Weekly Meal Plans

1. Goat Ragù
2. Slow Cooker Roasted Chicken w/ Cabbage and Potato Gratin with Sage
3. Marinated Pan-Seared Eye Round Steaks w/ Roasted Beet Risotto Bumped to next week.
4. Mustard Tarragon Grilled Chicken w/ Herbed Summer Squash and Potato Torte with Parmesan
5. Sautéed Tilapia with Honey-Scallion Dressing w/ Turnip Gratin
6. Queso Chicken Pasta
7. Grilled London Broil w/ Pasta with Fresh Tomato-Herb Sauce
Super Omega 3 Granola Bars Put off yet again.  Poor Art, his omega 3s are doomed.
Panzanella

This week I will get back on track with cooking and blogging!  That’s really my main goal for the week, everything else is secondary.  Secondary goals include trying to make a dent in the veggies that are accumulating in the fridge (meals 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7), remaking a few earlier posted (recipes in order to update the pictures (meals 2, 3, and 4), and getting fish in at least one day Art is away (meal 5).  Art also had the request that we grill and use basil when he is home next weekend, so that’s where meal 7 comes in. 

I’m also going to try to do those granola bars to help Art’s omega 3 intake while he’s on the road and the Panzanella will be both a lunch treat and a way to use up a number of cucumbers.  Sadly we’re not quite into tomato season yet so I’ll need to use store-bought cherry or grape tomatoes still.  I am so ready for tomato season to arrive. 

It looks like it will be a root vegetable and squash-filled sort of week here in Southern Maryland.

As an aside, I have a few goals for the future as well that I’d just like to note here for posterity and, hopefully, so I’ll remember. 

1) I’d like to work on marking cookbooks with sticky tabs. I’ve got tons of cookbooks and I find it easier if I have them already marked when I pick on to use in meal planning. 

2) I’d like to get back into the habit of picking one cookbook a week to use in meal planning.  I’ve been slacking in that department and my cookbook collection recently exceeded 200.  It makes no sense to own them if I don’t use them, so I’ve got to get back into that routine. 

3) I’ve become enthralled with The Culinary Institute of America and while abandoning my family for 2 years to pursue a formal culinary education is not very feasible, working through The Professional Chef is.  I’ve got the book, I just need to start reading and figure out how exactly I’m going to cook through the (recipes.  It’s got about a bazillion (recipes so I’d like to set myself a pretty easy goal – maybe 2 (recipes from TPC a week?  Something to think about.

1. Breakfast: Parfait w/ Parsley Goat Cheese Eggs w/ toast Dinner: Out
2. Out
3. Out
4. Out
5. Spicy Stuffed Collard Greens
6. Chicken Caesar Salad Pizza
7. Mom’s Chicken w/ Amatriciana Pasta w/ Sautéed Garlic Scapes
Super Omega 3 Granola Bars Next week.

At this point in the week I really don’t know what’s going for food!  I feel like I’m still catching up from everything last week and haven’t really thought at all about this week.  This is not helped by Lance and I heading out of town for a few days.  We have entirely too many meals out this week – I’ve promised myself that I will cook every single dinner next week, or else. 

I do know that I’ll be attempting to make granola bars for Art to take with him when he travels in order to boost his omega 3 consumption.  Edit: Next week..

Edit: As of ⁶⁄₁₇ I have not cooked dinner in the last six days.  My promise to myself is to cook something new every single day next week.  No eating out for dinner, no leftovers for dinner, just cooking.  Or else.

1. grilled goat chops w/ Swiss Chard Gratin
2. Leftovers
3. Salmon with Mustard and Dill Sauce w/ Mashed Potato Cakes with Onions and Kale (Can I make these with turnips to supplement the potatoes?  Probably so.)
4. Moroccan Chicken w/ Quinoa with Squash, Garbanzo Beans, and Cumin
5. Baked Layered Pattypan Squash w/ Baked Lemon Pasta (I’ll forget to toss the shelled peas into the pasta for excitement. Oops.)
6. Caesar Salad Pizza I was looking forward to this, finally, but with my choir schedule this week we’ve decided that we need to have a second leftover night to fit into our hectic week.  Next week, Caesar Salad Pizza, you will be mine!
7. Breakfast: Parfait w/ Eggs Benedict
8. Breakfast: Parfait w/ Parsley Goat Cheese Eggs w/ toast
Gazpacho (with garlic scapes for the garlic.)
Granola

