Cheap & Cheerful Meals for the Tail End of July

 

Hi friends. Happy Friday! And it's the last Friday of the month of July. How did your week go? I hope you found time to enjoy yourself as well as took care of your work. 

What we ate around here this past week:

Breakfasts: 

homemade raisin and spice granola, blueberry muffins, toast, homemade yogurt with raspberries, blueberries or blackberries, chicken gravy on toast, juice, milk, coffee

Lunches:

leftovers, cream of sorrel soup, turnip and vegetable soup, mixed green salads, hummus, crackers, cheese or peanut butter sandwiches, cookies, graham crackers, raisins, blueberries, eggs, sausage, zucchini chips

Dinners:

Friday
peppers and olive pizza, dolmades with yogurt sauce, sautéed summer squash, cookies

Saturday
hummus, fry bread, carrot sticks

Sunday
barbecued burgers, beet greens, tossed garden salad, cookies

Monday
eggs with chives, turnip greens, roasted root vegetables, rice and gravy, rhubarb crisp

Tuesday
chicken in thyme gravy, rosemary mashed potatoes, beet greens, leftover rhubarb crisp

Wednesday (my daughter prepared this)
beef with broccoli, chicken and vegetables, rice, egg rolls

Thursday (my other daughter prepared this meal)
scratch macaroni and cheese, turnip greens, summer squash, stewed prunes

This past week, I finally got around to thawing the chest freezer. Sometime in September 2020 I froze several jugs of milk in the chest freezer. One of the jugs split a seam and leaked 3/4 of a gallon of milk all over the bottom of the freezer, cementing anything sitting on the bottom of the freezer in place. I wanted to just get that cleaned up, but with a full freezer that's not terribly easy. I waited until that point in summer where we'd gone through most of our frozen foods from last summer's garden and foraging, but it was still early enough in this year's harvest so I wouldn't have as much food to stuff into other freezers. That moment came this week. It was a nuisance, but much more do-able that I'd thought it would be. So now I have this pristine freezer all organized and room to spare. How long do you figure this will last -- 3 weeks, a month? It doesn't seem to take too much rummaging to mess up the organization. But at least I now know exactly what we have in there. And yes, there were some surprises.

Last Friday, I was out of pepperoni for our weekly pizza. So I scrounged in the freezer and found some frozen pepper strips and opened a can of olives, yielding a pepper and olive pizza for the family. This week, I have pepperoni again for our favorite pizza topping. Plus, I'll be baking a blackberry pie later this morning. While cleaning out the deep freezer, I came across several bags of frozen blackberries from last year's foraging. Blackberry season is just about to begin for this year, so I need to do some quick baking, and jam and syrup making. So, tonight -- blackberry pie. I also came across a bag of dried prunes. And you guessed it, we're coming close to ripe plum season again. Stewed prunes were added to the menu this past week and will be on coming menus as well. I also came across several bags of blueberries. I made some blueberry jam and baked some blueberry muffins. Cleaning the freezer is a bit like a treasure hunt. I found so many odds and ends that will add to our upcoming meals.

When I wasn't cleaning out the freezer, I was in the garden or organizing our pantry. It's always about food for me these days.

How was your week? What was on your menu?