to the refrigerator.

I knew that we were eating the same things over and over and that we tended to eat certain things at certain times of the year and on certain holidays. I figured I might as well write it all down and see what the details really are. I found there is plenty of variety. No one grows too picky and I am learning better what my family really enjoys eating. They are good eaters, so there are plenty of options. Planning ahead in this backwards way really gives me solid information as a homemaker.

Before I go today, I’ll share a funny anecdote. In January, my husband decided he wanted us to be gluten free without leaning on gluten free substitutes (GF pastas and breads) for various reasons. This was a bit of a blow to me, but I agreed.

Actually, I told him that was fine with me, but I would need his help meal planning. Meal planning is a burden to me after planning over a thousand meals a year every year for a dozen years. I felt like I was finally really succeeding in cooking meals the family liked and gluten free was about to throw a wrench in it. He agreed to plan with me.

So one day we sat down and he opened an AI program on his computer!! What?! I had not thought of doing that. It felt a little like cheating, but we prompted the AI anyway. It gave us a meal plan that was good, but not quite what we were looking for. It was just giving us lots of quinoa, hummus and lettuce wraps over and over. Nice things to eat, but we didn’t feel that was sustainable long term with our large family and hungry, growing children. I mean, there was no bacon–a naturally gluten free option.

We continued to adjust our prompt until we landed on ideas that worked for us. The final prompt? 1960’s middle class America, gluten free. We found the bacon, ham steaks, orange slices, potato salad, and much more. This was enough to get us going and we have been successfully gluten free this year. I will say, there are many other naturally gluten free meals that it did not list that we do eat on a regular basis. Things like pad thai, chana masala, and tacos. These are all yummy, filling meals our children enjoy.

If you are struggling with meal planning, have you considered doing it backwards or using AI to help you? What else do you do to help lighten the burden of 1,095 meals a year?

above: my Cobb salad. I love serving salad on this giant platter. It’s beautiful and enticing for the children.

One day I was sitting at the dining room table with my sister, actually a rare event, and we were eating bread. We were eating this delicious, salty, soft on the inside, hard on the outside, perfect French bread that she had made that afternoon while I was at work. We wanted to eat all of it and not leave any for her poor husband who was working late that night. So we did. But don’t worry, we made more. I mean, I didn’t know how to make it, so how else was I going to learn?

Here now, I will share with you one of the easiest, most make-your-life-better recipes I have ever found. The hardest part is remembering to do the next step and having yeast on hand.

Four Easy Ingredients:
2 cups of flour (bread flour is best, but not necessary)
2 1/4 teaspoons of yeast
1 (or for my taste, 3/4) Tablespoon of salt
1 cup of hot water at 130 degrees Fahrenheit

*It is important that the water be at or just under 130 degrees Fahrenheit because if it’s not, the yeast won’t activate and the bread won’t rise. So, invest in a thermometer. You’ll use it all the time! 🙂

Twelve Easy Steps:
1. Combine dry ingredients, including the yeast; mix them well with a whisk and then put away all metal utensils.

2. Add the hot water gradually while you stir the dry ingredients. The dough may be a little dry around the edges at this point. That’s okay. The kneading process will mix in the rest of the liquid.

3. Knead the dough for 10 minutes in an fun and appropriate manner. You could ninja it, pizza guy it, spin it, toss it, sideways toss it, etc. I like a circular rolling knead and ninja tossing to knead. The bread should gradually and noticeably get softer as you knead. It should feel like freshly made play-dough, if you’ve ever made that.

4. Spray your big bowl with non-stick spray and put the lump of dough in the bowl. Flip the dough once so that the non-stick spray is then on both sides of the lump.

5. Put the bowl of dough into a pre-heated, then turned-off (warmed) oven uncovered. Make sure you have a pie pan of water on the lower rack to keep the oven humid and the dough rising.

6. Let the dough rise for an hour. This is the easy to forget part.

7. Remember you put bread dough in the oven, go get it out, then separate it into two long baguettes.

8. Place the baguettes on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper and dusted with corn meal to help things not stick.

9. Place the cookie sheet of baguettes back in the warmed oven to rise for another 30 minutes.

10. Remember you’re making bread, take the baguettes out of the oven, turn the oven ON to 450 degrees Fahrenheit, then give the baguettes and egg wash. (An egg wash is watered down egg yolk. It makes things golden.)

11. When the oven is fully heated, place the egg-washed baguettes in the oven for 20 minutes and don’t forget to set a timer.

12. Remember you made bread, slice it, butter it, and enjoy your wonderful self for doing something so simply elegant. (You can also salt the bread at this point if you wish. I don’t, but my sister does.)

You see four loaves of bread here because two loaves is clearly not enough in my house. Go ahead, make this bread.

Tag: recipes

Backwards Meal Planning

Make This Bread