Locavore Menu Plan for Southern Ontario October 7-13

Meal-planning is an important part of our week.  It allows us to be more prepared and relaxed with regards to our nightly meals and reduces stress.  As locavores, it also makes eating locally much easier because we take the time to figure out what seasonal foods are available and how we can use them.  If you live in a similar climate (we’re in Southern Ontario, which is a pretty classic upper-midwest climate) then you should sign up for email updates or check out the facebook page or twitter feed and compare what you’re eating with us!

This next week sees us eating a mix of summer and fall foods.  Since it hasn’t frosted here yet summer veggies remain and therefore we plan to make use of them (and preserve them, most recently sweet peppers)!  Most of the recipes this week come from The Food52 Cookbook which I found while browsing at the library this week (and I’d love to check out their Volume II Seasonal Recipes too!) .  We tend to prefer compilation cookbooks because they have much more variety and diversity of styles, as opposed to those written by one author.  When paging through single-author cookbooks it’s easy to get bored quickly and feel like you’re looking at the same recipe over and over.  This one is filled with recipes from almost 100 different cooks, so there’s little chance to get bored!

Well, only the tomatoes and butternut our from our Kitchen’r Garden, but the rest is straight from a Mennonite farm just outside of town!

Thanks to this cookbook this one was one of our easiest meal plans to come up with in quite a while, we just flipped through the cookbook and jotted down ideas and in about 20 minutes had plan.  Now it’s time to cook!

 Menu Plan Monday for the week of October 7-13 (however, there’s no plan for the weekend…)!

Be sure to check out Food52 which is an awesome site that features home cooks and their recipes all year long (thus the 52…).   Also if you’d like more late summer/early fall menu ideas check out the last menu plan.