Mondays mean it’s time for meal plans. Meal plans are a must for our family ensuring that we have a (mostly!) healthy dinner planned every night. It helps keep us on budget as well, since less trips to the grocery store equal less impulse buys! If you are new to meal planning you can learn more about how I create our weekly meal plan in this post. This past week it was rainy and cold for a couple of days. This type of weather means comfort food around here. Here’s a look at what was on our menu this past week:
Sunday – homemade pizza and salad. Normally, we eat pizza on Fridays. But we had come home from visiting my sister and her family for Thanksgiving late Friday evening. I ran to the grocery store Saturday to just pick up a few necessities and pizza is so easy. So, pizza it was!
Monday – I made Chicken Sausage Provolone Pasta Bake from Cooking Light, January 2005. This is a recipe repeat and is a dish that I’ve made before. I had apple chicken sausage in the fridge that I wanted to use and remembered this recipe. This recipe takes a little prep in the beginning, cooking the pasta and getting the sausage and tomato mixture ready. And then it has to bake for 25 minutes. Not super quick but fairly easy to make. Plus, it uses a pound of pasta, which means lots of leftovers for us. The kids ate this and enjoyed it. However, my tastes must have changed since this wasn’t as good as I remembered.
Tuesday – I made Roasted Broccoli Cheddar Soup from Closet Cooking. To me soup is not a meal. So to make it meal-worthy, I served it with some biscuits and Caesar Salad. This was easy to make but takes some time in the cooking department, since the broccoli has to roast for 30 minutes and the soup has to simmer for 20 minutes. This was tasty though and kid-approved. It was perfect for dinner on one of our cold, rainy evenings.
Wednesday – I made Biscuit-Topped Chicken Potpie from Cooking Light, October 2006. This was a very biscuit week for us! The biscuits in this potpie are made with baking mix (like Bisquick). Instead of chicken breasts, which the recipe called for, I used chicken thighs, which I cooked in the slow cooker. I served this dish with roasted asparagus. This dish wasn’t quick and required a bit of prep and then oven cooking. I found the diced potatoes were a bit harder than I would have liked. This was another kid-approved meal, but one that I probably won’t be making again.
Thursday – I made Better Than Takeout Ham Fried Rice from the The Recipe Critic. This was hands down the winning dinner of the week! Plus it was so quick and easy to make! Thursdays are currently the craziest night of the week for us. I precooked the rice in the rice cooker earlier in the day. When we got home from piano lessons, I was able to whip this together in probably 10-15 minutes. The kids love fried rice. To spice it up, we add sriracha sauce after to the adult portions!
Friday – Surprisingly we had enough food left over for leftovers tonight! This happens so rarely, that I was super-excited for a night off from cooking!
What is on your menu this week?
Isn’t it strange how our tastes can change? I’ve had that happen when I remake something I devoured the first time and now feel meh about it. Honestly, it’s irritating because all that work for something so-so. I love Closet Cooking. It was one of the first food blogs I discovered! I can do just soup for lunch, but not for dinner. I have to have something extra with it too. The Ham Fried Rice looks delicious! I love fried rice and will check out that recipe. YUM!
Closet Cooking was also one of the first cooking blogs I discovered as well! I rarely make the same thing twice, so it’s even more disappointing when I thought I remembered a recipe being better the first time and it’s only “eh” the next time.