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?

A Peek at My Indoor Garden in February

I just wanted to show you the progress of my tall indoor vegetable garden (I have the small one filled with sprouting seeds for spring planting). Earlier this season, I discovered that radishes did the best for indoor production, both roots and the greens. Here's a photo of 3 shelves of radishes about 5 weeks old. I can see now that I could have planted them more thickly. This is a learning experience.

I harvested some of the radishes the other night for a delicious winter salad. I used the greens and the roots as the base of the salad, then added 2 sliced boiled eggs and a sprinkling of bacon bits. To top the salad, I quickly mixed up a dressing of orange juice concentrate, herb vinegar, olive oil, and salt.

In another week, when I need to start another flat of seeds indoors for the garden, I'll put the milk container pots outside on the deck to complete their growing, and I can continue harvesting radishes as they mature.

My primary goal with this light garden has been to begin more seedlings indoors to plant out in spring. However, we've really enjoyed growing some of our fresh greens indoors in the heart of winter.