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Thursday, February 24, 2022

Cheap & Cheerful Suppers for Late February

Another week of simple meals at our house. You will notice that on several nights, we finished off different garden vegetables for the year. Always makes me a bit sad. As you may have guessed, we like to eat a lot of vegetables. Oddly, I sometimes have to remind myself to cook some meat every now and then, too. After looking at what we ate this past week, I think this next week will be one of those weeks with more meat. Anyway, here's what we had for dinner this past week.

Friday, pizza and movie night (we watched Some Like It Hot)
pepperoni pizza, roasted pumpkin cubes (the last of our garden pumpkins and winter squashes from 2021. :-( sad me), canned green beans, celery sticks, brownies

Mexican-inspired dinner

Saturday

Homemade Mexican -- refried beans and cheese, canned corn, canned tomatoes, homemade flour tortillas, with last of the garden carrots, steamed, brownies

Sunday
lentil-vegetable soup with homemade cheese buns

Monday's hot dogs after a busy afternoon

Monday

toasted hot dogs in bread wraps, Parmesan potatoes (last of the potatoes tonight), steamed carrots, radish green salad with boiled eggs and bacon bits in citrus dressing

I love frittatas!

Tuesday

broccoli and sausage frittata, with brown rice and chicken stock gravy, avocado slices, ginger apple-fig sauce

one daughter made dinner tonight for us

Wednesday

tuna salad on cabbage leaves, carrot sticks and dip, canned green beans, homemade French bread and butter

other daughter made dinner this night

Thursday
vegetable and lentil curry over brown rice with raisins, peanuts, and homemade chutney garnishes


Thursday was a baking day. I made granola (again -- gotta use up some of our oats), blueberry muffins, and some bar cookies, a recipe from one of my mother's first cookbooks. My family liked them, but I thought they were on the dry side and just okay. They were coconut-almond bar cookies, to which I also added dried cranberries. If I were to make these again, I'd use a smaller baking pan so they would be thicker, and maybe use more coconut and almonds. While I was making them, I was thinking that the recipe was a bit skimpy on both almonds (1/4 cup) and coconut (1/2 cup). Perhaps this was a recipe holdover from wartime just a decade earlier. Anyway, I think I may try them again and tweak the recipe a bit. I liked the idea of a coconut bar cookie. The recipe just needs more of the goodie ingredients, in my opinion. So, I baked the sweet things on Thursday and will bake bread for the week on Friday. Lately, I've been quadrupling the pizza dough recipe for Friday's pizza dinner and using 3/4 of the dough to make 2 large loaves of French bread. This seems to be about the right amount of bread for us for one week and we all really like French bread. So, I'll do this again this week, make one large pizza and 2 loaves of bread.

Other meals this week --
Breakfasts: crockpot steel cut oats, bran muffins, granola, homemade yogurt, toast, juice, fruit, coffee, tea, cocoa, milk

Lunches: various pureed vegetable soups, peanut butter sandwiches, eggs, cheese, crackers, fruit, juice, carrot and celery sticks, canned and frozen veggies, brownies, and leftovers from dinners

That's what we ate this past week. What was on your table this week?



13 comments:

  1. They all look delicious and I wouldn't have noticed the lack of meat if you hadn't mentioned it. But, of course, I am very happy to eat vegetables in all forms and wouldn't miss the meat, unlike the males of the family.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Live and Learn,
      You definitely have a different demographic in your household than we do here. We're 3 to 1, female to male. I think my husband does miss having meat as often as we used to. I'll have to make more of an effort for his sake. Have a great weekend, Live and Learn!

      Delete
  2. Your meals do look fantastic! We did better this week in terms of meals since mom is stable at home. I feel like she is doing a bit better though still on oxygen and sleeps a lot. It's a slow downward spiral.

    We had homemade pizza, smoky link casserole, beef roast with mashed potatoes, broccoli, brussel sprouts, cheeseburger casserole, ham balls, julienned potatoes, peas, cheese broccoli soup and brownies.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Alice,
      I'm glad that your mom is doing a bit better and life isn't quite as chaotic for you this week. I hope life feels stable for a while for you.

      What's a smoky link casserole? I was wondering if that's a midwest dish. Your meals sound delicious and warming. Wishing you a wonderful weekend, Alice.

      Delete
    2. Thanks for the update, Alice.

      Delete
    3. smoky link casserole: enough cooked macaroni to feed your family, 2 pkgs sliced smoky links, 2 cans cream of chicken soup, 2 soup cans water, 1 - 2 cups shredded cheddar cheese. Mix together and bake until bubbly. We had this early in the week when it was still quite busy and ate from it two nights and gave son some to take home and put a little in the freezer (I hope it thaws well).

      Delete
    4. Thank you for the instructions for smoky link casserole, Alice. It sounds both yummy and simple!

      Delete
  3. We've been very cold this week so I gravitated to heavy winter meals. We had ham one nite. I had intended to use leftovers for dinner the next night but my husband wanted ham salad so thats what I made. I reheated a large piece of frozen lasagna that I had made a couple months ago another night. We had biscuits and gravy and a pot roast too. I think thats it. I havent decided what we'll have tonight.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Diane,
      Cold weather does seem to call for heartier meals, doesn't it?
      Your meals sound yummy. I thought about making biscuits and gravy one night this past week. I was going to make a sausage gravy, but then changed my mind at the last minute and used the sausage in the frittata. My husband would love b and g, though. I'll have to work those into the menu very soon for him.
      Have a wonderful weekend, Diane!

      Delete
  4. Hooray for your daughters and the meals they cooked!

    I got my meal out on Monday. We went to a local Italian restaurant. Prices are a little higher than last time we went there, which I expected, but it was still a mental adjustment. Food was delicious and not the kind of thing I would be able to duplicate easily at home. Plus, there were enough leftovers for lunch. Tuesday I reheated my leftover cheeseburger potato soup and made biscuits to go with it. Wednesday I got ambitious, since I had several nights "off" from cooking, and made a Thai chicken curry over rice. It's not hard but there are a lot of ingredients and a fair amount of chopping involved. Last night I made pizza using your dough recipe AND your sauce recipe. I usually make the ATK recipe which uses crushed tomatoes, but I didn't have any of those and did have a can of tomato paste which I wanted to use up before it expired. I think I'll make chili mac tonight.

    You reminded me that I need to make crockpot steel cut oats again. :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Kris,
      Oh, I'm so glad you got to have a meal out. Italian is one of my favorites, especially if it's a small family-owned Italian restaurant. Always delicious, I think.

      I hope your pizza was delicious! Those are the recipes I use every week. They're easy, and since I do pizza on Friday when I'm most tired from the week, it's got to be easy. Lately, I've been making extra pizza dough and turning it into French bread. Also good and easy.

      Thanks for sharing your meals with us here.

      Delete
  5. We had a cold week of weather here so had chili, beef stew, copycat Zuppa Toscana (made with broth made from the bones of a roast chicken we had the week prior), homemade pizzas, and a meal called cowboy grub (rice, beans, ground beef, Rotel, and spices--can have corn but I don't love it so leave it out).

    Also, I tried a recipe for a gluten-free version of the Artisan Bread in 5 minutes a day, which came out pretty good. I also used some of this dough for my own personal gluten-free pizza and it was excellent for that. Will be my new go-to for that. I put ingredients in my ($10 Craigslist find, 10 years ago) breadmaker for the rest of the family for regular bread, just because it's so much cheaper to make the non-GF kind.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. that should read *cheaper to make THAN the non-GF kind.

      Delete

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