Vietnamese-Spiced Pork Chops

This Week's Plan

Meeting Reality: Since my pork chops finally thawed, we had Vietnamese-Spiced Pork Chops that was originally planned for Wednesday. This was okay, but our pork chops were a bit too thick for this recipe, I think. By the time the pork was cooked through, the rub had burned. Served with a rice pilaf and some steamed veggies.

Tomorrow night we'll try out an Indian spice mix with some frozen chicken tenders... Sorry for the lack of pictures. I need to charge the batteries for the camera.

And now it's time to come up with another week's plan. More on that tomorrow.

Taco Bake

This Week's Plan

Meeting Reality - Well I almost didn't make this because it was late before we got home thanks to swimming practice. But I did and it was good, albeit late. This is nice yummy comfort food for me - macaroni and cheese layered with taco meat. I ended up mixing mine up instead of layering it as I had forgotten to stir in the sour cream before starting the layers. But it was still very good, at least to E & I. M had something else to do tonight, which is the other reason this was made tonight - I knew E and I would like this and M would not.

Tomorrow night should be the pork chops we should have had Wednesday. E will probably eat leftovers from tonight.

Soup

This Week's Plan

Reality strikes: Well, when we arrived home this evening, I discovered that the pork chops had not thawed enough yet to cook tonight. So we had to rethink things. We had a couple of boxes of the Campbell's Select soups - one box of Butternut Squash Soup and the other of Italian Tomato Soup. So we heated those up and fixed a sandwich for E, who didn't want any soup. I had the Butternut Squash soup and I have to say it was very good. I would buy it again.

Melting Pot and MyRecipes.com

This will have to be a relatively quick post as my home laptop isn't the most cooperative. Tonight we went to The Melting Pot for a fondue dinner, which was delicious as always. We're all completely stuffed.

Since there's not much to talk about on dinner, I'll tell you quickly about one of my favorite sites for recipes. MyRecipes includes recipes from a number of magazines - including Sunset, Southern Living, Cooking Light, Health, and others. I subscribe to Cooking Light and really enjoy the variety of recipes. MyRecipe's "Dinner Tonight" newsletter always has some nice meals. So check it out.

Crispy Baked Pesto Chicken

The Plan: Crispy Baked Pesto Chicken

The Reality: Same as plan. Yay! It almost went astray as what I thought was frozen chicken breasts turned out to be pork tenderloin. Luckily we had to run another errand tonight, so we stopped by the store and picked up some chicken. It was really easy to make and I love anything with pesto, so of course I loved it. It got the thumbs up from M and E, though not without some "What is that stuff on top?". I had to remind E several times that we've had pesto numerous times before and he loved it so eat it!

I know I'm really behind on posting pictures - I do have them. I just have to get them off the camera and resized.

Tomorrow night, we'll have dinner at The Melting Pot, a fondue restaurant nearby. They are having some "anniversary" celebration this week, so they are offering 50% off the food bill tomorrow night. Who can resist a deal like that? If you like them and aren't on the mailing list yet, sign up!

Pizza and This Week's Plan

Tonight was homemade (sort of) white pizza with sliced tomatoes and bacon. Someone introduced me to this genius of a pizza once and it's been my favorite ever since. So when we bought some homemade pizza dough while attending a "Pizza and Wine" class at Vino100, I figured I'd try to recreate it. This is my second time using this pizza dough and it works pretty well. This time there was far less cursing, which is a good thing I think. Now that we've used up the dough we purchased, I think next time I might try making some in my breadmaker and see how that works.

I topped the raw pizza dough with a bit of oil, then sprinkled some pre-shredded pizza cheese, then some sliced Roma tomatoes, some chopped mostly-cooked bacon, then some more cheese. I forgot to put the stone in the oven to preheat with it, so the dough didn't get quite as crispy as it did last time. Still it was very good. Unfortunately, I didn't think to take pictures until it was all gone.

