One of the main premises of Home Made Modern is that moms shouldn’t have to sacrifice style, personal preferences, or in this case, a delicious lunch despite the fact that most of our waking hours are spent taking care of the needs of someone else. Needless to say, it can be challenging to feed your family a healthy meal, let alone get one for yourself. To help make this a little easier, I often make a huge salad at the beginning of the week and munch on it all week. Here’s another alternative that’s super-versatile. Make a big pan of these roasted vegetables on a Sunday night, then use them all week for lunches or dinner side dishes.
Easy Roasted Vegetables
1 red pepper
1 large or 2 small zucchini
1 large or 2 small yellow squash
1 medium red or yellow onion
1 T. Herbs de Provence
Rough chop all of the vegetables and toss with 1-2 tablespoons of olive oil and the herbs on a foil lined cookie sheet. Roast at 400 degrees until fork-tender, stirring once.
There’s a variety of lunches you can get out of these veggies:
- Wrap them in a tortilla with shredded cheese and creamy Italian dressing
- Stack on an toasted English muffin spread with Laughing Cow cheese, whole-grain mustard and deli-sliced turkey
- Put in a pita pocket with Romaine lettuce and feta cheese
- Toss with pasta, a little marinara sauce, and cheese (smoked mozzarella is really good with this)
- Toss with orzo and Parmesan cheese.
Have any other ideas? Let me know! Here are some other salad recipes you’re gonna love:
I wish I had thought of roasted vegies when I was working full time and had 2 kids 13 months apart and returned to work when they were 6 weeks old. I have been retired for 16 years but I think some of my shortcuts may help others
The details of the recipes are sketchy but there’s nothing unusual about them except the preparation.
When we did our weekly groceries we prepared a number of meals based on the meat specials. We lines our corning ware with foil and froze a number of meals. Please note that they were not the meals for that week. These were added to whatever else was in the freezer. The reason for the foil was that we did not have enough freezer to oven dishes to accommodate all the meals I liked to have on hand.
We froze meal sized portions of meatloaf, shepherds pie.and chili. chicken (usually legs ), pork chops and ribs. The chicken. and pork chops were frozen in a variety of sauces such as mushroom soup and tomato sauce based. Sometimes I used pre prepared HP sauces as well. As for the ribs we usually partially cooked and deboned them because otherwise they took too much room,
After supper I prepared the vegetables. Usually potatoes for baking and another vegetable wrapped in foil.(we did eat a lot of carrots and Turnips had to be cut up quite small.
In the morning I pre set the oven. Put the meal in the oven and returned to a cooked meal after work. I think I usually set the temp at 350 and started it about an hour before we got home. If it wasn’t ready when we got there it didn’t take long.
Of course we added mashed potatoes and other vegies from time to time as well as fish which was not prepared as the other things were. Stew was made in the slow cooker, But I didn’t have one until the kids were older. so stews were usually on the week end.
Hope this idea helps others. It’s easy to adapt your own recipes to this method.
Hope this idea helps othere,
Wow, Sandra, these are GREAT ideas! I will definitely be employing some of them to help save time this school year. You rock. Come back often to share your expertise! Thanks for sharing. 🙂