It’s been a long time since I’ve done a Meal Prep Monday! I’ve been laying low and working on content and getting excited for October, of course!

Now that it’s October, we can start pulling out the soups and stews and pumpkin everything, which I’m pretty excited for.

First up, for breakfast this week, is the Pumpkin Smoothie. I’m not craving warm breakfasts yet but I am craving pumpkin spice so this seemed the perfect compromise. I took my go-to Smoothie recipe from Jessica Eats Real Food and tweaked it a bit. For this one I did:

• 1 Banana, Frozen
• 1/2 cup. riced cauliflower, frozen
• 1/4 cup pumpkin puree
• 1 scoop vanilla protein powder
• 2 TBSP rolled oats
• 1 pinch of pumpkin pie spice
• 1 pinch of cinnamon
• 1 pinch of salt
• 1 TBSP ground flaxseed
• 1 TBSP almond butter
• 1 cup of milk of choice

To Meal Prep this, Freeze the first 3 ingredients together in 1 container. I store the protein powder, oats, spices and flaxseed in another container in my cabinet. In the morning, I just add the milk, the frozen ingredients and the dry ingredients together, add the almond butter and blend. It comes together fairly quickly when prepared like this.

Lunch is one of the easiest recipes I have and one I make constantly during winter, the Quinoa Black Bean Soup. I almost always have the ingredients on hand and it comes together quickly. Plus, it has a ton of great flavor. I like it with a slice of homemade sourdough but you can top it with cheese or avocado, if you want. I would just advise keeping extra broth on hand. The quinoa really absorbs the broth and if you want this to be a soup, you’ll need the extra broth for when you are reheating this.

Dinner is a Harvest Bowl aka Whatever-Is-In-The-Fridge Bowl. I had some kale that was getting wilty so I sauteed that up with some garlic. I roasted a sweet potato that I had kicking around with tofu, olive oil and salt and pepper at 400 for about 30 minutes or until the sweet potato is soft. I added pecans, pomegranate seeds and avocado (Not pictured. I added this when I was ready to eat it) and tossed it all with little olive oil and a little lemon juice. Voila! #shopyourfridge

Because I can’t go without snacks, I opted to bake some apples this week to mix in with some yogurt and homemade vanilla cinnamon almond butter. You can also add these to oatmeal or over ice cream. It’s a good snack to have around.

Have you started making fall food already? Or is still too warm where you are for soups and stews?