It’s a weird meal prep week this week. I didn’t get a chance to post my meals from last week so I’ve included them here. Knowing St. Patrick’s Day was on a Wednesday, I kept with an irish theme all week and definitely had breakfast for dinner most nights.

For my groceries, the only items I purchased in packaging were the sage, which I couldn’t find fresh without plastic, and the ice cream. I almost never buy ice cream but I knew we were making homemade boozy shamrock shakes for St. Patty’s day and I wanted a dairy-free option.

I don’t think I would necessarily recommend this meal plan on a regular basis but all the components were good and worth sharing. Maybe you’ll be inspired to meal prep one or two of the recipes for next week with some less irish-themed meals 🙂

Breakfast- Irish Steel Cut Oats: If you follow these meal preps regularly, you know I’m a big oats person. I love rolled oats and eat them fairly regularly but I can’t say I often eat steel cut oats. They take longer to make and, honestly, sometimes I just forget they exist! Normally, when I do make them, I go the savory oats route and serve them with eggs and garlicky kale. So good! This time around, I made them with banana as the sweetener and topped them with more banana, peanut butter and hemp seeds. I always forget how good the texture is with these oats. The great thing is, you can also make a big batch of them in your slow cooker and have them throughout the week, changing up the toppings to keep things interesting. I halved this recipe so it was too small for my slow cooker but cooking them on the stove for about 25 minutes worked out just as well.

Lunch- Potato and Leek Soup with Shiitake “Bacon”: This shiitake “bacon” was SO freaking good. I’m pretty sure half of it got eaten straight off the baking sheet and from the container while the soup was reheating. Mine didn’t get crispy. I think it was because I put them in the oven partially frozen (by accident. My fridge got too cold) so even though I cooked it for 5 minutes longer than the recipe suggested, they weren’t crisp. Honestly, though, I didn’t mind! I can’t wait to make these again and add them to a sandwich.

As for the soup, it was good. I would advise peeling your potatoes. I used really small yukon gold potatoes and kept the skin on and even though I cleaned them really well, I didn’t love the taste they gave the soup. I served mine with nutritional yeast and the shiitake “Bacon” and a hunk of the below irish soda bread and it was quite good!

Sourdough Irish Soda Bread: If you have a sourdough starter, you know the struggle of finding uses for discard. So when I wanted to make soda bread, I certainly wasn’t going to neglect my poor starter. Any excuse to use it is a win in my book. Thank Gosh for Jenni at the Gingered Whisk. I genuinely didn’t think a sourdough irish soda bread existed but there it is!

Honestly, I’ve been pretty much surviving the year on sourdough and haven’t had Irish soda bread since, maybe, St. Patrick’s Day 2019? so I can’t speak on the authenticity of the texture. I can tell you it was good, though! It was super soft and not too crumbly. It came together quickly with no wait time for rising and very minimal kneeding. It was very low maintenced after all the sourdough I have been making. In fact, I definitely made it again this week. I was able to toast it easily. There was almost no sourdough taste in mine but that could have just been due to my starter. To keep this dairy-free, I did swap out the buttermilk for vegan buttermilk, made with almond milk and lemon juice, and earth balance for the butter.

The recipe suggests flavoring the loaf with caraway seed or orange and currants but I just kept mine plain so it was more versatile.

Dinner- Irish Baked Beans: When I was thinking about St. Patrick’s Day, I knew I didn’t want to do the standard Guinness stew or shepherd’s pie or bangers in mash. I’ve done those before and though they were fine, I knew I didn’t want to eat them for a week. Instead, I wanted to do an Irish Fry Up! Diving into the internet for research, though, left me with more questions than answers. There wasn’t really one definition of an Irish fry-up. It depends on where you go. So, I left out the meat parts and made the parts that I could eat! Cue the homemade baked beans. These are definitely not the Boston Baked Beans I’m used to. No molasses and far more tomatoes. They tasted great but as someone who isn’t a huge chunky tomato fan, I’d leave out the chopped tomatoes at the end next time.

If I’m being honest, I’ve eaten them mostly on toasted Irish soda bread with a side of fried-eggs for dinner and it was delicious! For my fry-up, I also added some sautéed mushrooms. I could have breakfast for every meal and be ok with that.

Cheers! I hope everyone has a nice weekend!!