I feel like I did a bit better last week since only one meal got carried over to this week!  Woo!  This week is a bit of an unusual one, as you can probably tell from meals 7 and 8.  My parents are coming to visit this weekend and we’ll only be home for breakfasts on Saturday and Sunday.  After breakfast on Saturday we’ll be going to the Food and Wine Festival at National Harbor and eating dinner somewhere at the festival.  After a late breakfast on Sunday we’ve got my choir concert and will probably be grabbing an early-ish dinner somewhere on the way home.  Since I won’t be able to make any exciting dinners, I’ll be attempting to make some exciting breakfasts instead.  The parfaits will be made with whatever fresh fruits I can get at the market that morning, banana, yogurt, and homemade granola. Yum.  I’ve never made Eggs Benedict, so that should be a challenge. I’ve never actually poached an egg either, buy my mom will be there to help me so I have no fear!

The goal for the rest of the week is to use up the weekly vegetable bounty.  I’m not sure that everything is accounted for in the plan, but I feel like I’ve got most of it in there somewhere.  I’ll even need to stop by the market on Wednesday in order to pick up a few squashes for meal 5.  (Meal 5, by the way, is my meal of the week for updating pictures from old (recipes.) 

We’ve also realized that we need to start having a weekly leftover night whether I’ve got choir or not.  Why?  Because there’s just too much food otherwise!  We can’t eat it all!  This means it ether goes to waste or we try to eat it all and then it goes to waist.  Hopefully having a weekly leftover night will mitigate this problem. 

And the gazpacho?  That’s just because I’ve missed it so much these past months and I want it so much!  Soon I’ll be able to make panzanella too! 

Life is good.

1. Grilled Marinated Leg of Lamb w/ Orzo Baked with Greek Cheese
2. Smoked Beef Brisket w/ Garlic Chive Mashed Potatoes w/ salad 3. Tandoori Chicken with Butter Chicken Sauce w/ rice (New recipe.)
4. Sakura!
5. General Tso’s Chicken w/ rice
6. Pasta with Sausage, Basil and Sundried Tomatoes (modified to use broccoli rabe)
7. grilled goat chops w/ Swiss Chard Gratin Moved to next week in order to have Chinese food from the local delivery place.

You might be able to tell from all the strikethroughs in last week’s menu, that last week did not go as planned.  I had to serve the tomato dish earlier in the week due to tomato damage, the table delivery happened at an awkward time that caused me not to cook prior and then not to want to after, and the desire for sleep sort of collided with choir on Monday which left me with no time to cook between the two.  Meal 2 is from last week’s meal plan. 

I’ve got lots of veggies to use up this week from the market and CSA!  I’ll be using turnips in meal 1, garlic chives and green garlic in meal 2, broccoli rabe in meal 6, and Swiss chard and spinach in meal 7.  Radishes will be used throughout the week in salads. 

The best “challenge” for the week is Art!  He’s home for the entire week!  Oh my gosh yay!  I believe this is the first time he’s been home for an entire week since early March and since he always tells me how much he misses home cooked food while he’s traveling, I asked him for ideas of things he has especially been missing.  Meals 3 and 5 were selected by him.  I picked meal 6 with him in mind as well, since it’s one of his favorites and meal 7 is a result of him asking to try out the goat we got a few weeks ago. 

Then there’s meal 4… I’ve been craving sushi something fierce.  I can’t even remember the last time I had it which is a sad state of affairs! 

Have a delicious week!

