Our ground beef taco salad - an all time favorite!

What are you making for dinner this week?

One of the core tenets of our philosophy is that healthy eating should taste as good as it makes us feel. We really love food, and refuse to sacrifice flavor and satisfaction to feel our best. One of the reasons our clients are successful is because we load them up with meal ideas they genuinely enjoy and look forward to eating.

Most of our clients also need their meals to be relatively low effort and quick, and in the throws of new motherhood, we’ve found that need more relatable than ever.

Even with our newfound time constraints, we both love to cook (most days) and even more so, we love to find the unicorn meals we all seek - fast, easy, delicious, crowd pleasers - to add to our repertoire. But we get into food ruts just like everyone else, and most Sundays one of us gets a familiar text from the other: “What are you making for dinner this week? Need ideas. Sick of everything.”

We constantly look to each other for newness and fresh inspiration, and since no one ever turned down a healthy weeknight meal idea, we thought we’d share our latest and greatest with you. Here’s what we’re making this week:

*note: the recipes from the New York Times require a NYT cooking subscription - we find the best recipes from the app all the time, we promise it’s worth it! Email us if you don’t have access.

Sunday

Miso tofu and sweet potato salad with pickled red onions - a longstanding MELA client favorite and has made tofu converts of the non believers.

Pro tip: make the dressing and pickled red onions ahead of time. Then all you need to do is roast the sweet potato and tofu together and it comes together pretty quickly (you can actually make the roasted tofu and sweet potatoes ahead of time too if you want this to come together in 5 minutes).

Monday

New York Times roasted dill salmon served with New York Times roasted sweet potato fries and a mixed green salad (we love this spring salad this time of year, or another weeknight go-to: arugula, radicchio, thinly sliced apples, shaved parmesan, and our apple cider dijon vinaigrette). This salmon is a regular in both of our houses - it’s so, so good. We like to make extra to have for lunch the next day. We also may or may not make these sweet potato fries 3x a week. Trust us on both.

Pro tip: marinate the salmon while you prep the sweet potatoes, then roast everything together at 400 or 425F, depending on how hot your oven is. Make the salad and dressing while everything cooks.

Tuesday

Weeknight Bite’s egg roll in a bowl. A forever favorite- it always delivers. We like to keep it simple and often skip the cauli rice and just serve it over a big bed of greens.

Wednesday

Cooking fatigue inevitably strikes mid-week so it's an easy, no-brainer, vegetarian pasta dinner using a legume-based pasta like Tolerant Foods or Banza. We’ll decide last minute between MELA’s easy weeknight chickpea pasta, greenest pesto pasta with zucchini and arugula, or the easiest 5-minute cheesy-lemon pasta (cooked pasta tossed with olive oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper, parmesan or nutritional yeast and tons of arugula). Sometimes we make 1.5 boxes so that we have extra for lunch and/or dinner the next day. We often serve this with a simple green side salad drizzled with high quality balsamic (we love this one) and extra-virgin olive oil (or we’ll skip the salad and just add more greens to the pot of pasta).

Thursday

Leftover pasta! Easy peasy.

Friday

If we’re feeling motivated, we may make something a little more involved (but not too involved) because it's the weekend. Either roast spatchcock lemon chicken from Martha Stewart (pro tip: ask the butcher or person behind the counter at the market to “spatchcock” or “butterfly” it for you), or our own lemon and thyme roast chicken recipe. If we’re totally spent from the week, it’s an organic rotisserie chicken from Whole Foods paired with homemade sides.

All of these are delicious with some roasted potatoes (mix of olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic powder and rosemary at 425F for 30ish minutes or until crispy) and a similar salad to the one we made on Sunday.

Saturday

Usually take a night off - takeout or enjoy a night out!

Sunday

We love a lazy Sunday, but still want a cozy dinner to close out the weekend - cue our ground beef taco salad (it’s just as good with ground turkey and chicken if you don’t eat beef). We love pairing this with the New York Times’ sweet potato fries (we weren’t kidding about how much we eat these) and/or Ina Garten’s guac and Siete’s lime grain-free tortilla chips.

A few more things

Where we share all the things we’re loving, reading, listening to, cooking, discussing and purchasing as of late.

Lauren: I’m loving everything Rick Rubin these days. The famed music producer’s new book, A Creative Act: A Way of Being has little to do with music. It’s filled with nuggets of wisdom and inspiration for doing your best work, being your best self and living your best life - and it’s not just for artists or “creatives.” Some of my favorite podcast episodes for an introduction to his ideas: 1 / 2 / 3
For our fellow coffee snobs and caffeine enthusiasts - we can’t stop telling everyone we know about comiteer coffee. Direct to consumer coffee concentrate pods from your favorite specialty roasters - they live in your freezer and don’t require any special machine, you just add boiling or cold water for hot or iced. No affiliation - they’ve just somehow thread the needle between best taste and lowest effort.
These featherweight sweatpants were a great find during our pregnancies and we continue to wear them nonstop. These are magical sweatpants. They are so soft, light as air, and they aren’t technically maternity but somehow fit perfectly before and through every stage of pregnancy, postpartum and beyond. Take your true size.
Livwell protein powder has been our go-to plant-based protein powder for our MELA smoothies for as long as we can remember. We’ve scoured the market and nothing compares in terms of quality, taste and nutrition. Use code: Merrill15 for 15% off.
Obsessed with these woven bins from Amazon for all things storage. We both use them in our play areas to organize our oh so many baby toys.
Two really fun mini series we recently watched and loved - Shrinking (feel good and laugh out loud funny, despite the premise), Daisy Jones and the Six (SO much fun. Like a Fleetwood Mac biopic. Highly reco reading the book first before watching!).
As two people that a) are serious about sun protection but b) don’t naturally pull off a wide brim hat, we were very happy to find two we both feel good about. This straw one is great for windier days because it has a drawstring cord. Also love this canvas hat - so packable!