This week's plan is as follows:

SUNDAY - Homemade White Pizza with Bacon and Tomatoes
MONDAY - Crispy Baked Pesto Chicken
TUESDAY - Dinner at The Melting Pot
WEDNESDAY - Vietnamese Spiced Pork Chops
THURSDAY - Smoked Salmon Quesadillas
FRIDAY - Taco Bake
SATURDAY - Something indian...

So there you have it. The Chicken tomorrow night is mostly to use up the little bit of pesto left in the refrigerator. The Pork chops are to use up some pork left in the freezer. The quesadillas just sounded odd, so I had to put that on the menu to try out. Friday, it's just E and I, so we're having something that M wouldn't appreciate. I picked up a mix from one of the local indian markets that I hope to try Saturday evening.

Fish & Tots

The Plan: Homemade pizza

The Reality: Frozen beer-battered fish and tater tots. I saw the fish on sale at Target this morning, so I picked some up. For some reason, we never make it out to run errands until late afternoon. So even though you'd think I would have more time to cook on the weekends, it never works out that way. I doubt tomorrow will be any different as we still have to do grocery shopping.

This was the first time we had tried this fish (Gorton's) and it was pretty good, though next time I might use a different pan. My house is all smoky where some of the liquid from the fish spilled over the edge of the stoneware pizza pan I used.

Served with some hard cider. Yum!

Tomorrow morning I will work on the menu and then post it here. I'll also post the pictures from the last two meals.

Moussaka

The Plan: Rotisserie chicken.

The Reality: Moussaka at my mother's house.

We don't normally eat at my mother's two times in one week, but this was an odd week. We're a one-car family, so on the rare occasion that conflicting activities come up, my mother will usually let us borrow her car. Such was the case this week when I had a work event last night and E had swimming lessons to attend. So we had dinner at her house Wednesday evening when picking up the car, and tonight when dropping it back off.

Anyway, she made this Moussaka recipe which was very good. Definitely worth making again, though she said it took quite a lot of time and steps and used just about every dish in the kitchen. Still, she thinks it would be a great dish for company, especially since you should be able to make it ahead.

For dessert, she had some leftover frozen pumpkin/cool-whip dish which was really good - I'm going to have to search out that one and make some individual portions to keep around.

I have pictures of dinner, but I'll have to update this post with them sometime tomorrow.

How I Plan Meals

Nothing exciting for dinner tonight. M and E had sandwiches, while I went to a work event at Biaggi's.

So instead I'll talk a little bit about how I come up with a menu for the week. I like to try new recipes, so most of the time, that's what I make. Sometimes we'll have spaghetti or sandwiches or a previously-enjoyed recipe, but most of the time, it's new stuff. While I have quite a few cookbooks, I have to admit that most of the recipes I use come from various websites. I won't list those today - I'll save those for boring-dinner days.

But I will tell you that right now, I'm using del.icio.us to store my recipe links. This works very well for me because it is easy to add tags when we've tried and liked a recipe or to categorize it in different ways. For example, a few weeks ago I had a family birthday party for E where I made six different soups for everyone to try. This was an idea stolen from my mother. Anyway, I could add a "SoupFest" tag to keep track of the soups I wanted to use for this event. Plus of course I can then access these links from anywhere - home, work, etc.

When planning a menu, I know that a few days in the week I need to have quick meals because of other evening plans. So I try to work around those days - either a very quick meal, or more often, leftovers. Luckily, I have a family that doesn't mind eating the same thing two days in a row, so I will often plan meals so that we eat them two or three days in a row. That way I don't get burned out in cooking every night. That's how we end up eating pizza some nights.

Usually I only plan the main dish. The side dishes are just whatever we happen to have around. I try to vary cuisines and proteins from day to day (or dish to dish), just so we're not eating the same type of thing several days in a row. My usual proteins include chicken, turkey, fish (I like to keep a few bags of frozen fish around), pork, and occasionally beef.