1. Lostathon Appetizer Day – Beef Nachos, Spinach and Artichoke Dip, Crispy Polenta Triangles with Brebis
2. Slow Cooker Cabbage Rolls
3. Tilapia with Balsamic Butter Sauce w/ Roasted Turnips w/ salad w/ Balsamicy Pasta Caprese
4. Caesar Salad Pizza Delivery pizza due to the very late table delivery 5. Grilled Marinated Chuck Steak w/ Balsamicy Pasta Caprese w/ Roasted Turnips w/ salad
6. Pesto Chicken w/ Spaghetti with Tomatoes, Garlic Chives, and Basil
7. Smoked Beef Brisket w/ Garlic Chive Mashed Potatoes w/ salad Leftover Taco Pizza
Garlic Scape and Basil Pesto

I have not yet finalized this menu since I just got home yesterday and have been pretty busy recovering from last week and getting ready for the week to come.  I’m running out to the grocery store today to get the ingredients for today’s Lostathon and then I’ll get the rest of the menu filled in to do the bulk of the grocery shopping tomorrow. 

The main challenge for this week, now that the CSA has started up again, is the challenge you’ll be seeing for the next 20 or so weeks – use up all the CSA veggies!  I’ll be using cabbage in meal 2, turnips in meal 3, lettuce in meal 4, garlic chives in meals 6 and 7, and a whole bunch of good things in the pesto.  Meal 5 will use the beautiful tomatoes that I picked up, I just haven’t put much thought into how yet. 

Today is the last ever episode of Lost which is something like two and a half hours long.  Before that we’ve got an hour recap special and, before that, we’ll be watching Tuesday’s episode that we weren’t able to watch since I was out of town. We don’t normally watch so much TV, but it’s Lost!  This is a Big Deal!  I thought it would be fun to have an appetizer die and forgo real meals as part of the celebration, so we each picked the appetizer we wanted most.  Art picked Spinach and Artichoke Dip, Lance picked Nachos, and I thought that the Crispy Polenta Triangles would be a fantastic vehicle for the Brebis cheese I got in West Chester.  It should be a very tasty sort of day! 

The other goal that I’m attempting to work on is updating old pictures in my blog.  I like the way the pictures with the light box turn out so much better than my pictures pre-light box, so I’m slowly going through old posts, remaking the (recipes, and posting new pictures.  This week I’ll be updating pictures for Beef Nachos, Spinach and Artichoke Dip, Spaghetti with Tomatoes, Garlic Chives, and Basil, and Garlic Scape and Basil Pesto.  (My goal is two a week, but this week had other plans.) 

Have a tasty week and if you’re ever in West Chester, PA, stop by Jazmine – the town’s newest Thai restaurant.  It’s delicious!

1. Out (Chipotle, yum)
2. Hamburger Beef Stroganoff w/ salad
3. Elegant Garlic Chicken w/ rice of some sort w/ salad
4. Baked Chicken Breasts with Parmesan-Garlic Crust w/ Pasta Caprese
5. Cod with Lemon-Caper Sauce w/ Greek Potatoes w/ salad
6. Out (The Tex-Mex place by the movie theater after Iron Man 2!)
7. Smoked Short Ribs w/ more salad! 8. Taco Pizza
Chicken Tetrazzini
Egg Salad (without the bacon)
Mock Tuna Salad

I think the main challenge for this week was just figuring out what all the challenges were in the first place!  We’ve had an unusual number of dinners out recently due to my 15th Alumni Day at my high school.  It was a fantastic weekend of time spent with friends and family.  However, I’m still a bit sick and meal planning is a very huge hurdle for me to jump when I just want to sleep 16 hours a day! 

One of the fun bits of planning this week involves cow.  We finally picked up our first order of Mountain-Pastured Beef and I’m excited to start using it!  This meat is featured in meals 2 and 7.  (If we like the first order, we’re planning to order a half cow in the fall.)  We’ve never actually fired up the grill as a smoker which makes meal 7 doubly exciting.  I also bought some lovely local tomatoes when I was away over the weekend so I’ll finally get to make Pasta Caprese again.  I’ve been waiting for it all winter!

Next week is a strange one because I’m going to New York to help my brother and dad work on a big home renovation project.  This means that I slipped an 8th meal into this week since I won’t be posting a meal plan at all next week!  Meal 8 is a recipe given to me by my awesome sister-in-law and I’m excited to give it a try. 

