A week of better breakfasts promises days that start with ease (not chaos), and food that fuels us, whether we eat at home or on the run. A better breakfast, in our book, is one you can cook once and eat all week without getting bored, and is nourishing, convenient, and, of course, flavorful. May we introduce you to our new favorite strategy? The 1×5 breakfast.
Although I’m fairly new to meal prepping, it didn’t take me long to get into the groove. I discovered that while I like having some sort of rough framework for what I’m going to eat during the week, I also need some flexibility. Since I’m only cooking for myself and my husband, we have the luxury to cook somewhat spontaneously on weeknights, which makes our busy weeks more fun and enjoyable.
My Power Hour Meal Prep Plan provides a rough guideline for a week of wholesome, feel-good meals, but leaves room for mid-week inspiration. Oh, and it comes together in just one hour.
For perfectly cooked green beans that are flavorful, crisp, and tender, you have to employ a quick two-step technique. Here’s how to do it.
Command hooks are as ubiquitous as they are handy. But don’t get it twisted: The stock you see in the aisles at Target is only a small taste of what the entire line has to offer. In addition to those adhesive hanging hooks, Command has several highly specific applications of their removable (aka renter-approved) technology.
They’re just the perfect thing for tidying up some messy corner of your home. From simple spray bottle holders to a full-blown smartphone charging station, read ahead for ten highly specific Command hook solutions that are every bit as unique as they are renter-friendly.
As much as I adore meal planning, I’m a very reluctant meal prepper. Preparing our dinners for the week over the weekend feels a little too much like locking our meal plan in place forever without flexibility. But we have a big family change on the horizon — my husband is going back to school full-time next month — and we need to figure out a better system for prepping breakfasts and lunches.
This week’s five dinners all require very little prep work — although they are still easy family favorites. Win-win!
The recipe that I am about to describe might not sound (or look) very delicious, but if Ree Drummond aka The Pioneer Woman (aka general business genius) says that it is, who are we to question it? It is called 7-can soup and, other than seven cans of literally anything you want — plus a hunk of Velveeta — there’s not much more to it.
CAN we cook it? Yes we CAN.
Nothing quite encapsulates everything we love about comfort food more than smooth, creamy, buttery garlic mashed potatoes. Oh, and to make it easy on you, we made this in the slow cooker, which means you can make these rich, satisfying potatoes a regular occurrence at your dinner table. Here’s how to do it.
Don’t sleep on canned fruit. Yes, the thought of canned fruit likely brings to mind something mushy or overcooked, or swimming in sugary syrup. But not all canned fruit is bad canned fruit — I promise! In fact, I always have the following three canned fruits on hand for baking, cooking, and making cocktails.
I’ve often thought that Ina Garten could read the phone book and I would think it was fascinating, and this week she proved this with a fun new Instagram video in which she literally just shows people how to put food in bowls. That’s it! No cutting, no stirring. She just puts some store-bought snacks in bowls, and suddenly it looks like a nice cocktail party.
“Once in a while, I make something simple to serve with drinks, like figs wrapped in prosciutto,” she writes in her latest Instagram video. “But mostly, I like to find delicious little appetizers that need no cooking at all.”
One of the things I obsessively collect in my cooking life — aside, apparently, from container lids with no bases and jars of mustard seeds because every time a recipe requires it I presume I’m out because of that one time in 2010 I was — is recipes with very short ingredient lists. It’s not revolutionary to learn that, say, a salad can be made with just lettuce, oil, and vinegar or to find tomato bread, or basil pesto on these lists, but Marcella Hazan’s 3-ingredient tomato sauce is indeed something pretty revelatory, especially when you’re short on time to go to the store or merely patience to cook. So is this Minimalist Barbecue Sauce, Bacon Corn Hash, this summer squash pizza topping that could convert anyone to zucchini, and if does not, this Quick Zucchini Sauté will, the omelet that’s basically Spain’s national dish (and mine), and let us never forget all of the magical things that happen when you let fresh raspberries, brown sugar, and sour cream blister under a broiler, or roast a sweet potato until it almost candies itself inside. It’s not fully populated (I keep finding things I’ve missed and taking liberties when the 6th ingredient is butter or olive oil) but I finally got to pulling together a few of my favorites in this collection this summer. Life is busy; it’s here to help.
Despite all of this, I am a deeply contradictory person. While I assure you that these recipes don’t require any more ingredients than listed to fulfill their delicious destinies, if you were to try to tell me about a recipe with a set number of ingredients, I’d immediately bristle at the limitation. “What was the 6th one? Maybe I have it! I really don’t mind taking it out!”