Recipes

Meal Planning – Vacation Style

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On Sundays (and sometimes Mondays), I meal plan for the week. This week, my husband and I are on vacation so I will be planning on lunches for him as well but I plan on incorporating leftovers and treats. Stay tuned for some new recipes I’m trying out, including peanut butter cups!

I know a lot of people are intimidated by meal planning but I promise, you don’t need to be. You already do a little bit of meal planning when you buy your groceries, whether or not you mapped it out in advance. It only takes a few minutes to plan out the week. You can get started by planning out the first few days and then expanding to the week from there. You don’t have to cook it all at once and I often switch things around during the week if we have a lot of leftovers or feel like getting takeout one night.

I start my meal plan by writing down different ideas I have for things I want to cook that week. Then, I fit them into a day that makes sense at the time. I also know which meals will give us a lot of leftovers and will skip a night of cooking. I also cook things that work for everyone’s tastes at that time. So where I may eat something over a salad, my Husband may eat that same thing with a wrap or bun.

Since this is a vacation week, I want to make sure we’ve got plenty of food for lunches and snack as well. Since I have extra time because of vacation, I’m going to be cooking every night and saving the leftovers for lunches. It’s also my Husband’s birthday on Friday so we are planning a fantastic night of takeout along with cake and celebration!

Of course, this vacation week is different than years past since we will be at home all week. Normally this week of the summer is spent at the beach but I still meal plan when we are away. We know when we are going to splurge at the breakfast buffet, when we are going to eat away from the hotel (and where) and when we are going to grab a quick something from the beach cafe. Traveling to somewhere you haven’t been before can be a little trickier but you can always have a flexible plan and check out the menu before you dine.

Happy meal planning and have an awesome week!

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Recipe: Chocolate Chip Energy Bites

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Courtesy of Carrie Underwood’s book Find Your Path

3/4 cup natural creamy peanut butter
3 tablespoons raw honey
1 1/2 cups rolled oats
1/2 cup mini dark chocolate chips
1/4 teaspoon sea salt

Mix oats and chocolate chips together in a large bowl. Set aside.

Heat peanut butter over low heat in a small sauce pan, stirring occasionally. Once it is runny, remove from heat and stir in the honey. Drizzle over the top of the oats mixture. Sprinkle with the salt (I used less) and mix everything together. Cover and refrigerate for about 30 minutes.

Remove from fridge and form into eighteen 1-inch balls. You can store these in an airtight container for up to a week or freeze them, but they never last more than 2 days in my house before they are devoured!

Nutrition Facts: (per piece) 137 calories, 9 g fat, 10 carbs, 4.6 g protein, 2.3 g fiber, 5 g sugar

My Favorite Cookbook (or 2)

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I like to do home workouts using Beachbody on Demand (BOD) fitness programs but what most people don’t know is there is a cooking show in the BOD lineup called Fixate. They also have 2 cookbooks, Fixate and Fixate 2. There are recipes for everything from breakfast, lunch & dinner to snacks, cocktails and even holiday favorites. If you are vegetarian or vegan, there is plenty in there for you and a lot of the recipes are gluten-free, if that is important to you. They even have spice and dressing recipes!

I love these cookbooks not just because they are full of yummy recipes but because they breakdown two measurements that make my life easier: nutritional information, especially carbs, and container counts.

Nutritional information: I cook for two people with Type 1 Diabetes so knowing how many carbs are in foods is essential. Most mainstream cookbooks don’t have this information (love you, Chrissy Teigen!) so I don’t use those books as often. Most “diet” cookbooks have a breakdown but the foods are often boring and bland. All of the Fixate recipes have the nutritional information broken down so if you are counting carbs, calories or macros (more on macros to come), it’s perfect!

Container counts: I can hear you saying what the heck are container counts? Well, you may have heard of a fitness program called 21 Day Fix. This goes hand-in-hand with the Portion Fix way of healthy eating, which is what I follow most days. The containers make it easy not only to measure the portion sizes of what you are eating but to balance your macronutrients. The Fixate cookbooks spell out the container counts and balance for you.

I promise to do a whole post on macronutrients and the containers in the future. Another nice thing about counting macros using the container system is you can Google any recipe and add “Fixate” to it and you will likely come up with a bunch of recipes someone already invented, with the container counts already figured out!

I will be trying out some new recipes as well as sharing some of the family favorites. For now, I will leave you with the donuts we made last weekend. These are only 226 calories per donut with 32 grams of carbs and 2 grams of fiber! Compare that with a Dunkin Donut which is 360 calories, 41 carbs and 1 gram of fiber. These were super easy to make and so delicious!

If you want to purchase either Fixate or Fixate 2 from Amazon, please use my affiliate links. The containers are also available on Amazon.