Menu Plan Monday 1.2.12

It’s a four day work week… So it will be quick and factor in some leftovers.

Breakfasts:

• Banana bread, apple slices
• Oatmeal, bananas
• Cereal, juice
• Toast, applesauce

Lunches:

• Chicken drummies, rice pilaf, pineapple (today)
• Spanish rice bake, salad
• Chicken noodle soup, orange wedges
• Bologna sandwiches, carrot sticks, apple slices
• Beef noodle casserole, green beans, peaches

Suppers:

• Spaghetti & meatballs, spinach salad
• Dilly venison roast, cheesy potatoes, carrot sticks
• Fish, peas, salad
• Potato soup, cheese and crackers, salad
• Leftovers

 

Snacks:

• Chocolate chip cookies and milk
• Banana bread and yogurt
• String cheese, apples
• French fries and milk

 

Yes, thanks for noticing… I really DO have a lot of apples to use up. Also, salad is something we are planning to make into a staple at many suppers.

For a ton of great ideas, check out OrgJunkies Menu Plan Monday links!

My goals this month are to start fresh with menu planning. I hope to really use up what is in the freezers and pantries. So I’m not sure.. these meals could be either really interesting, or really boring. We’ll see!

 

Summer: the half-way summary

Exactly half-way through this summer, I am wondering where the time has gone…  Yes, I counted out the days/weeks.  I like numbers.

It seems to have at least partially gone to:

• bonfires
• sleepovers
• parties
• baseball practice
• baseball games
• house guests
• weekend trips to visit family
• a visit with a dear friend (Hi Heather!)
• time at the lake
• tubing at the lake
• fishing
• quiet hours at the coffee shop with a spiced chai
• strawberry picking
• making strawberry  jam  syrup
• picking peas
• shelling and freezing peas
• tearing apart a bathroom!

The second half will see the end of baseball, but won’t slow down!

• BIG family trip (first ever)
• camp for kids
• bathroom redo to complete
• garage to clean out and reorganize
• more time at the lake
• more fishing
• CSA harvest events
• gardening to keep up on
• freezing and canning to do
• painting

Just as I don’t know how we fit it all in the first half, I don’t really know how it will all get done in the second half.  But I think that somehow it will…

Menu Plan Monday ~ 7.18

Well, last week went pretty well.  Not perfect, but better than the last many weeks have been!  The biggest success was coming home from our pea pick at the CSA farm to a roast already done, saving us from fast food!  Yeah!  Within 15 minutes of being home there were shredded beef sandwiches, baked beans and carrot sticks.  I also liked not having a specific meal assigned to each day.  It gave me the freedom to know that I had something on hand for everyday, but could make what I felt like making and fit into the craziness of the day.

Now I’m excited to try again.  Let’s see what can go on this week’s menu!  In cleaning out the pantry and looking at all I had on hand, I am pretty stocked up on ingredients for Mexican dishes.  And we have 16 jars of canned salsa to use before tomatoes start taking over.

Lunches

• Lettuce wraps with deli meat and shredded cheese
• Quesadillas – either bean or chicken, we’ll see what I find more of in the freezer
• Lasagna hotdish (made in the crockpot?)
• Crockpot cheeseburgers
• Tilapia fillets

Suppers

• Spaghetti and meatballs
• Chef salads
• Enchiladas
• Chicken legs
• Leftovers

Side-dishes will consist of LOTS of veggies! Our CSA has been delivering a ton of vegetable variety on Thursdays!  We will have green beans, Chinese cabbage, peas (shelling and sugar snap), onions, lettuce, lettuce and more lettuce, some spinach, kohlrabi, cabbage and maybe a carrot or two.  Fresh fruits right now include kiwi, nectarines, oranges and bananas.  So any combination of those will grace our plates at any given meal.

What will be on your plates this week?  Looking for some meal planning inspiration?  Look no further than the Menu Plan Monday links  hosted this week by Finding Joy in My Kitchen!  Wow there are some creative ladies out there!!

Menu Plan Monday ~ 7.11

My menu planning has been all but nonexistent!  I am hoping to get better this week!  Thursday and Friday we will be gone during the day and I don’t know when we will get home so it will either be supper on the road or something quick and easy at home.

