A quick reflection on menu planning

In talking to a friend tonight I realised that,  not only had I not blogged in a while,  but I hadn’t planned a menu in a while either.  We’ve been experimenting, in my house,  with buying meat in bulk but buying produce daily. This has added up to an empty fridge,  frozen meat, and an increase in reliance on fast and processed foods. I think this is because our time always seems pressed during the week.  We’re rushing to work,  rushing to get Little Elfkin from day care,  rushing to get home to feed her, making sure to nourish her mind and her body with story time,  play time, bath time, and bed. Honestly,  by the time she conks out, I’m ready to pass out too! I’m cutting into my sleep time to make this menu and reflect: menu planning would be so much easier if you didn’t also have to make the grocery list, buy the ingredients, and actually cook. 

I’m going to try to find time for:

• Swirly Crustless Quiche 
• Pumpkin pancakes
• Grain free porridge
• Salmon
• Mustard glazed chicken thighs
• Zucchini pancakes
• Buffalo chicken lettuce wraps
• Sweet potato and apple soup
• Sage roasted turkey legs
• Spaghetti squash bolognese
• Bacon wrapped smoky chicken
• Sausage and pepper stew
• Turkey meatballs and squash

Now,  this is a ton of food, so I will disclaim this: not all of it will be made,  but what is made will be eaten and not wasted. For me,  menu planning is mostly a suggestion,  not a concrete agreement. 

What’s on your menu? Do you have a go-to meal plan?

Zoe and Zucchini

Which Firefly Character Are You?

More on Firefly.Created by BuddyTV

Is it just me, or are quizzes becoming popular again?  I think I’ve taken a couple in the last week or so, but I know I’ve SEEN a gob of them show up in my friend feed.  I like it 🙂 Let’s bring back the blogging habits from the early aughts.  I feel like bloggers were closer with their audience because there’s a certain bit of ‘audience participation’ when you can share your answers with each other.  Go ahead! Take the quiz above (in a new window) and come back to share your answers…. I’ll wait.

[Firefly theme starts up]

Did you post your answer in the comments yet? 😀

Anyway… The plan for today is to do a lot of cleaning, menu-making, and cooking.  Our last week month has been out of whack with the three of those above, culminating in a desk that the cat cannot sit on, a kitchen that has seen little to no use, and a waistline (I’m sure) that’s expanding from all of the fast food we’ve been eating.

By the end of the day, I’m going to have a menu whipped up for dinners for this whole week, a grocery list, AND a plan to batch cook all of it. Nothing to it but to do it!

Weekly Menu Planning: Week of 10-29-12

Hello readers,

The pictures in my previous post weren’t exactly the best, but the recipe definitely was!  I posted that entry while riding along to the coffee shop with my mom.  We headed out to Caribou to hang out and get some wedding planning stuff done.  The culmination of which amounted to a three-page list and the decision to buy buttermints.  Mmm.. buttermints..

This week’s menu includes a left-over from last week’s menu that never made it into the rotation – Bourbon Chicken.  The recipe itself calls for skillet cooking, but it also says it can be done in a crockpot, so we’ll see how that goes.  Our menu this week also features:

Stir Fry (pork)

Pork Chops w/ Potatoes and mixed Veg.

Eight-Layer Casserole

Shrimp w/ mushrooms, spinach, bell pepper and spicy alfredo

Broccoli & chicken casserole

So, we’ll be doing lots of baking this week and not so much slave-over-the-stove type cooking.  One of the things that I did to help with my weekly menu planning and the facilitation of actually cooking these recipes, is I made a new board on Pinterest and I just repin menu items from my “Foodies!” board to my “Weekly menu planning” board.  If you’re a member of Pinterest, you should check it out for all of the recipes that I’m going to be using this week.  If you have your own “Foodies!” style board, or make your own Weekly Menu Planning board, I’d love to check it out 🙂 Just include the link in the comments.

Menu Monday – no wait..

Guess what happens when you spend your whole weekend celebrating birthdays:

You fail to make a menu for Monday.  Or go grocery shopping.  Or you know, any of the usual weekend activities.

I had a great weekend hanging out with Jeff, putzing with puzzles, going to a wedding fair, throwing a birthday bash for my niece… We even cleaned house and managed to do some laundry!  We utterly failed, though, to ponder this week’s eats or to make a menu.  Tonight’s dinner was a sad affair… I called Jeff on my way home and he listed off things that we had in the fridge: mixed fruits, left over veggie tray, bell peppers, cucumbers, sweet corn…  And in the freezer: mixed veg, shrimp, chocolate chips, froyo.

Hm.

We didn’t even have a bagged meal to fall back on and we didn’t want to get fast food, so we  just assembled the basics – a ‘meat’, a side, and a veggie:

Yep.  Tonight’s dinner was a handful of shrimp and two ears of corn.  I figure one served as a side and the other as a veggie =P

The shrimp was actually really good.  If you’re ever in a pinch and you’ve got pre-cooked frozen shrimp, it’s really easy to make it tasty:

Quick Shrimp:

• pre-cooked, frozen shrimp
• butter
• minced garlic
• lime juice

1) Thaw shrimp per package instructions–best to run it under cold water. Pull off the tails while you’re at it.

2) Put 1 Tbls of butter and 1 (heaping) Tbls of minced garlic (ours was the jarred variety tonight) into a frying pan

3) Add the thawed shrimp and cook just a couple minutes until heated through–they will start to curl smaller, but you don’t want to *over* cook shrimp, then it just gets rubbery.

