Diet June 2012 Menu
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School is out and swimsuit season is here! This month, we continue to take advantage of the abundance of fresh vegetables we can find this time of year. The recipes are planned to avoid the oven as much as possible and keep meals light and fresh along with a few items for the grill. Breakfasts are light and focused on fruit with berry oats and a puffed pancake filled with fruit. For lunches, easy to reheat spring rolls and a chilled gazpacho. For dinners, you can hit the grill with grilled flatbread pizzas and a grilled chicken with raspberry marinade. The kalua pork and southwest flank steak pinwheels both cook themselves in the slow cooker. Take a day to cook for the month and then enjoy those summer days!
For a detailed explanation of what is meant by “diet” we have a post explaining what we mean. If you are new and not sure how to get started we have a wonderful series starting with 5 easy steps to get you on your way to once a month cooking. Good luck!
Puffed Oven Pancakes with Summer Glazed Fruit
Breakfasts
Lunches
- Zesty Salmon Burgers
- Wheat Berry and Bean Salad
- Baked Chicken and Vegetable Egg Rolls
- Spicy Summer Gazpacho
Summer Salmon Stuffed Peppers
Dinners
- Veggie Spaghetti
- Chicken Spinach Burgers
- Grilled Chicken with Raspberry Marinade
- Slow Cooker Kalua Pork
- Summer Salmon Stuffed Peppers
- Paella Primavera
- Grilled Veggie Flatbread Pizzas
- Southwest Flank Steak Pinwheels
**Indicates meals that require NO COOKING on your OAMC BIG DAY aka “throw and go” meals, perfect for the family who needs to adjust to just do the quick meals!
Recipe Cards
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Grocery List
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Instructions
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Labels
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Pinterest:
Are you a person that likes to see the menus visually? Perhaps you should check out the June 2012 Diet Menu via Pinterest to see the yummy goodness you will be cooking up on this menu. Not sure what Pinterest is all about, check out what Once A Month Mom has to say about it.
Test Cooks
Each month we have some wonderful volunteers who “test” out the menu prior to publication. They do an amazing job of helping to eliminate confusion and mistakes. They may not catch everything but they sure do catch A LOT! If you are interested in test cook, feel free to volunteer. Here is a little bit about this month’s test cooks:
- Melanie Boudrealt – Melanie is a stay at home mom with 3 kids ( 7, 5 & 3 yrs old) for the past 7 years. She has a background in Chemical Engineering and consulting. Her family is keeping an eye on the food we eat and are looking to cook most of their meals at home. They are looking for lower fats recipes, more whole grains & more fruits and veggies.
- Meaghan Barry - Meaghan Barry lives with her husband and 18-month old son in a town on the south shore of Boston. She is a former finance professional turned stay-at-home-mom and tweets under Twitter profile @Meaghz. Meaghan blogs with her NYC-based sister about cooking, party ideas, and projects at http://www.2sisters2cities.com
Get Started
Are you new to Once A Month Mom or once a month cooking (oamc) in general? If so, you might want to spend a few minutes (or hours) on the Get Started Series. If you are in a real hurry to catch on we have written some simple steps for getting started. Welcome!
If you are feeling abundantly blessed and generous feel free to donate. :) And don’t forget you can always go back and use the Summer 2011 menu if you are looking for something different!
[...] Mom this past month and the new June menu I tested was published today. I was a test cook for the June diet menu, but there are also traditional, whole foods, gluten-free/dairy-free, and vegetarian menus [...]
What a great looking menu! What did the testers spend on this menu? I am trying to figure out if the whole foods or diet menu will be cheaper. We are trying to eat healthy but have a major budget crunch going on right now! Also I’ll be writing up a review on my blog once I do this! I am pretty excited!
One of the diet test cooks reported $140 for this menu but she had many of the ingredients (probably baking and spices) on hand already. I’m not sure about the whole foods test cook as my writer with that info is not available at the moment. As soon as I can get it I will communicate that also.