Besides my online recipes, I get a few cooking magazines that I use - Cooking Light, Light & Tasty, and Weight Watchers Magazine. All three are pretty good, but I admit I tend to use Cooking Light most of the time.

I will ask M and E if they have any requests. E at 6 years old has a couple of suggestions that he offers quite often. M will occasionally have a request, but usually doesn't think of anything until we're in the middle of grocery shopping when I've already made the plan.

If I know a week will be crazy busy, I'll plan on our open-faced sandwiches for a few days. I also will plan an "OPEN" day into the plan because I know how often our plans get shifted. So this allows for shifting of menus or extra leftovers I wasn't planning on.

So that's the rambling version of how I plan my menus...

Cheesy Egg and Spinach Casserole

The Plan: Sandwiches

The Reality: Cheesy Egg and Spinach Casserole with biscuits. My mother asked us to stay for a quick dinner when we stopped by. Since we had just figured on sandwiches tonight, we agreed. Luckily, my mother let me borrow her camera so I could take pictures of dinner. This was a pretty good recipe, though we all agreed it needed a lot more sausage. Still, it would make a great brunch recipe. Even E ate some, which I was pretty surprised at. He's not much of an egg eater.



After dinner, we headed over to our local Vino100 for the weekly wine tasting. This week's theme is Bordeaux wines. I wasn't fond of the white Bordeaux (though M liked it) but the three red Bordeaux wines were pretty good.

Tomorrow E has swimming lessons in the evening, so I'm sure we'll stick to the plan. No need for more pictures of meat and cheese, so maybe I'll talk about my approach to planning a week's worth of dinners instead.

Sandwiches

The Plan: Sandwiches.

The Reality: Sandwiches! We took E to BounceU tonight so we needed a quick dinner. Usually it's either sandwiches or leftovers. I know you've already seen my lovely plate of meat and cheese from yesterday, but I'll give you another one, just because. There are a couple of different meats this time though.


On the far left is some Cajun Turkey Breast and next to it, in the middle of the plate, is some Honey Pepper Turkey Breast. The Cajun turkey is very good - we've bought this before. I haven't tried the honey pepper turkey yet but it sounded interesting.

If you haven't checked out your local grocery deli counter, I encourage you to do so. I was surprised at how many different meats and cheese there are. We always find some interesting chicken and turkey to try. We usually pick up a quarter of a pound of a few just for some variety.

The Plan: Tomato and White Bean Soup

The Reality: Okay, so we had leftovers from last night which I had wanted to finish up tonight. But I wasn't in the mood so we had sandwiches instead and M will take the leftovers for lunch. Tomorrow, we'll have sandwiches again since we have somewhere else to go afterwards. Hopefully, we'll have the soup on Wednesday.

Spreads clockwise - salmon cream cheese, garlic and herbs alouette, whipped chives cream cheese, plain cream cheese, and margarine

Some nice crusty bread. Even better when it's toasted...

Meats & Cheeses - clockwise there is hard salami, pepperjack cheese, provolone cheese, mild cheddar cheese, and smoked turkey breast

Seashell Pasta with Gingered Scallops and Snow Peas

This is a recipe from Cooking Light. I picked it because (a) it sounded good and (b) it used up the remainder of my frozen bay scallops. This looks very nice but is missing something in taste.

Now that could be me. I'm notorious for deciding on a recipe to do and missing a step or realizing at the last minute that I'm missing some vital ingredient(s). In this case, it was the latter. Despite me making my grocery list this afternoon, I still missed a couple of things. This recipe has been on the plan for the last week or two and I'm only just now getting to it. Anyway, my substitutions on this was some egg substitute for the egg and some dried basil instead of the fresh (which I added with the milk/egg mixture instead of at the end).

It was okay, just nothing spectacular. I don't think we'd make it again.

