This was the week my meal plan was disrupted by having to drive to the doctor twice in one day during the middle of the week.
 |
| Enjoying coffee on the front porch. |
I had to get bloodwork done as part of my yearly physical, but due to visitor restrictions I wasn't allowed to bring the kids with me to the lab to get my blood drawn. (I didn't know about the restrictions beforehand or I would have made arrangements ahead of time.) Since I had already been fasting for quite a while and there was a storm due to blow in the next day I needed to figure out how to still get my bloodwork done that same day. Thankfully one of our neighbors was able to watch the kids for me so I could drive back to the doctor and get my labs done. I was in and out the door in five minutes. It was the fastest bloodwork I have ever had done.
After fasting for more than twelve hours I was finally able to eat breakfast/lunch at 1:00 that afternoon. I was pretty worn out after this whole debacle in addition to not sleeping well the previous couple of nights, so I didn't have the energy to keep up with most of the cooking I had planned, not to mention all of that driving ate up a lot of time I would have spent prepping meals.
Breakfast
For breakfasts during the previous week I had made a couple loaves of oatmeal bread instead of steel cut oatmeal and we enjoyed it so much that I decided to do it again. We had some simple microwaved rolled oats on Monday to give me time to make bread. With the oatmeal bread we had eggs, yogurt, and fruit. By Friday the bread was running low so we had steel cut oatmeal for breakfast while I baked two more loaves of oatmeal bread. One loaf was for us and the other we took to a friends' game night on Saturday.
My oatmeal bread recipe comes from the Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book.
Lunch
Our leftovers from the previous week didn't stretch quite as far as I had hoped so I ended up throwing together some quick breakfast burritos for lunch after church on Sunday. I scrambled some eggs with black beans, cheese, and green onions. We topped them with avocado, spinach, and some yogurt and rolled it up in tortillas. We also finished off the bit of leftovers we had hanging around in the fridge.
Last week I roasted a chicken for dinner and then simmered the carcass in the crockpot to make chicken stock. I used the bits of leftover meat and the chicken stock to make white chili for lunch at the beginning of the week.
My beans took longer to cook in the crockpot than anticipated so I threw together something easy for lunch on Monday and we ate the chili from Tuesday onward.
"Boiled eggs and such" was my tired way of saying, "I have no clue what to plan for lunch, so I'll just write down something easy." I think we ended up having cheesy scrambled eggs with veggies and toast two days in a row.
A big snow storm blew in Thursday night. Seeing all of that deep, fluffy snow outside made me crave something warm and cozy for lunch. I roasted some sweet potatoes and made a bit of miso butter pasta which we ate along with the last of the Pad Thai.
Tuna melts finally happened for lunch on Saturday.
Dinner
These sriracha pork meatballs are one of our favorite recipes.
I make them a little easier to cook by quickly browning them in a skillet and then transferring them to a 9x13 pan, pouring the sauce over the top, and cooking them the rest of the way in the oven, at about 450 degrees Farenheit until the internal temperature of the meatballs reaches 160 degrees Farenheit. I typically make a double batch of meatballs so this makes cooking them a lot quicker instead of cooking them through on the stove for ages. Throwing them into the oven also frees me up to prep other things to go with dinner.
 |
| Sriracha Pork Meatballs |
We eat these meatballs with the rice recipe below. I leave the sriracha out of the actual meatballs and sauce so it isn't too spicy for the kids. Noah and I will top our servings with sriracha and then gulp water because we have made our food too spicy.
Next we made Pad Thai. We followed the recipe below.
I cut up an entire head of cabbage to go into the Pad Thai this time. It looked like a ridiculous amount until it all cooked down. If you don't have a wok big enough to accommodate all of the ingredients you could make this in whatever big pan you have by cooking each element separately and then stirring them together in a big bowl afterward. Don't skip the pickled turnips/radishes and make sure you get the sweet variety, not the salty. If all you can find are the salty turnips then soak and rinse them before adding them to the Pad Thai otherwise it will end up being way too salty. We made that mistake once.
"Mexican" is a pretty vague thing to write on a menu. It means we're having some kind of meat with some kind of beans eaten on some kind of tortilla. If I am making something specific like enchiladas or carnitas, then I'll write that on the menu. But this time around we were keeping it simple. Just some taco meat, refried beans, and tons of fixins to go with them. I have linked below my husband's family's taco meat and refried beans recipes, though the beans have been re-written to make the recipe a lot easier.
We ate the meat and beans on store bought tortillas along with avocado, cheese, corn, lettuce, cilantro, green onions, rice, and homemade canned salsa. This is one of our favorite meals. Noah is 1/4 Hispanic and I grew up in Texas so we are always game for Mexican food.
Everything got pushed around and delayed with the menu this week, but it was very helpful to have a plan to fall back on when things settled down.
No comments:
Post a Comment