Thanks so much! That really helps. I am pretty sure I have most of the spices and baking supplies on hand. I CANNOT wait to try this out. Still debating on which menu to use. I would vegetarian by my hubby is not to excited about that prospect. LOL.
There *might* be a vegetarian mini menu in the near future (or vegan) so perhaps you can do this one and then do a mini version for yourself. :)
Very excited to hear about a possible mini-vegetarian menu! Our dughter is a lone vegetarian in our household. It would be nice to be able to cook a segment of the menu for her, rather than committing to the whole thing. However, we did do one vegetarian menu (March, I think) and loved it.
For the paella, does the rice need to be cooked before you add it?
The answer is no – make sure to check out the printable recipe cards for full details on preparation and freezing.
Where can I find wheat berries? I haven’t seen them in any of my local grocery stores. Is there something I can substitute?
You will likely find them in natural/organic section or possibly the bulk grain section of your local store.
I found them at Whole Foods in the “package your own” section. I had to ask since I could not find them at ANY of the grocery stores in my area.
I never could find them here (I should have just gone out to the field where they were harvesting the wheat, haha) so I just used bulgar instead – worked great :)
I am on day two of cooking the Diet menu, my 2 month old son prevented me from finishing it yesterday, but I have a few comments/questions.
1)Is it possible to list kitchen twine in the ingredients list? I had no idea I needed it until I read the recipe for the Southwest Flank Steak and had to improvise with toothpicks until I could find some.
2) For the puffed oven pancake recipe it says to flash freeze them but in the Day of Directions it says to let cool and then top then freeze…Which is it? I ended up taking them out of the oven, putting the fruit on them and then freezing them. Then later on I separated them into containers…not sure how they are going to be.
3) One more thing…for the Kalua Pork…do you need any other liquid in the slow cooker in order for it to cook? I always thought you needed a good amount of liquid to use a slow cooker.
Other than that, looking forward to eating the many, many things I am cooking. They all look so good. I think I may run out of room in my freezer before the day is done.
Thanks for this wonderful site!!!
We can modify the grocery list to include the kitchen twine, thanks for pointing this out. The puffed oven pancakes should be topped after cooling and then frozen. The flash freezing is to prevent them from all sticking together so the way you handled them is correct. No additional liquid should be needed. You may want to reference the original recipe source to check on cooking time though, it may vary a bit depending on how many servings you are making.
I was looking forward to using this menu but now I’m not so sure since all the meals have to be cooked the day of prep. I like the menus that you can just toss in a bag/pan and cook later!
Well, you might try the mini menus in that case. We vary our meal plans so that they include a variety of to-be cooked and to -be assembled meals for your month.
Our menus are varied from month to month but almost always contain recipes that you have to cook the day of prep. We include throw-together meals in there but yes, there is a bit of cooking involved.
This is my 3rd time doing OAMM, maybe the 1st doing the diet menu (can’t remember). I was surprised in comparison with other menus that I’ve done that it did have you cook some things, like the grilled chicken and chicken spinach burgers. I just opted not to, I put the marinated chicken in the freezer and called it good, flash froze my burgers and called it good.
Hi. I just found this site and am really excited to try out this diet menu! I was just saving the recipes to my ziplist but the link for the chicken spinach burgers goes to a wordpress site that says is private and asks me to log in. Hopefully this is just a mistake or you can list the recipe on oamm so we can have the info. Thanks! :)
The original source of the recipe does seem to have changed since this menu was posted, however, you can still access the recipe we used on the entire menu recipe cards: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ani0eqb0Ai4_dHp6aGtkdTdwX2VpcHNiNUdPeFV5NkE#gid=32
[...] that don’t require cooking ahead. Tonight we are eating the Chicken Spinach Burgers found in the Diet June 2012 Menu. I used to be in a group that would meet once a month, cook together and separate, then swap [...]