I like keeping track of my weekly menu plans because it helps me in my planning, my using stuff from the freezer and pantry, and having a good rotation of meals. Since I do recycle the menu plan posted weekly on our fridge, however, writing it down on this blog gives me a record of it.
So that's why you get to read about things we already ate.
Saturday (Jan. 21): We had a few hamburger buns left over from the Sloppy Janes meal earlier in the week. And, since we were low (in other words: completely out) of ground beef, I bought a family pack from the grocery store on that week's run, and cooked part of it up for Saturday dinner as Sloppy Joes -- also using some of the canned soup I won from 5MinutesForMom as an ingredient. The five-year-old and I had also made Strawberry Muffins (strawberries from our freezer, picked last summer) that day.
Sunday (Jan. 22): For the day before Chinese New Year, DH suggested we go to the buffet at the Chinese restaurant at our mall for our midday repast. For supper later in the day, the kiddo and I had Popcorn and M&Ms as we watched Barbie and the Diamond Castle -- acquired cheaply as part of our local Blockbuster brick and mortar store's sell-off as they go out of business.
Monday (Jan. 23): There was a call for a low-fiber meal this night, due to a required medical test last week for a family member who recently turned 50 (not me). That ended up being Crockpot Lasagna -- I used some of the hamburger I had browned and "onion-ified" on Saturday. (I browned most of the rest of the family pack and put it in the freezer, except for a a portion that I left raw and froze as hamburger patties.)
Tuesday (Jan. 24): We still had a bag of frozen Voila pasta and vegetables in the freezer -- it's a handy post-travel meal for us -- that I had purchased before the holidays. Since one bag really only feeds two of our family well, it was a good night to have it when only two of us were eating.
Wednesday (Jan. 25): A day of driving to appointments and errands. I put some Cranberry Chicken in the crockpot in the morning, using up the last Thanksgiving-era sales can of cranberry sauce from the pantry, and cooking up the whole family pack of chicken thighs from the freezer.
Thursday (Jan. 26): The Plantation Ham Pie from a Quick Cooking collection used up the last of the cooked and shredded Thanksgiving ham from the freezer, plus a bag of frozen broccoli from the same source. I made up homemade "cream soup" (butter, flour, milk) for those ingredients. And I did *not* roll my dough up into jellyroll style: I just plopped it on the casserole. Might not have looked pretty, but it tasted fine. Since our grocery store's sales on cottage cheese (an ingredient in the lasagna) always seem to require buying two containers, we also had a salad of Cottage Cheese and Raspberries (from last summer's pickings, from the freezer).
Friday (Jan. 27): Pizza.
Saturday (Jan. 28): I'd had a hankering for Chicken and Dumplings for a while, so I simmered up some turkey broth from the freezer, and shredded up the cooked but uneaten chicken from the family pack I'd crockpotted on Wednesday.
Now, we're up to this week.
Sunday: Indian restaurant, leftovers.
Monday: Crockpot Chili, using browned hamburger-and-onions from the freezer.
Tuesday: School restaurant fundraiser. I am being forced not to cook in order to support my child's education.
Wednesday: Spaghetti Carbonara. We have numerous garlic cloves from last summer's CSA sitting around in our pantry, plus one lone strip of bacon that's still residing in the fridge and hasn't gone bad -- yet.
Thursday: Two--Cup Corn Casserole. Pasta from the pantry, corn from the freezer, homemade cream soups -- and a wintertime hot comfort food.
Friday: Pizza?
Saturday: Apple Oven Pancake?
Those two might get switched up.
Showing posts with label pantry challenge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pantry challenge. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Menu Plan Week of January 16
So, you know how I said I thought we'd probably eat something last weekend? We did.
And I'm still doing pretty well on the eating from the pantry thing -- although I'm not being as strict about this as I have been in previous years (in part, because our January weather has been decent enough -- until now -- that going to the grocery store hasn't been as much of an ordeal as in other winters. I hate fighting the weather and the frozen fingers that have trouble manipulating the lists and the coupons).
What we ate on Saturday was "Mini Pot Pies," a recipe found on the Gooseberry Patch blog.
Ours were created with some cooked turkey from the freezer, the last can of cream soup from the pantry (I sometimes make my own, as it's basically used as an ingredient, but sometimes buy it if there's a really good sale), shredded cheese and refrigerated biscuits. We served them with applesauce. It wasn't a meal that took a lot of effort, but it was good.
We had our pizza meal last Sunday instead of Friday, because our family ended up needing to go to a memorial service for a former coworker of my husband's - who had been married to a woman I'd come to know through a church small group -- on Friday evening. We changed up our usual Sunday family meal out to Friday night, afterward.