Serve with some of the garlic butter if desired, sprinkle some lime juice over the top.  BBQ Sauce is optional, but if you go for it–Sweet Baby Ray’s is awesome.

The corn was just corn, but my grandma taught me the trick to getting a good ear of sweetcorn–take your fingernail and press it against a kernel until it bursts.  If it pops like over-inflated bubble wrap and squirts juice at you, you’re good!  If it just deflates, try another ear.

Orange Chicken

Yeeeaaaahhh… My version of orange chicken turned out almost nothing like the picture that I pinned on my pinterest foodies board.  When I was at the grocery store, a friend in need called and I missed out on a couple of ingredients such as the  sesame seeds, red pepper flakes and scallions.  We made due with what we had, though, and it turned out pretty wicked (in a good way).

After going through this process, I would say that there are some things to be desired in the recipe, as far as instructions go.  Here is how the recipe was published on laaloosh:

Orange Chicken Recipe

Ingredients:
1 pound uncooked boneless, skinless chicken breast, cut into 2-inch strips
2 cup cooked white rice, kept hot
Rind of a small orange sliced into thin strips
1 1/2 Tbsp cornstarch
3/4 cup canned chicken broth, reduced-sodium
2 Tbsp sugar
1 Tbsp white wine vinegar
2 tsp peanut oil
1/2 tsp ground ginger
2 medium garlic cloves, minced
2 Tbsp low-sodium soy sauce
2 medium scallions, chopped
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes, or 1 dried chili pepper, minced
1 tbsp sesame seeds

**For added nutritional value, substitute the white rice with brown rice

Directions:
In a bowl, whisk together the soy sauce, broth, sugar, cornstarch, ginger, and vinegar, then set aside.
In a large skillet, heat peanut oil on medium-high heat. Add orange rinds, scallions, garlic and red pepper flakes and cook for about 2 minutes. Add in the chicken and cook for approximately 6 minutes, or until chicken is golden brown.
Now mix in the sauce and let simmer until the chicken is cooked all the way through and the sauce starts to get thick, this should take approximately 3-4 minutes. On a plate, serve chicken and sauce over rice and garnish with a sprinkle of sesame seeds

Serving size = 1 cup of chicken and 1/2 cup of rice

Here is what I learned by doing:

– Cook the rice according to package directions.  Then strain the rice because there’s still too much liquid when it’s done.

– Use an itty bit more oil.  It was pretty well gone before the chicken even got there.

– Dice the orange rind if you intend to eat it.

– On that note, add a little bit more sugar to the sauce recipe so that it caramelizes a little more.

– Dried chives are not the same as fresh scallions.

– Rice vinegar, though, is a good substitute for white wine vinegar.

– Use the pulp from the orange that you chopped up in a fresh house salad to serve alongside your chicken:

All in all, this recipe has got lots of potential, but we just need to refine the way that we cooked it a little and actually use all of the ingredients called for 🙂 We will probably make this again.  1 serving has 6 points on a popular weight loss program.

Menu Mayhem – and a little chaos

That over-exposed beauty right there is this week’s dinner menu at my house.  I love how you kind of lose the whiteboard, but the colors of the markers stand out.  Me + Color = Love!

I went grocery shopping for just the two of us this last weekend and ended up spending about $75 dollars.  I was happy to see, though, that I am naturally gravitating towards more produce.  About half of my grocery cart was fruits and veggies.  Today in my lunch box, for example, I have mixed fruit (cup), celery, and grapes.  I had blueberries with my breakfast.  We were snacking on cherry tomatoes as we were watching a movie the other day.  It is so much easier to be healthy now that it’s just Jeff and I 🙂 I’m enjoying the change.  The only down-side is that my trip was cut short and I am realizing that I missed a few things on my list.. Like spiral pasta and red pepper flakes.  I will either have to make another trip, or rearrange the menu… But hey! That’s why it’s on a dry-erase board, right?  Suggestions, not mandates.

On Monday, dinner plans got mixed up and Jeff ended up eating left-overs and I went out to dinner with a friend in need.  The Orange Chicken recipe, though, is definitely on my to-do list this week… and I will post fabulous pictures and a review when I’m through.

The other thing that I am excited for is the party on Saturday.  It is going to be hosted a couple hours after my Heart Walk (not too late to donate!)  If the weather holds, we’ll have some outdoor activities.  If it doesn’t, that’s okay because we have a rockin’ space that can fit plenty of people 🙂  Add some good apps, fun games, good music and good friends and you’ve got a party.

Hope you’re having a great week so far.  Happy Wednesday!

Gads: From Japanese Drums to Rammstein

It’s true, folks: This week has been crazy so far.  I have been putting the finishing touches on our apartment and couldn’t be happier–Well, except for a failed trip to Ikea, which you’ll hear about later.  Tonight, Jeff made the Tortellini Garden Vegetable Bake (for two!) and it was just as superb as the first time we made it.

Yesterday at work there was a Japanese Drum Show to celebrate Asian Heritage Month, after that, I had a dentist appointment where I found out that I need a crown (sad day!) Afterwards, Jeff and I saw Avengers (awesome!) and from there, we went straight to the Rammstein Concert.

So, based on this blurb,  you can see that there will be some pretty good posts coming up.  In the mean time, though, I really need to buckle down and study for my business exams.  It is already open as of the 5th and closes on the 11th, so time is a-wasting.  Wish me luck ❤ I will write again soon!

Thanks for reading, here’s some geese: