Menu 2/12/2012

1. Out to celebrate Art’s birthday!
2. Leftover Night (voice/choir)
3. Basil Chicken in Coconut Curry Sauce w/ rice
4. Grilled Marinated Leg of Lamb w/ Wheat Berry Salad
5. Grilled Tandoori Chicken w/ Naan w/ Basic Chicken Curry (Har-Roz ki Murgh Kari) w/ rice
6. Sausage, Tomato, and Arugula Fettuccine
7. Tilapia with Cream Caper Sauce w/ rice hamburgers w/ Molten Chocolate Cakes w/ vanilla ice cream (Somehow I got confused and thought meal 7 was Sunday when Art is gone, but it’s Saturday when Art is home which means no fish!  We’ll do burgers instead.)
Lunch: Red Lentil Coconut Soup

Art is home this week before heading back to England for another three weeks so the meals I have planned are based around the things he wants to eat and cook.  He requested grilling tandoori chicken and a leg of lamb which I planned meals 4 and 5 around. 

I’m trying to integrate more whole grains and beans into our diet and, to that end, I’ve been subscribing to beans and grains through Amazon.  (Sadly, I don’t have access to the “weirder” things locally.)  I’ll be using my newly acquired red lentils and wheat berries in our lunch soup and meal 4. 

Meals 4 and 6 use meats from the freezer.  I think I’m doing okay staying on track with using meat from the freezer two to three nights each week. 

I also spent quite a bit of time this week cataloging my cookbook collection.  The old spreadsheet wasn’t cutting it as I wasn’t keeping on top of updating it.  I decided to switch it over to Goodreads, which I already use to track all the other books I’ve read and want to read.  I’m hoping this will be easier to maintain.  (As of writing this, I still have one shelf left to enter into Goodreads.  I’m not tall enough to reach it myself and I keep forgetting to ask one of the guys to do it!) 

In conjunction with putting my cookbook collection into Goodreads, I decided to give Eat Your Books another try.  I really do want to start meal planning from cookbooks more often than I do now.  Internet (recipes are certainly easy, but I’ve got this awesome cookbook library and should do more with it.  I’m hoping that EYB will make that easier.  The site seems quite a bit more robust now than it was when I initially checked it out and I think it has quite a bit of potential for usefulness.