Weekly Menu Musings #26

Welcome to the 26th Meal Plan. Skip to the BOLD food for the menu plan. Thank you for visiting our humble little blog. Spring is here! We’ve had a couple of beautiful days at the beginning of the week. Sunday was beautiful, sunny, but a bit chilly. It felt like summer on Monday; it was so wonderful! We appreciate the warmth so much here in the Pacific Northwest because it is kind of a rarity about 10 months of the year. We are back to clouds and sprinkles for a little while, but I remind myself the sprinkles give us the beautiful lush green that the Pacific Northwest radiates.

I am planning on writing out my menu every Tuesday since that’s the first time in the week I usually get to sit down and work on my own thing since we homeschool Mondays and Fridays. In fact, I decided that this weekend. So I finally make a decision, and then of course I couldn’t follow through this week. I didn’t have access to the website at the time I had to write my menu on Tuesday, and I ended up on phone for one hour with tech support. So here is my menu musings today.

This next story does have to do with food and how our last week’s menu was partially sabotaged (in a good way). This weekend we were at Home Depot, and Jonathan was helping a lady in the car next to us load her merchandise. Well the lady was part of a gleaners organization and had a truck loaded with bread. She gave JSarr three loaves of bread for helping her including two loaves of Dave’s Killer Organic Bread. Our kids were in heaven! Bread is such treat at our house since I don’t buy it, and since I only bake sourdough bread about once a week. And when we have sourdough, it’s as a side or in pizza and not as part of sandwiches or anything like that. So we have been feasting on grilled cheese with pesto a couple of times. SO GOOD! The bread was gone in three days. We also enjoyed French Toast for two or three breakfasts!

We also got stuck eating out a few times since we had a concert for Ellie and Abbie down near Seattle, and then we had to go to the Apple Store in Lynnwood to repair JSarr’s hard drive. We stayed out WAY longer than expected, but thank you, Lord for Apple Care. JSarr was within a month of his three year term expiring. So we walked out of the Apple Store shelling nothing out of our pockets and coming away with a new hard drive. God’s grace! Plus, we got to eat Chipotle for one of the meals.

And now for my loose meal plans:

Dinners:

Pulled Pork at a friends.
Pizza with Sourdough Crust and Pesto and Marinara Sauce-I am making a stromboli with these recipes and want to make a quadruple batch so we have leftovers to stretch out for two dinners. The two sourdough batches are soaking now as I type. Each batch of sourdough makes at least two pizzas. I use raw milk cheese on my portion so I can eat it.

Cranberry Pecan Kale Salad and more Pizza-Just call it pizza week. Since pizza is in different forms, and it’s Ellie’s ninth birthday I am just fine with more pizza for the family this week. Have I really been a mom for nine years now? She’s halfway to 18. Oh, that’s a bit scary, and good, and beautiful all at the same time! Ellie wants pizza at my dad’s. I am bringing one of her favorite salads, the Cranberry Pecan Kale Salad.

Roasted Cauliflower and Garlic-Seriously Ellie loves burnt cauliflower and garlic-the darker the better for her. It’s SO good!

Crock-pot Chicken with a Salad
Crock-pot Re-fried Beans–It’s been awhile since I’ve made re-fried beans, so crock-pot beans are in order.
3 Ingredient Chimichangas-And it’s only natural since we’ll have a big batch of beans around to have some chimichangas. Since we’ll have leftover chicken, I may throw it into a few chimichangas.

Guacamole-Upon inspection of my produce inventory, I need to make guacamole pronto to accompany our Mexican before they go South. No pun intended.

Dessert and Snacks:

Bananas with Nut Butter and Pecans-a family favorite afternoon snack.

Chocolate Covered Pretzels with Sprinkles-for Ellie’s classmates at school.
Crazy Cake-if Ellie would like it for her birthday. I have yet to ask her. I still have a few days, though.
No Bake Raspberry “Cheesecake”-I made and froze some raspberry “cheesecakes” a few weeks ago so we’ve been nibbling on these babies recently and have a few more left. I just love pulling them out of the freezer and having a quick sweet treat. I also love that they are portable and that the portions are already pre-determined. When we had guests for an impromptu Family Fellowship this Sunday, I was all ready for dessert. Gotta love the freezer. Seriously, the worst ingredient in these little loves is honey or maple syrup…if you call that bad. JSarr jokes and says they are practically a salad, they are so healthy. Well not quite a salad, but I guess you can call my Grasshopper Pies that are made in the same way a salad since they are naturally colored with spinach. Spinach in a sweet pie. Yes! You seriously can’t taste it.

Raspberry Rapture Smoothie–See a bit of a raspberry theme? Well I got some organic raspberries on sale recently. So our featured smoothie this week is the Raspberry Rapture Smoothie. We even snuck some greens in it. You can sub strawberries for raspberries, too.