Saturday, June 29, 2013

This Week's Eats: June 23 - 30

Each week, my goal is to cook at least 3 dinners at home. Instead of planning specific days for each recipe, I'll just choose recipes and decide what to cook day by day. Everything from this week came from Cooking Light's April 2013 issue.

Chicken with Quick Chili Verde: This was delicious! I really liked the Chili Verde sauce, and could see it being great on steak too.

Spice-Rubbed New York Strips with Avocado Lime Salsa: Oh wow. This was excellent. I'm on an avocado kick lately, and the salsa that went with this was great. And so pretty! I used jalapeƱo instead of serrano chilis, but other than that made it exactly as the recipe lists.

Shrimp and Shiitake Rice Bowls: I'm not a huge rice fan, but I do love shrimp, so I tried this one out anyway. I subbed the Uncle Ben's Wild Rice and Brown mix for plain brown rice since I already had it, and made this on the night I was cooking for my parents. We all loved it! This was probably the quickest of the 3 meals I made this week, although all were done in 30 minutes or less.




Friday, June 28, 2013

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Meal Planning

For a really long time, I tried to plan out meals for the week. I'd sit down on Sunday and plan out what I'd cook each night, then make a list of ingredients, then go grocery shopping. I'm a planner, so I love planning aspect of doing that, but then my plans would fall apart when I decided I wasn't craving chicken on Monday and chicken was what I'd written I would cook on Monday. Or something would come up at work and I'd stay late and not feel like spending an hour cooking dinner when I got home. Or maybe I'd get a call from a friend or my parents offering a last minute dinner invitation.

So to kind of remedy that, last week I still sat down and made my meal plan. But instead of deciding on which nights I would cook each meal, I just picked 3 meals that looked good, bought the ingredients for those, and then decided day by day which recipe worked for me. Since for the most part, I just cook for myself, 3 meals a week seemed like a good goal and would easily be enough for dinners, leftovers for lunches, and a couple nights of leftovers with at least one night out.

Is this rocket science, new, or an incredible idea? Nope, not at all, but I want to document meals here in this space so I have an easy place to come back to for repeats. So hopefully, I'll be posting weekly meal ideas for each week on Sundays.

We'll see how long I can keep this up!