I’m planning on taking some lunch foods with me to New York so we’ll have sustenance while digging out a house foundation.  Since my brother is a vegetarian, I’ve opted to make Mock Tuna Salad and Egg Salad and take along a few loaves of good, grainy bread as well as some peanut butter and jellies.  That should get us through the week. 

And then there’s Lance who will be holding down the fort while Art is traveling for work and I’m in New York.  When I asked him what he wanted me to make for him his response was “Tetrazzini!”  He’d never had it before meeting me and now he can’t get enough.  Rightly so, since it’s a fantastic dish.  He should have enough other food in the fridge and the freezer to tide him over until I’m back home to cook again.  I hope. 

Sort of an unusual week, but at least it will be a tasty one!

1. Mom’s Chicken w/ Swiss Chard Tart
2. Salty Sugared Salmon w/ Rice Cooker Lemon Rice
3. Bacon Swiss Quiche (Make 2, freeze 1.)
4. Chicken with Mustard Wine Cream Sauce w/ Rice Cooker Riz au Parmesan
5. Sesame Chicken with Garlic Sauce and Broccoli (tweaked) w/ brown rice
6. Out of Town (Pepper Mill!)
7. Out of Town (Leftovers, etc.)
Mock Tuna Salad

Last week didn’t go completely as planned.  We ended up eating leftovers for two meals due to my hectic choir schedule.  Thankfully choir is now back to once a week which should free up my schedule a bit.  Meal 2 is planned for choir night this week.  The salmon only requires a quick broil to cook and the rice can be put in the rice cooker in the morning. 

I had a number of goals this week with meal planning aside from accommodating choir.  Now that the market has started, I’ve got the goal of using up market produce each week.  This goal (and challenge) will be in effect until Thanksgiving.  This week gives me a slow start and I’ve only got to use up Swiss chard (meal 1), green onions (meals 3 and 5), and lots and lots of eggs (meals 1 and 3). 

In the hopes of adding more brown rice to our diet, I finally invested in a rice cooker so this adds another goal to my meal planning – use it.  I also picked up The Ultimate Rice Cooker Cookbook, so meals 2 and 4 feature (recipes from that tome.  Both of those (recipes will use white rice, I guess my goal of eating more brown rice isn’t going so well yet! 

I’m also going to work on getting fish onto our dinner plates at least once a week and hopefully twice.  I suggested to Lance that we have a vegetarian meal a week and he counter offered with “can we just eat more fish instead?”  So we’ll be doing that while Art is away. 

The Mock Tuna Salad is a test recipe.  I’m going to be visiting my brother, the vegetarian, later in the month and I wanted to take some good lunch foods with me to share.  The “mock tuna” part of the salad is chickpeas, which I love, so I decided that I need to test the recipe out before making it for my brother. 

Last, but not least, I’ll be trying out sourdough bread again.  My last attempt, which I didn’t post, was to follow a tried and true No Knead Sourdough recipe from the internet.  And it didn’t turn out any differently than my not tried and true attempts.  For my next attempt I’ll be taking Lance’s advice and using a more bread-shaped vessel in which to bake the bread. 

Maybe it will be a busy week after all…

1. Grilled Flank Steak Fajitas
2. hamburgers w/ Mac and Cheese
3. Chicken and Broccoli Stir-Fry w/ rice
4. Sesame Chicken with Garlic Sauce and Broccoli (Tweaked.) Leftovers since there are a lot in the fridge and I’m super busy with choir this week.
5. Leftovers
6. Out with Mom and Dad!
7. Breakfast: Buttery Cream Cheese Coffee Cake w/ scrambled eggs We’re opting to eat breakfast out.
Dinner: Chicken Parmesan Pot Pie

This week is a mish-mash of things.  We had planned to have company over last Saturday and to grill fajitas again, but then I got sick.  So we canceled our plans and ended up ordering pizza.  We’ll be grilling fajitas tonight instead, and then we’ll have infinite leftovers.  Meal 2 is also a holdover from last week. 

This week is normal in terms of Art’s travel but, if I’m feeling well and don’t actually have strep throat, I’ve got choir four nights this week which includes the concert.  My parents are coming for the concert and we’ll be eating out afterward for meal 6.  They’ll also be joining us for breakfast on Saturday so I’ve got coffee cake planned.  Edit: We’ll be eating breakfast out instead of at the house. 

