On the Menu.... 3rd Week of February

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Menu Planning

If you made it through my Pantry Challenge posts, you know that we are not quite done yet with whittling down our pantry to a more manageable and purposeful selection of items. Going into this week, I wanted to keep the spirit of the Pantry Challenge alive by shopping the items in my freezer and pantry that had been ruminating the longest and turning them into something delicious.

Truth be told, if you have a well stocked pantry like we do, you are always working on a loose first-in-first-out mindset of rotating goods that were bought on sale in the past with new sale items, in the hopes of rarely having to pay full price for items you use often.

Instead of going into this week with a set idea of what I wanted to make, I went down to the chest freezer to see what items were in the most need of being used up. Our chest freezer needs a bit of a re-shuffling, but for the most part the older items are near the top. 

I pulled out: steak tips, stew beef, a pre-marinated pork loin roast (about 1.5 lbs), and pre-cooked diced chicken breast (about 1 cup).

In the fridge, we also had some leftovers from the end of the previous week, plus a plethora of vegetable I purchased on the discount rack at Market Basket - lettuce, tomatoes, zucchini, summer squash, mini peppers, and broccoli.


What's on the Menu?

How menu plans tend to work for us is that some ideas get assigned to specific nights, other tend to float so that we can adjust incase our schedule changes. This is my rough projection for the week.

Breakfast

Breakfasts this week are pretty basic, oatmeal or cereal for my husband, a granola bar and peanut butter for myself once I get to work. 

Lunches

Lunches are always either dinner leftovers or a meal specifically prepped for lunches. I typically take the dinner leftovers, and make another dish for Ben to take throughout the week that might not be to my taste.

This week for lunch there are leftovers of Creamy Kielbasa Pasta from Friday's dinner, and one remaining serving of baked ravioli. I also made this Instant Pot Beef Stew for Ben's lunches, served over a bit of rice.

Dinners

Monday: Roasted Pork Loin, Roasted Potatoes, Roasted Zucchini and Summer Squash, and Steamed Broccoli. Since Monday was also Valentines Day, I made these sweet heart shaped chocolate cakes for dessert.


Meal Prep: Instant Pot Beef Stew - I love using the instant pot to prep lunch items because they can cook without taking up a lot of counter room or my attention.


Tuesday: Steak Tips, Rice, Steamed Broccoli, Roasted Zucchini and Summer Squash, or maybe a salad?


Meal Prep: lunches for myself with the leftover steak, broccoli, and roasted potatoes from Monday's dinner

Wednesday: Pork Loin reheated in a bacon pan sauce, leftover veg, maybe rice?

Thursday: I have a work dinner to attend, Ben will probably have some Chinese leftovers from the weekend.

Friday: Chicken Taquito filling in blue corn tortilla shells with cut veggies on the side


Other Kitchen Happenings

This past weekend was SuperBowl Sunday. We met up with a few family members for appetizers and a little game watching. 

I made pizza rolls using pizza dough made from scratch, frozen mozzarella cubes, pepperoni from the fridge, and scratch made pizza sauce. Since I was already making the dough and sauce, I doubled the dough recipe and made the full sauce recipe, since we were out of both in the freezer.

After making the pizza balls, I had enough dough leftover for two 12 inch pizza crusts, and 5 cups worth of sauce. These are great to have on hand for weekend or weeknight meals.

In the spirit of working through some pantry odds and ends, I've been adding a quarter of a packet of hot chocolate mix to Ben's coffee in the morning to get them used up (I prefer making hot chocolate from scratch - much less sweet). I also took a few miscellaneous tea bags to work that we weren't going to use.


Have a great week, and happy meal planning!


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