This week, there are a lot of other things on the schedule, so the plans have seemed to come down mostly to "kid-friendly and fast" meals (sometimes I wonder if my own tastes have ever outgrown "kid meals"...).
Monday: Grilled Cheese Sandwiches and Tomato Soup (from the pantry).
Tuesday: Parmesan Chicken (chicken from the freezer) and Mashed Potatoes (from the pantry; a free bag of one of those bag mixes).
Wednesday: Sloppy Janes in the crockpot (hot dogs and buns from the freezer from summertime sales, mixed with canned beans from the pantry) and Cornbread (made with pantry ingredients).
Thursday: some sort of Pasta
Friday: Pizza.
I also needed to use up the acorn squash that had been sitting on the counter since last fall -- and were starting to turn more orange instead of green. I scrubbed them off and put them in the crockpot for a few hours with some water, which created easily sliced squashes with pureed insides. I froze some of the puree and used about a cup of eat to make Squash Muffins. The recipe called for raisins, which would indeed have been healthier, but my kiddo is currently on an anti-raisin strike, so I substituted chocolate chips in the hopes of persuading her to eat them. (It didn't work.) She also helped me make them -- we're working on her cooking skills this year. I've been finding a couple of them to be a nicely hearty winter breakfast, particularly when consumed with a cuppa tea.
Speaking of the tea, I've changed my ways on that as well. Since I take morning medication that prevents me from eating until an hour after I've swallowed it, plus have to get people up and going and to places in the mornings, on the days that I work outside the house, I end up eating breakfast at my desk. I had fallen into the habit of buying chais from the vending machine (I don't drink coffee). This month, I've finally begun brewing my own tea at work, using tea bags and an electric teakettle (a wedding present from 13 years ago). It did take me a few days to remember, first, a mug, then something to set the used teabag upon (I do reuse it a few times), then a container to actually pour the water into the kettle, but -- by the second week of January -- I've managed to shift the habit away from the vending machine and toward the kettle. I have bought one vending machine chai, and also treated myself to one from a coffee shop -- yay for gifts cards so I didn't actually spend anything out of pocket! -- but, overall, I've definitely reduced my daily and weekly spending in this area, plus it's probably healthier, too.
Visit orgjunkie.com for more menu plans (many of them posted in a more timely manner).
And I'm still doing pretty well on the eating from the pantry thing -- although I'm not being as strict about this as I have been in previous years (in part, because our January weather has been decent enough -- until now -- that going to the grocery store hasn't been as much of an ordeal as in other winters. I hate fighting the weather and the frozen fingers that have trouble manipulating the lists and the coupons).
What we ate on Saturday was "Mini Pot Pies," a recipe found on the Gooseberry Patch blog.
Ours were created with some cooked turkey from the freezer, the last can of cream soup from the pantry (I sometimes make my own, as it's basically used as an ingredient, but sometimes buy it if there's a really good sale), shredded cheese and refrigerated biscuits. We served them with applesauce. It wasn't a meal that took a lot of effort, but it was good.
We had our pizza meal last Sunday instead of Friday, because our family ended up needing to go to a memorial service for a former coworker of my husband's - who had been married to a woman I'd come to know through a church small group -- on Friday evening. We changed up our usual Sunday family meal out to Friday night, afterward.
This week, there are a lot of other things on the schedule, so the plans have seemed to come down mostly to "kid-friendly and fast" meals (sometimes I wonder if my own tastes have ever outgrown "kid meals"...).
Monday: Grilled Cheese Sandwiches and Tomato Soup (from the pantry).
Tuesday: Parmesan Chicken (chicken from the freezer) and Mashed Potatoes (from the pantry; a free bag of one of those bag mixes).
Wednesday: Sloppy Janes in the crockpot (hot dogs and buns from the freezer from summertime sales, mixed with canned beans from the pantry) and Cornbread (made with pantry ingredients).
Thursday: some sort of Pasta
Friday: Pizza.
I also needed to use up the acorn squash that had been sitting on the counter since last fall -- and were starting to turn more orange instead of green. I scrubbed them off and put them in the crockpot for a few hours with some water, which created easily sliced squashes with pureed insides. I froze some of the puree and used about a cup of eat to make Squash Muffins. The recipe called for raisins, which would indeed have been healthier, but my kiddo is currently on an anti-raisin strike, so I substituted chocolate chips in the hopes of persuading her to eat them. (It didn't work.) She also helped me make them -- we're working on her cooking skills this year. I've been finding a couple of them to be a nicely hearty winter breakfast, particularly when consumed with a cuppa tea.