Meal 3 is from the How to Boil Water cookbook, meal 4 is an experiment to tweak a recipe I’ve made previously, and the dinner for meal 7 is Art’s request for the week.  While planning it didn’t really occur to me that meals 3 and 4 are pretty similar, but oh well. 

Here’s hoping I’ll heal quickly and be able to do everything I need to do this week.

1. Swedish Meatballs w/ egg noodles w/ salad
2. Italian Baked Chicken and Pasta
3. Not a Slab o’ Steak Sandwich
4. Pan Seared Salmon with Sautéed Spinach and Crème Fraiche w/ Super Simple Oven Potatoes
5. Leftovers
6. Chicken Sancoche w/ salad
7. Grilled Hamburgers w/ Mac and Cheese We ordered pizza since I’m sick :(

My menu is delayed this week.  I blame SimCity 4.  I have the usual planning challenges this week.  Four nights without Art and two or three nights of choir. 

I did have a few other goals with meal planning this week.  I’ve been craving Mac and Cheese so it’s on the menu.  Art enjoys grilling at least once while he’s home, so we’ll be doing burgers on the grill.  I also have a bunch of steaks in the freezer that I want to make a dent in, so that’s the inspiration for meal 3.  I’ll also be making fish during the week, since we didn’t have any last week. 

Since the cookbooks I grabbed weren’t offering any inspiration this week I turned to the internet and my own recipe files.

In other exciting food news we ended up getting an additional chest freezer for future bulk cow purchases and also a rice cooker to make the transition to brown rice a bit easier!

1. Beef Wellington w/ salad
2. Slow Cooker Orange Chicken w/ rice w/ veggies
3. Chicken Dijon w/ rice w/ Parmesan-Roasted Broccoli
4. Pan-Glazed Chicken with Basil w/ Risotto with Peas and Prosciutto
5. Leftovers
6. Chicken Tetrazzini w/ salad
7. Grilled Fajitas w/ Mexican rice (This will probably be made with flank steak.)

Um, yeah.  As you can tell I haven’t gotten very far with my meal planning for the week.  Why?  Because I had to grocery shop on Saturday for Saturday’s dinner (meal 6 in last week’s menu) and I opted to get food for Monday of this week (meal 2) so I’m not shopping for the rest of the week’s food until Tuesday.  This means I get to procrastinate meal planning and, of course, that’s what I’m doing. 

I’m sure the rest of the week will include something with fish and perhaps something with the crème fraiche my grocery store just started stocking.  It’s a pretty standard week - one night of leftovers due to the craziness of Thursdays and Art gone for most of the week due to business travel.  There will probably be another attempt at sourdough bread and more Chickpeas with Sausage and Sundried Tomatoes. 

For what it’s worth, I do have meal 1 of next week planned already, since it will be another Game Day.  I’ll be making Spinach and Artichoke Dip, Slow Cooker BBQ, Potato Salad, and Spinach Bacon Salad.  All things I’ve already posted here and all things that include bacon.  That wasn’t planned, it just happened, I swear. Game Day was canceled :(

In other food news, I’ve started looking into buying cow in bulk. I’ve found a farm in the area that sells ¹⁄₄ cows and I think, maybe, that I could fit ¹⁄₄ cow into my freezer.  Maybe.  I’ve contacted the farm to get a cubic footage estimate and then I’ll go from there.  This is very exciting to me, I’d love to get locally and humanely raised cow! 

I’ll edit this post later in the week with the rest of the meal plan.  Maybe tomorrow.  When I’m done procrastinating.

Edit: Meal planning ended up taking no time at all.  Why?  Because I decided that, in these few weeks left before market season begins, I should revisit some of the earliest (recipes I’ve shared here. Not only because we enjoyed them and it would be nice to feast on their deliciousness again, but also to take new, better pictures with my mad skillz.  (Okay, so I don’t have mad skillz, but I do have a much nicer photography setup than I started out with!)  Sadly this means I won’t be posting many new (recipes during the week, but I will be posting many new photographs!