Lunches for Monday through Wednesday:

• English muffin pizzas, spinach salad and watermelon
• Chicken & Rice casserole with broccoli,  peaches
• Lettuce wraps with turkey and cheese, crackers, melon

Suppers for the week:

• Stromboli, lettuce salad
• Shredded venison roast on buns, fresh veggies, applesauce
• Chef salads, nectarines, kohlrabi sticks and toast

(then there are bound to be leftovers and a meal out do to the schedule)

Making this plan is definitely a step in the right direction…. now comes the hard part!  Follow-through!!

Good luck in your meal-making this week!  For LOTS of inspiration and yummy recipe links visit OrgJunkie for Menu Plan Monday links!

CSA: Week 15

CSA Week 15 ~ 9.8.10

Oh look!  Vegetables!

Must be the Wednesday delivery.

As you can see, there is the usual…corn, potatoes, cuke, Walla Walla onion, garlic, green beans.  Then there are a few new things…beets, red onion, jalapeno, BIG banana pepper, brussel sprouts, tomatoes, sage.

Within a couple of hours the tomatoes were already in a new pot of salsa.  Batch 3 for the season.

I really am not sure how I’ll use the rest.  We are planning on eating out the next couple of nights, so some of it I will incorporate into lunch this week yet.  The rest I’ll use up this weekend.

Are you enjoying the garden bounty that comes with late summer?

Menu Plan Monday ~ 9.6.10

I haven’t posted any menus in a loooooong time!  With school starting tomorrow, I am anxious to get back into routine days.  We ate out more than usual this summer, and while that is fun, I am ready to start cooking complete meals most days.

So here we go…

Today being a holiday & all, everyone is home.

• Lunch: burgers on the grill, sweet corn, watermelon
• Supper: chicken quesadillas, mexican beans, salad

And for the rest of the week I’ll just give you a list of lunches and suppers.

Lunches:

• tuna melts, apple slices, carrot sticks
• homemade pizza, salad
• sloppy joes, fried potatoes, nectarines
• bean & cheese burritos, salad, watermelon

Suppers:

• sweet & sour meatballs, rice, pineapple & mandarin oranges
• tomato soup & grilled cheese, carrot sticks, fresh fruit
• take-n-bake pizza (there is a special on Thurs nite), salad, watermelon
• leftovers

Next weekend I foresee some combination of  the folloowing:

• Brats, baked beans, chips
• A new recipe of some kind
• Chicken noodle soup, cheese & crackers, fresh fruit
• Scrambled eggs & ham, toast, fried potatoes, fresh fruit

So there it is…easy variety without much prep work.  Check out all these menu plans, many complete with links to YUMMY recipes!

Tomatoes

It hasn’t been a good year for tomatoes.  Most people are getting a little concerned about having enough for all the canning they would like to do.  Knowing this helps me remember to be thankful for the tomatoes I have.

I love the romas for canning.

We haven’t had a bumper crop by any means.  That was two years ago.  But we are doing ok.  I have 10 containers of stewed tomatoes in the freezer and 2 batches of salsa done.  I would like to can some plain tomatoes, either puree (haven’t done before) or whole tomatoes.  We’ll see what I have on hand tomorrow before I decide.   Another batch of salsa would be nice too, but not essential.

The crazy producer is my grape tomato plant!  Dan finally pulled it up last night.  On one plant I got pails full of the sweet little things.

This is the 8th or 9th time we've picked at least this many. Seriously.

Tomorrow I plan to can the flat in my garage.  There are a lot more out there that are ready too.  So some of the ripest will get canned and then we’ll see.  Maybe some more salsa on Monday?

(our csa garden had the tomatoes fall to blight so there isn’t going to be a tomato pick there)

CSA: Week 14

Here we are…another CSA post.  Just 6 weeks and a couple more picking events left.

CSA Week 14 ~ 9.1.10

Again with the corn.  It will taste good with the grilling I’ve got on the menu plan for the holiday weekend.

The green beans will definitely be easy to eat.  Probably for lunch tomorrow, as I’ve got some in my garden to pick too.