Speaking of the tea, I've changed my ways on that as well. Since I take morning medication that prevents me from eating until an hour after I've swallowed it, plus have to get people up and going and to places in the mornings, on the days that I work outside the house, I end up eating breakfast at my desk. I had fallen into the habit of buying chais from the vending machine (I don't drink coffee). This month, I've finally begun brewing my own tea at work, using tea bags and an electric teakettle (a wedding present from 13 years ago). It did take me a few days to remember, first, a mug, then something to set the used teabag upon (I do reuse it a few times), then a container to actually pour the water into the kettle, but -- by the second week of January -- I've managed to shift the habit away from the vending machine and toward the kettle. I have bought one vending machine chai, and also treated myself to one from a coffee shop -- yay for gifts cards so I didn't actually spend anything out of pocket! -- but, overall, I've definitely reduced my daily and weekly spending in this area, plus it's probably healthier, too.
Visit orgjunkie.com for more menu plans (many of them posted in a more timely manner).
Monday, January 3, 2011
Menu Plan, Pantry Challenge
A lesson learned (repeatedly, it seems...) is that life goes better when I have a menu plan. I'd also like to get my recipes organized (a huge project) and be able to refer back to where I found something. I have a couple of ideas for how to do this, but need to experiment to see what works best. Ideally, I want to be able to look something up by main ingredient (e.g., bananas, ground beef, etc.) or by type of food (breads/muffins, casseroles, soups, etc.) and, potentially by which one of my cookbooks it can be found in.
FishMama over at LifeAsMom is hosting a Pantry Challenge this January, and I hope to participate in that, as well. Like her, part of my motivation comes from the fact that some frost is starting to build up on the walls of my (almost full) freezer. On the other hand, I really appreciate this time of year all of last season's produce that got stocked up in there -- and the other stockpile items. It's really helped with not having to worry about needing to do any major grocery runs during holidays/vacations...and our regularly scheduled blizzards.
In addition to the blizzard/time-saving issue, eating mostly from our freezer/pantry is a nice way to save money in January after the month of December. Plus, it's kind of a fun challenge. :)
So, here's the menu plan for the first full week of January:
Sunday: Chicken and Wild Rice Soup [Busy Woman's Slow Cooker Cookbook], Basic Banana Muffins [N/D 1998 Taste of Home magazine].
It's National Soup Month, and my husband said something a couple of days ago about a good bowl of soup being nice on a cold day. And I spent part of December browsing through old issues of Taste of Home and Quick Cooking magazines for the season and finding recipes I wanted to use. We are now almost out of wild rice, but it did come from the cupboard. Other ingredients -- frozen broccoli and corn (scraped from last summer's ears) were in the freezer, as was the chicken. (One of our grocery stores had a "Buy $25 worth of chicken, get $5 - I think -- off promotion in December, plus I had a $10 grocery gift card that expired the end of the year.) The bananas for the muffins came out of the freezer, too -- they were the ones that started getting soft from bunches we'd eaten throughout the year, so got put in the freezer to be used for banana bread (or muffins).
Monday: Spaghetti with Ragu Sauce
We had half a giant jar of spaghetti sauce left over in the freezer, plus a remaining free box of Barilla Plus spaghetti from a VocalPoint offer.
Tuesday: Chicken Pot Pie [Kraft Food and Family magazine Winter 2002 issue] (or, maybe, Popcorn Chicken and Seasoned Oven Fries -- for which I need to look up the recipes)
The soup only used a breast and a half of the three-breast package of chicken, so I need to use up the rest -- in something that stretches it. Hence the idea for the pot pie (which would also use the frozen pie crust in my freezer, and probably some frozen corn and shredded zucchini from the same source). The popcorn chicken and seasoned oven fries would use up the last four potatoes -- which are on their way to soft and shrively -- from a 99 cents for a 5-lb. bag purchase.
Wednesday: Church Supper and Epiphany Festival
Nobody has to cook!
Thursday: Blueberry Pancakes and Bacon
I actually had something else in mind for this day, but the memory completely escaped me before I could write my menu plan. I hate that. I'd been thinking of blueberry pancakes some time anyway, though (a request from the four-year-old), using some of last summer's blueberries from the freezer, and some deal-purchased bacon also in there. (This means I'll need to plan a way to use more of that bacon in next week's menu plan, before it goes bad.)
Friday: Pizza
Our family is still eating purchased frozen pizza; some day, I'd like to try the homemade stuff. It goes well with Family Movie Night, though. (Note to self: use free Redbox rental before it expires!)
Saturday: Weather willing, we'll be at a family gathering.
Since some of that family may read this, we could, theoretically, plan the meal now instead of engaging in our traditional sitting around throwing out various ideas an hour before mealtime while kids (OK, just mine) complain that they are Starving. To. Death. But where would be the fun in that?
(See more Menu Plan Monday links at http://www.orgjunkie.com.)
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