However, there were leftovers, so we'll have those tomorrow night and push the original plan back a day.

This Week's Plan

Each weekend I make a plan for the week on what dinners we will eat. The plan rarely stays intact, but it's a start at least. So my intent is to post my plan, then each day I'll post what the reality is. Since I'm typing this after dinner, I already know this plan will shift slightly.

Another day I'll post my process for coming up with a week's menu.

SUNDAY - Seashell Pasta with Gingered Scallops and Snow Peas
MONDAY - Tomato and White Bean Soup
TUESDAY - Sandwiches
WEDNESDAY - Sandwiches
THURSDAY - Sandwiches
FRIDAY - Rotisserie Chicken
SATURDAY - Homemade pizza

One quick explanation on Tuesday through Thursday. Sandwiches for us are open faced ones with plates of deli meats and cheeses and tubs of flavored cream cheese and spreads, so we can each make our own. It's something M grew up with in Germany, and it's nice for those evenings where we need something quick for whatever reason. Pictures and more on that on Tuesday.

Salmon and Eggs

Before assembly

After assembly

This is one of our regular meals - E requests this one a lot and how can you argue with a kid who loves smoked salmon? It's very simple - really good fresh crusty bread, topped with butter (or smoked salmon cream cheese), smoked salmon, and slices of still-warm hard-boiled eggs. It's a nice last-minute meal. We discovered this little combination when visiting a Norwegian friend of M's.

Chicken Breast Bundles with Cranberry Chutney

Tonight's dinner is from Pillsbury. Another new recipe and this one is going on the favorites list. I have to work on the chicken wrapped in crescent roll part though. I got too impatient with it this time. But the chutney was really easy to make - throw the ingredients together and microwave. And the flavor combination was fabulous. If you're doing a small Thanksgiving, this would be a great alternative to the traditional dinner.

Past meals

I set this blog up just for fun and then promptly did nothing with it. But I ran across NaBloPoMo and figured it was good incentive to actually do something with this besides annoying my family with picture-taking.

So here we go. We just had open-faced sandwiches tonight, so no exciting pictures. Plus, I um, forgot. But here are some pictures from meals in the past few weeks.


Kashi Mediterranean Pizza


These are small, but pretty good. Like most frozen pizzas, though, the trouble is arranging all the toppings which have ended up in a lump in the middle. But at least with the Kashi pizzas, I can pretend like I'm eating healthy. Hey, it's got fiber and whole grains, right? That must count for something....


Pfefferbrötchen



This is my mother-in-law's recipe and is one of my favorite comfort foods, next only to my husband's Fried Pasta. These are hard rolls, stuffed with a mixture of hamburger, cheese, and onion, then baked.


Pesto Salmon


This was a spur-of-the-moment idea. My mother gave me some leftover pesto dip she had made and I was trying to figure out what to do with it. I took some thawed salmon fillets and spread the pesto on top, then baked according to some time & temp I found in a recipe online for something similar. Very very good and I would totally make this again. But then I'm a pesto fiend.

Pinot Noir Risotto with Rosemary Chicken


This is a recipe from Cooking Light. It sounded so interesting, I couldn't resist trying it. The risotto is made with an entire bottle of Pinot Noir. Now how can you go wrong with that? We enjoyed this one a lot. Definitely a keeper that would be good for entertaining, I think.


Spaghetti and Meatballs


Okay, nothing that interesting here. Whole wheat spaghetti with jarred sauce (Classico is our sauce of choice) with some turkey meatballs that were simmered in the sauce. Served with Texas Toast garlic bread. I love texas toast - too much, probably. Still, it's an easy dinner that is very good and very kid-friendly.


Pork Fattoush


Another recipe from Cooking Light which was both warm and cold, crunchy and soft and chewy. I used some Greek Pita Bread I found at Target which was much better than your standard pocket pita bread. Another keeper.

So that's it for now. Tune in tomorrow for a new dinner...