The pepper is HUGE and beautiful!  Not sure exactly how I’ll use it, but I will!

The carrots, cucumber and kale will become snacks or salad additions.  I think I’ll do kale chips again.

The zucchini will get baked and added to a meal.

Garlic?  Well that is always useful.  And the other little bit of green you see in the top of the pic?  That is sage.  If I don’t get to it fresh I will dry it when I get ready to dry more basil and oregano.

Look at that!  A plan for all this garden yummy-ness.

A quick question too…Do you freeze carrots?  Or dishes made with carrots?  Tell me more!  Last time I froze carrots they didn’t really get eaten.  And I have the carrots shown as well as a lot of carrots in my garden waiting to be picked.

CSA: Corn Pick

Does it seem like everything is about this CSA lately?  Are you bored to tears?  I need to get this down so I remember…you know, for next year.  Yeah, I think we’ll be doing this again next year.  Call me crazy.

one of several flats of corn we cleaned

A few weeks ago we got an email that the corn pick was on. We can pick about 10 dozen ears of corn at the farm.  While we would’ve rather waited another week, we decided to go right away.  Early on a Saturday morning, Dan and I set out, leaving the kids to sleep.  Picking went really quickly.

Then we went up to the farm place to pick up the first of our chickens. With each share in the farm, we get two chickens.  They are big chickens that spent their life feeding on the cover crops at the farm.  My mom & I went together to purchase a chicken share also.  That is 20 chickens we’ll split.  I am really excited to try these birds out.  The first of the two we brought home is thawing now.  It will become a beer-can chicken this weekend.

As for the corn.  Combined with what we had at home already, we froze 163 ears of corn.  The kids really don’t mind cleaning corn so they helped a lot.

A daycare family of mine in HomeTown (and also a farm family & sweet corn growers)  shared a recipe for corn with me years ago.  It is my favorite.

getting a pan ready for the oven

** see the cobs there?  An electric knife works great for getting that corn cut off quickly!

Canned Sweetcorn

40 ears corn, cut from cob

1 pound butter

1 pint half&half

4 Tbsp sugar

4 tsp salt

Mix together in roasting pan and bake for 1 hour @ 350 degrees, stirring occasionally.   Bag in quart size zip top bags and cool bags in ice bath.  Freeze.

It isn’t thick like creamed corn, but it is kind of soupy.  There is great flavor and I’ve found that I can cut back a little on the butter and half&half.

this was taken directly to the town's compost site

After getting the 2 dozen quart size bags of corn into the freezer, all that remained was husks and cobs.  Thankfully the town’s compost site is open until 7 pm on Saturdays.

CSA: Week 13

CSA Week 13 ~ 8.25.10

It was another full, heavy bag of produce.  Some things were the same: zucchini, cucumbers, onion, corn, potatoes.  And then there were some other things:  green pepper, garlic, green beans.

Our challenge this time was just that…the time.  We get our delivery on Wednesday.  On Thursday evening we had piano lessons, hair appointments and a football informational meeting.  Definitely no time to eat any of this.  On Friday we left for a long weekend in HomeTown.  We wouldn’t be eating at home again until Tuesday (yesterday).  So what do we do?

Compromise.

I hate to see anything go to waste if it doesn’t have to.  I knew I had a lot of paperwork to do on Wednesday so I didn’t have a lot of time.  Dan agreed to go to the work to freeze the corn.  I grated the zucchini quick, leaving out a few cups to bake into somethin’ yummy on Thursday, freezing the rest.  And I added the tomatoes, green pepper and onion to some tomatoes from my garden and stewed them.  They were tucked away in the freezer on Friday.  I also made Pineapple Zucchini Bread & Chocolate Zucchini Cupcakes on Friday before we left for HomeTown.  The cucumbers turned into refrigerator pickles that we took with for the family reunion dish-to-pass.

Green beans were divided up and given to the neighbors.

The potatoes?  Well they are still in the cupboard with a few other weeks’ deliveries of potatoes.  I really need to figure out what to do with the surplus.

And that took care of it.  My crisper drawers were empty with the exception of a few apples.

In a few hours I will receive a text letting me know that the deliveries are here.  Sweet corn anyone??