Welcome to the first weekly meal plan of 2016! This meal plan was actually last week’s meal plan, the last of 2015. With the new year here I am on a mission to eat healthier. Be on the lookout for more salads and lighter fare making their appearance in our kitchen. But, I am still aiming for quick and easy but tasty recipes to feed our family. If you have any recipe recommendations that fit the bill, please share! I highly recommend meal planning to keep your grocery bill on budget and to not have to deal with the dilemma of “What are we having for dinner?!” Here’s what was on our menu last week:
Saturday: Straight-up Christmas dinner leftovers – turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, etc.
Sunday: After a long day of after-Christmas shopping the Weekend Chef made homemade pizza. He made one plain and one roasted broccoli and bacon….though we all wanted more of the broccoli and bacon one!
Monday: I knew we were going to have leftover turkey from Christmas dinner. Since I’m not a huge fan of leftovers myself, I purposely looked for recipes where I could use the leftover turkey up without it tasting like leftovers. The first recipe was Turkey & Cranberry Monte Cristos from Rachel Schultz. I had forgotten to buy cranberry sauce for Christmas dinner so we were happy to eat it on these sandwiches. I adapted this recipe a tiny bit, using swiss cheese instead of havarti, and omitting the nutmeg. And of course, using canned cranberry sauce instead of homemade. The kids had never had a monte cristo before and loved this sandwich! This certainly won’t be the last time we make this. This was super quick and easy to make and a tasty way to use some of the leftover turkey. We ate these sandwiches with a salad.
Tuesday: I made Turkey Pad Thai courtesy of Melissa d’Arabian via The Food Network. I didn’t have fish sauce and substituted soy sauce, so this dish definitely lost some of it’s intended flavor. We also didn’t add the sriracha sauce while cooking and opted to add it to the end to just the adult plates to make sure the wasn’t too spicy for the kids. This was really tasty and you definitely don’t feel like you’re eating leftover turkey. While the recipe says this only takes 15 minutes including prep and cook time, this probably took us more like a half hour.
Wednesday: The last of the leftover turkey was used in Turkey Tikka Masala from The Delicious Cook. This dish had a lot of flavor and didn’t remind us that we’ve been eating turkey for days! It was easy to make and super tasty! We ate this with rice and naan.
Thursday: Happy New Year! To ring in the new year we had app-as for dinner! That is appetizers/tapas for dinner including shrimp cocktail, nachos, eggrolls and dumplings. We ended the year with a caloric bang!
Friday: We were out during the day Friday and stopped at a local pizzeria and picked up some specialty pizza slices for dinner. I went with the Eggplant Parm pizza which was delicious!
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