Meal Plan Monday - September 12

Last week went great as far as planning goes, but as for following through? Eh. Not so much. Hey man, you have to learn to admit your shortcomings before you can begin to overcome them, right? I got sick last week with a bad cold so we ate out a couple of times. We were hardly home all weekend too, and that didn't help matters much. As a result, many of last weeks dinners didn't get made and will be made this week.

Here's the plan for this week:

Monday - Curry-Spiced Shrimp and Rice

This is on the stove as I type and it smells FANTASTIC. If it tastes only half as good as it smells it will be a winner! Recipe here, from Woman's Day.

***UPDATE***

This was good, but holy heck it was SPICY!!! I was on the fence about whether to include it in the recipe binder, but my husband (who can eat stuff like salsa, unlike your's truly) loved it. I think I'll make it again, but reduce the curry powder to 1 1/2 tsp and see how that works.

Tuesday - Italian Sausage and Spinach Marinara over Orecchiette

Another Woman's Day recipe. Find it here.

Wednesday - Chicken Linguine

Yup, pasta two days in a row. This is what happens when you have a plan, and then you totally screw up your plan. Dang. Good thing I like pasta! Recipe here.

Thursday - Pork Chops with Quinoa, Corn, & Scallions

I'm just going to pan fry the pork chops, nothing fancy there. I found the recipe for the quinoa on Pinterest.

Friday - French Chicken Broccoli Supreme

I'm usually not a big casserole eater for the simple reason that it's nearly impossible to find one that both sounds good AND doesn't contain Cream of Something soup. Those things are so bad for you! This one, however, doesn't have any of that nonsense, so I'm going to give it a chance despite it's stupid name. I found it on Pinterest (of course). I can already tell you that I'm leaving out the poppy seeds and using Panko instead of the Ritz crackers for the topping.

Saturday - Crockpot Jambalaya

This should be interesting. It sounds pretty easy, anyway. Recipe from Pinterest.

Sunday - Leftovers if we have a ton, Beef and Potato Salad if we don't

I am not good at factoring Leftovers into my meal plans. I don't like leftovers, so I generally try to avoid making so much that we have them. However, when you're making a new recipe you never can tell if you're going to have them. I'll have my "just-in-case" recipe ready to go if we don't have enough to make a meal.

Last weeks meals -

The chicken tacos were excellent. The rice - not so much. I quit buying canned tomatoes, including tomato sauce. I just will puree a jar of my home canned tomatoes to use in recipes that call for it. Well, organic tomatoes that you can yourself are apparently a bit more flavorful than regular ones, so my one cup of pureed tomatoes tasted WAY more tomato-ey than a can of tomato sauce did. It was just too much tomato flavor for me.

The beef, green bean and mushroom stir fry had good flavor, but just not enough of it. By adding the rice noodles, which pretty much have no flavor of their own, it became bland, bland, bland. Maybe if there had been more sauce, or the flavor had been more concentrated this would have been okay. As it was, it will not be making it into the binder as a keeper.

And um, yeah... that's all I really did before I got sick. So lame.