Low-Lift Autumn Meals

including variations to suit your eating style + encouragement to make it yours

These quarterly offerings have found a tender place in my heart. It allows me the opportunity to ground down into the world around me- taking notice of the transitions found in the seasons and myself. As with most recipes found in these guides they are meant to serve as a starting point and inspiration; allowing for your foot to be in one season while softly slipping into the next.

Autumn isn’t quite here but the tree I can see from where I type is already shaking out her green and letting it fade.

Cheers to the next chapter and these lower-impact, lower-lift meals to sustain you along the way

xx

Lower-impact on brains and body and money. Less fussy, more straight forward, multi-purpose meals/ingredients to piggyback off one another, and seasonal while being realistic (I buy tomatoes year round at the good ol’ grocery store.)

I cannot produce menus that are not authentic to me which just means I don’t compute trying to make things or cook things that I am not quite literally cooking alongside you. My neurodivergent brain, while it has its fussy tangents, really benefits from a lower-lift vibe most average days.

Take what you need, make it yours, leave the rest.

I love the summer into fall transition and I’ve said that freely and wildly across this newsletter. Produce around here is still coming in hot but a soup/stew/chowder has more appeal than it has what with the cooler mornings and evenings reminding us of what’s to come. Start here or end here this week with this corn chowder.

Need a bowl of vegetables but tired of summer salads? Make a Bowl of Micronutrients (no cheeky names for them here, it’s a big ass bowl of roasted/raw/grilled whatever you like vegetables and/or grains (or no grains! Make it yours!) with dressing suggestions. This week’s variation includes roasted broccoli, Brussels sprouts, greens, and sweet potatoes with a miso-based dressing and fresh herbs.

As we begin the slow unwinding into slower, colder, and darker months we crave hearty and warming meals like this Colorado and New Mexico staple- Green Chile. Get your hands on roasted hatch green chiles (this is a must) which can be found at roadside stands and markets here in Colorado all the way down through NM from the middle of September-October. Can’t get them that way? You can usually find frozen roasted hatch chiles in the freezer section of grocery stores and when all else fails, and what my mother often did while we lived in the middle of fuckall Minnesota, use the canned ones. Serve over rice and/or with tortillas. Smother a burrito, eat it with eggs, or put it on top of a Big Bowl of Micronutrients.

Have left over rice? Make this Sheet Pan Fried Rice. Don’t have leftover rice? Brilliant, because this is the one way to make fried rice when you want it now but forgot to make rice in advance. Doing it this way, and using a generous amount of sesame oil, toasts the rice to a delightfully chewy-crunchy vibe that I live for.

Rounding it out with this Baked Oatmeal that comes together in a cinch, lasts for days, reheats beautifully, and has the capacity to convert even the most oatmeal-adverse person you know. Think of it like oatmeal “cake.” Just trust me here.

I hope this comes in handy or at least gives you some ideas.

Biggest love,

AR