Tuesday/Wednesday Meals

So I know I'm not really a fancy meal person. I'll change that one day. Like when the girls are possibly a little older, and I'm not having to leave whatever is on the stove every 5 minutes because somebody needs to be rescued from outside, or at least until we get a door that my kids can open easily. Or like when I feel like we can splurge a bit more on the grocery bill. I know that I always have plenty of food that my family can eat when they are hungry, and that for the most part it is really healthy. But fancy meats and ingredients are not on the list. I'm just very thankful that what I do end up making they all love.Ok, I'm done with that. Let's go to the past few evenings.

Tuesdays meal was Fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, coleslaw, and biscuits. I, however, did not make any of it. We had a KFC coupon we'd been holding onto for a while, and decided to use it. It was nice because I was having a rough day and not having to cook was just a wonderful break for me. It was bad because, well, I seemed to have forgotten how nasty KFC chicken was. Or maybe they've just gone down in quality. So while I thoroughly enjoyed everything else on the menu, the chicken didn't quite settle well with me. The rest of the crew was excited though...and only washing 4 plates, 4 forks, and 4 cups made it all worth it.

Last night was a different story. We love bacon here, and since I still had quite a few tomatoes and a bunch of lettuce from last weeks bountiful basket, I decided BLT's were a grand idea. I also sliced up a few cremini mushrooms and stuck them on as well. We had some zucchini left too, so I cooked it in a bit of olive oil with salt and pepper. To top the meal off we had some oranges as well. Those oranges we've been getting are a little small, but oh my goodness....they are SSSSOOOOO juicy!! I have to peel them over the sink or garbage can. Maybe I just have really bad peeling skills, but juice always ends up going everywhere! I love it.

Tonight meal is gonna be fun...but I'm not gonna tell you what it is. You're just gonna have to wait until tomorrow :)

Sunday's Meal

Ok, it's time to turn this blog back towards food. Now, I don't have a fancy camera, so forgive the pictures. But I'm pretty proud of the weekends meal (we technically had the same thing Saturday and Sunday because my pizza dough recipe makes 2 crusts). So, here we go.

The main portion of our meal is a homemade pizza. It consists of a whole wheat crust, almost homemade tomato sauce (the sauce part came from a can...but I added the seasonings), thinly sliced cheddar cheese, pepperoni (because we love it), and freshly sliced cremini mushrooms and roma tomatoes (courtesy of Bountiful Baskets). It was quite tasty if it do say so myself :)

(Everything you see next is also part of our Bountiful Basket. Seriously...can't say enough about how awesome this thing is!)

 

Next we have salad with more mushrooms, tomatoes, along with some cucumber. Forgive the tacky "salad bowl". It's in a tupperware container because 1-I knew I'd be putting the leftovers in the fridge, and 2- my real salad bowl is holding the rest of my fruit :). We also had some incredibly ripe and juicy pineapple. This was technically part of last weeks basket, but we still managed to consume it in about 24 hours. Yea, we have mad fruit eating skills!

So while it wasn't incredibly fancy, and would be considered by most an embarrassment to post online...it got a big resounding "Mom, you make the BEST food EVER!" from both of my kids, so it's a major win in my book!

Dinner: Potato soup and Breadsticks.

I'm a big fan of buying those 10 lb bags of potatoes at Winco. You can't really get a better deal for 2 bucks (at least I think it's 2 bucks...my brain is a bit fuzzy this morning). The problem I've had in the past is finding ways to use them all up before they go bad. Well, thankfully Fall is here! Hooray for cool weather, the perfect excuse to make massive amounts of different types of soup with those potatoes. I haven't been using a recipe, mostly because I don't have everything on hand that I need for that particular recipe. So I've just been winging it. I do believe that last night was my greatest creation yet. I ended up with a yummy, cheesy, potato soup which I served with Breadsticks (also very yummy). The soup consisted of the following.

5 Potatoes, cut into a bit less than 1 inch chunks.
2 Carrots, cut up.
Just a bit of chopped onion
About 2 1/4 cup of Chicken broth.
Milk
Cheese
1-2 TBSP of flour.

I cooked my veggies in the chicken broth until tender, and grated the cheese and left it sitting out while the veggies were cooking. Letting your cheese get closer to Room temperature before adding it to your soup will get rid of that grainy texture a lot of cheese soups have. I probably had about a cup of cheese. Once the veggies were done cooking I added my milk. I honestly have no clue how much I added, just enough to make it soupy and the right color (for me). Then I added my cheese and stirred until it melted. Take a bit of the broth out after that, place it in a separate bowl, and whisk in the flour until smooth. Add that to the rest of the pot, it was a great thickness for me. And yes, I'm kinda guessing on the flour amount...like I said..I just wing it these days.

The breadsticks made me very happy.

1 recipe Pizza dough
Olive oil
Parmasan cheese
Oregano
Salt
Garlic Powder

Prepare pizza dough, and roll it out. Brush with Olive Oil, and top with your favorite toppings. Once again, I didn't measure. Just kinda sprinkled to my hearts delight :) I ended up cutting them in 1 in. strips with my pizza roller, and placing them on a greased cookie sheet. They stretched during the transfer from my counter to the sheet, then looking funky as I smooshed them to fit in my sheet. So I think next time I'll probably press the dough into the pan, or just roll it out on my pizza stone, and cut it while it's on there. Anyways, bake at 400 for 15-20 minutes. They looked funny, but tasted yummy!

I had pictures of all this, but my camera met a sad end last night after being dropped on the floor by a child. Oh well, I wanted a new one anyways ;)