Happy Monday, everyone. I hope with everything that is going on in the world, that you are safe and healthy.

It has certainly been an…eventful few weeks. I feel like everything is saturated with talk of coronavirus so I’m hoping to keep this corner relatively coronavirus-free. I’ll be working from home for the foreseeable future so I will have 4 extra hours in my day to do with as I please. I’m hoping to use that extra time to bump the content of the website up to help provide everyone with something to read that isn’t instructions on how to wash your hands 🙂

First up this week is, of course, my favorite content- meal prepping.

To me, it’s so important to keep some level of normalcy right now. With working from home, my entire routine is completely off. So I really made sure to meal prep this week so that I had one thing the same in all this change.

For breakfast, I wanted to up my fruits and veggies count so I’ll be making smoothie bowls this week. For the most part, my smoothies will have 1 cup of almond milk, 1/2 banana (frozen), spinach, vanilla protein powder and fruit. The fruit will change depending on what I have available but I think it will generally be blueberries and pineapple.

I’m topping the bowls with homemade nut butter, hemp seed and some chocolate granola.

The chocolate granola is from Erin Lives Whole, which is clearly an awesome blog since it’s run by a fellow Erin. I made the chocolate granola with honey (you can use maple syrup if you are vegan) and about 1/2 the cocoa powder and chocolate chips that the recipe called for. It just seemed like a lot of chocolate chips for breakfast! I mean, I’m eating my stress right now but I still have a full day to do that. I don’t need to confine it to breakfast! This would also be a great snack in yogurt later in the day if you need something sweet.

To get the big granola chunks, I tossed the granola once half way though baking, pulled the granola out of the oven and mixed the chocolate chips in, popped the granola in the oven for 5 more minutes, pulled it out, gave it one more stir to make sure the chocolate chips were melted and well dispersed and then let it cool completely. Once it’s cooled, it will just be one big sheet of granola so you can break it up how you like.

For lunch, in the spirit of poor St. Patrick’s Day, which isn’t getting any love this year because of social distancing, I made roasted garlic and mushroom stew. Rabbit and Wolves is a blog that come up CONSTANTLY on my pinterest searches and I save so many of her recipes but this was the first one I’ve had a chance to make. The stew has a ton of flavor but I would strongly recommend having extra broth on hand. I used the 4 cups recommended in the directions and by the time I went to reheat it today, there was almost no broth left. The barley soaked it right up. It’s super tasty though and I liked her recommendation to cut the mushrooms into larger chunks.

I ate this with the leftover bread from last week that I froze. It tastes just as good this week as it did last week. I keep mine in the fridge at all times, though, and then warm it in the toaster when I’m ready to eat it. If you leave it out or eat it right from the fridge, it’s going to taste stale.

For snacks, I made sure I was ready this week! I mean, if you are going to be stuck at home, you better be prepared. I have plenty of oranges, aka vitamin C, for my morning snack. I’ve had an orange every day since Sumo season started and I swear, i haven’t felt sick with a cold or flu at all. I’m starting to get a little superstitious about eating an orange a day!

For something chocolately, I made a batch of Chocolate Covered Katie’s Chocolate Blender Muffins. She has a lot of substitution options so I used oats for the flour option, maple syrup for the sweetener and almond butter for the nut butter option. I also mixed in 3 TBSP of vegan chocolate chips and sprinkled a few extra chocolate chips or peanut butter chips on top. They are very dense and fudgy but a great use for ripe bananas or when you want a chocolate treat. They are also super easy to makes since you just dump everything in a blender and call it a day.

Dinner for the week is leftovers! I have jambalaya with vegan chorizo and vegan pizza left over from this weekend, along with half the batch of quinoa and zucchini burritos frozen from last week. I may not even get to those this week depending on my other left overs. The more I can stretch my food, the less reason I have to go to the grocery store and the more social isolating I can do!

Since so many of us are working from home, can we take a moment to share some of our favorites? I’m thinking your favorite book, show, movie and snack. All priorities for isolation. Mine are:

Favorite books: The Black Jewel Trilogy by Anne Bishop. The books I most recently finished though are by Sarah Maas. Both authors are great!

Favorite show: Gilmore Girls. Can you watch that too many times? Of course not. I’m about to start Westworld season 2, though.

Favorite movie: Empire Records

Snack: Popcorn with EVOO and nutritional yeast. The perfect no waste snack.

Share yours below!