what’s for dinner

Dinners This Week and Last
by

Dinners This Week and Last

Last week, I created a poll so that you could vote on which meals from my meal plan would not end up being eaten. First of all, I love a poll so I hope you enjoy it. Secondly, I can only see the results of the poll by submitting another vote, which is a) stupid; I am the poll creator and should be able to see the results and b) misleading, because I can either click on a random item or use my knowledge as The Person Making the Meals to choose how to vote, but either way, I’m skewing the results. There has to be a way for me to see the results without voting, right? This is totally user error.

Anyway, these are the (slightly skewed by me) results of the poll:

Poll results showing Japanese Curry as the leading meal likely to fall off the plan with 17 votes, followed by arugula salad with 13 votes.

Clearly you don’t know me AT ALL. The Japanese curry was the only meal I ended up making from that list!

What did I eat instead? Mainly chipotle chicken tortilla soup, which lasted the entire week, despite my eating it sometimes twice a day. I may… be a teeny bit sick of it.

One night, I ate a Red Baron pizza-for-one. One night, I ate panang curry from the local Thai place. And then this weekend, I made honey chipotle chicken in the crockpot and used it for enchiladas. (Jenny mentioned enchiladas recently, and it got to me.) Which means delicious enchilada leftovers for at least another day. YUM.

But what else should we eat???

Dinners for the Week of November 9-15

  • Coconut Curry Chickpeas with Pumpkin and Lime: This is not my favorite meal, but my husband requested it and my philosophy is to make something if my husband requests it because that’s one less meal I have to come up with. Bonus: This is one of the few vegetarian meals my husband likes.
  • Quinoa Salad with Apples and Sweet Potatoes: This is one of those times when having a blog turns out to be AWESOME. I have no recollection of eating this before, or even having heard of such a meal before. But it turns out – at least, according to my blog – that we have eaten this before and loved it. In my notes, I said this: “I lost my nerve/energy to make the hummus dressing, so we stuck with the boring old oil and vinegar. I think the salad would have been better with more interesting dressing. Aside from that, this salad was AWESOME. I included goat cheese and chopped walnuts as toppings, and the salad was very hearty and satisfying. PLUS it produced enough leftovers for at least two more meals. So good! Definitely a keeper.”
  • Szechuan Stir Fry: I am putting stir fry back on the list because I am so very in the mood for stir fry. The bell pepper situation at my grocery store hasn’t been super lately, though – and bell peppers are essential, in my mind, to a good stir fry – so we’ll see how things turn out.

I’m also in a baking mood, although a mood does not always translate to action. I really want to make another batch of pumpkin cream cheese muffins but this ginger cake sounds amazing.

Let’s do a poll again, just because I find them delightful. You know what? Let’s go crazy and do TWO polls, one for dinners and one for baked goods.

by

Dinners This Week and Last

All right, last week, I planned to make three meals: fried rice, pork chops with something green, and Guinness beef stew. Somehow, even though I only made two of those meals (plus two others), we have an ENORMOUS amount of leftovers. Some of which have already outlived their time and must meet the big garbage disposal in the sky. I mean, in my sink.

The first meal I made was pork chops. I’d planned on pairing them with broccoli, but the broccoli I’d purchased the previous week had gone moldy. So I made some roasted potatoes and sautéed some peas and shallots to go alongside the chops. (Confidential to Allison: They were nice and thick, but not quite as thick as they could have been.) The meal was good!

Next, I made fried rice with sautéed shrimp. It was fine! I was in the mood for fried rice, and it definitely scratched the itch. My husband ended up having a work meeting that night, so I made him a chicken breast and had plenty of fried rice for him to eat when he got home… and then it turned out they’d eaten at the meeting. Neither of us has eaten any of the leftovers, which have long since reached the point where I need to toss them.

Next, I made roasted salmon with roasted asparagus and mango salsa and rice. My daughter had a big test the following day, and I figured salmon was good brain food. Not only does Carla LOVE salmon, she requested that I make the asparagus! Um, yes, I will make you asparagus anytime, my love. I bought two mangoes and one was ripe but all grey inside and the other was beautifully yellow inside but not ripe, so the salsa was fine but not great. We have some of that leftover as well. I also made apple crisp, which was quite yummy.

My husband was not in the mood for beef stew. As an alternative, I suggested chicken tortilla soup. That did not appeal to my husband. He was in the mood for chicken pot pie. I am not sure if this will surprise you or not, but I do not like chicken pot pie. So we made a compromise: I made a vat of chipotle chicken tortilla soup and he made chicken pot pie. We now have leftovers for this week (and beyond; we both froze a LOT of leftovers) and we each got to eat something we wanted.

Of course, there are still multiple days of the week to account for, food wise. So I suppose it’s time to plan a few meals.

A bowl of soup topped with sour cream and cilantro, surrounded by tortilla chips, on a blue plate with the text 'Dinners this week' overlaid.

Dinners for the Week of November 1-8

Jenny suggested that I make a poll and allow you all to vote on which meals you think I’ll make and which I’ll skip, which I find hilarious. Let’s give it a try.

by

Dinners This Week and Last

How many of last week’s planned meals did I make? Stay tuned for the thrilling answer!

But first, I wanted to give you an equally thrilling update on the fruit fly situation, which is that we still have them. Per Swistle and Steph, I tried a combo of boiling water and bleach in the kitchen sink drain. I really really thought this had done the trick, as the fruit flies seemed non-existent the following day. But then they slowly returned, although not to the intensity of before. The Zevo, which some of you LOVE, and SWEAR BY, continued to do nothing. Out of desperation, I bought a package of 100 sticky gnat traps to stick in my plants; they seem to operate by a similar principle as the Zevo, only without requiring a blue light. The traps only just arrived, so I don’t know whether they are doing anything yet, but I have high hopes.

Now back to dinner talk. Last week, I planned three meals. Of those three meals, I made ONE, the Sheet Pan Cuban Chicken and Black Bean Rice Bowls. We ate this meal as a rice bowl one night and as tacos another night.

I did not make Beef and Broccoli because, despite your assurances, I was concerned it would prove to be too much broccoli with the other meal I had planned. So I made Fire Fry instead. WHAT A GREAT IDEA. We ate leftovers a second night, and then I ate vegetarian fire fry for two – no, three lunches and loved every bite. It’s been a hot minute since we’ve eaten Fire Fry, and I do not know why we waited so long. It has everything I love: sauce over rice, spices, and bell peppers. YUM. I have found that the key to really good Fire Fry is whole milk yogurt, though, and I haven’t found a whole milk Greek yogurt that works quite as well as boring old Dannon… and Dannon’s downfall is that it’s got a much lower protein content than Greek yogurt. Oh well. You win some, etc.

The other meal I planned to make was Oven Baked Pork Chops with Something Green, and that Something Green was intended to be broccoli. Well, it’s on the meal plan again for tonight, but the broccoli I bought last week had developed a five-o’clock mold shadow, so into the garbage it went. That’s what you get for shirking your meal plan, I guess: moldy broccoli. I’ll sauté some peas and shallots for tonight’s Something Green.

Yesterday, I made some chili, which I find pairs perfectly with fall weather and football. We have plenty of chili leftover, so I’m anticipating a repeat of that this week. But what else?

DINNERS FOR THE WEEK OF OCTOBER 26

  • Oven Baked Pork Chops with Something Green: Let’s just put this back on the meal plan, for the sake of completeness.
  • Fried Rice with Some Sort of Protein:I would like to eat fried rice with shrimp, but I suspect my husband would prefer chicken. I may end up mish-mashing some recipes together (doesn’t fried rice usually have ginger in it???), but I chose this one because it does not require oyster sauce. I don’t have oyster sauce on hand, and it’s one of those things I wouldn’t use very often if I bought it.
  • Guiness Beef Stew: I’m in a stew sort of mood. This seems like a good option for a Halloween-y weekend.

Carla has a big test this week, and for her post-test treat she has requested Taco Bell and apple crisp. I plan to make the apple crisp because I’m not aware that Taco Bell has it on the menu, and… even if they did have it on the menu, I might choose to make it anyway. Do you have a favorite recipe for apple crisp? If it helps, I like mine to have lots of crisp oaty goodness in among all the apples.

What’s on your meal plan this week? Any carryovers from last week?