Week of 5/14- 5/20 Menu

Here's the plan for this week. A couple days are going to be really busy around dinner time, so a few of these meals are super fast and easy.

Monday 5/14
Romaine salad with carrots, cucumber, tomatoes, corn, olives, black beans, and ranch

Tues 5/15
Hawaiian Haystacks (we're going to try this one more time....we ended up eating at McDonald's last week instead of making this)

Wed 5/16
Baked Potatoes

Thurs 5/17
Hot Dogs with french fries and carrot sticks

Friday 5/18
Pizza night-pepperoni for one, and the second pizza will be decided later

Saturday 5/19
Freezer meal from my freezer meal group (we'll shop the freezer Thursday night)

Sunday 5/20
15 Bean Soup and biscuits

Foil packed grilled potatoes

For Mother's Day I requested grilled steaks, grilled potatoes, and green beans. Again, I didn't think about taking a picture until I was 2/3 finished with my steak, had eaten my green beans, and one of three foil packed potatoes was eaten. I took a picture of my steak anyway, but Tom saw the picture and kindly told me how unappetizing it was. So imagine a deliciously seasoned, wonderfully grilled T-bone steak. Okay, now on to potatoes. I love eating grilled potatoes, and they're super easy. Well, that's easy for me to say because I just do the prep work...Tom does the grilling. Here's the recipe:

Foil Packet Grilled Potatoes (for 1 packet)
1 medium red potato, cubed
1 carrot, peeled and sliced
1 garlic clove, crushed
dried minced onion
salt
fresh cracked pepper
water

Tear two 15-18 inch lengths of aluminum foil and lay one to top of the other. Pile on your potatoes, carrots, garlic, a generous sprinkling of dried onion, then season with salt and pepper. Bring the long sides together and fold the ends together to crimp them down. Do the same with one short end. Before closing the other short end, pour about 1-2 Tbsp water inside. Then crimp the other short side. Grill over medium heat for about 20 minutes turning once (I think...remember, I don't do the grilling!).

Okay, I'm about 90% positive about that cooking time. This was the first time we added carrots, and our kids loved it. Even our 7-month-old love it!

Here's another variation for sauteed green beans:

Parmesan Green Beans
1 1/2 cups washed, cut green beans
1 Tbsp butter
salt
fresh cracked pepper
2 Tbsp parmesan cheese

Heat your sautee pan over medium heat then add all the ingredients. Cook for a little longer than 5 minutes, or until the parmesan cheese is toasty and golden, and the beans are a bright shade of green.

Rhubarb Streusel Muffins

Like I said in the Strawberry Rhubarb Pie post, our rhubarb is ready for harvest. To take advantage of this wonderful harvest time, I tried out a new recipe: Rhubarb Streusel Muffins. They were super yummy. The rhubarb gets all soft and adds this wonderful moistness to the muffins. My kids loved them.

I think that by the time I remembered to take a picture, this was the last muffin. Here's the recipe:

Rhubarb Streusel Muffins

2 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ginger
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/2 cup butter
1 1/4 cups brown sugar
1 egg
1 cup sour cream
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
2 1/2 cups rhubarb, chopped into 1/2 inch chunks

Streusel:
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 cup rolled oats
2 Tbs melted butter

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix flour, soda, salt, ginger and cinnamon and set aside. In a large mixing bowl, cream together butter and brown sugar. Beat in egg. Beat in flour and sour cream alternately until blended. Mix in vanilla. Stir in rhubarb chunks. Grease muffin tins and fill with batter.

For topping, mix togehter sugar, cinnamon and oats. Stir in melted butter. Sprinkle atop each muffin.

Bake for 20-22 minutes or until center just bounces back when touched.

Chicken Bacon Ranch Pizza

Friday night is pizza night at our house. This has been a tradition for our family for a while now...at least a year or more. I make a couple pizzas then we plop in front of the TV and watch AFV or Wipeout or a family movie we've gotten from Netflix. It's something fun we all look forward to, and my oldest likes to help make the pizza, too. For the longest time I made a crust recipe I found in the Tightwad Gazette, but about a month ago, I ran out of yeast, and our grocery store no longer sold the 1 pound vacuum sealed bags. I had to buy one of those little 4 oz jars, and it was so expensive! I decided to try out other recipes that used less yeast. My go-to recipe from Tightwad Gazette used 2 Tbsp of yeast for 2 pizzas, and my current recipe uses 2 1/4 tsp for 2 pizzas. So much better.

The texture between the doughs is quite different. The quick 2 Tbsp recipe is much more bready while the 2 1/4 tsp recipe is chewy and comparable to carry-out pizza. They're both very yummy. When making this first recipe, I would start mixing dough about 1 hour before I wanted to start eating. When making the new recipe, I need to have the dough mixed and rising about 2 1/2 hours before I want to be eating. Okay. Enough. Here are the dough recipes:

Quick Pizza Dough (yields 2 pizzas)
1/2 cup lukewarm water
2 Tbsp yeast
2 tsp sugar
4 cups flour
1 tsp garlic salt
1/2 tsp onion powder
1/2 tsp Italian seasoning
2 Tbsp olive oil
~1 cup lukewarm water

Combine water, yeast, and sugar and let sit for 5-10 minutes or until the yeast is foamy. Mix together flour, salt, seasonings, and olive oil in a medium bowl. Add yeast mixture. Slowly mix in enough water to form a soft, smooth dough. Divide into 2 equal pieces, place on greased pizza pans, cover, and let rise for about 10 minutes, or as long as it takes to get all your pizza toppings together. Roll out your dough and top with your favorite sauce and toppings. Bake at 425 degrees for 15 minutes.

Now this is my new recipe from Annie's Eats:

Technical difficulties. For an odd reason, I can't copy and paste the recipe. Well, just click on the Annie's Eats link and it will take you there. If you're familiar with her blog at all, you'll know that she has some really tasty recipes and knows what she's talking about. She gives some good tips like weighing the flour instead of just measuring with a cup. Do it. And brushing the crust with olive oil. Do it. I know I should preheat my pizza stone, but I don't. You should. Do it.

Now as the title suggests, here is how I do my Chicken Bacon Ranch pizza (yum!)

Ingredients:
Ranch dressing
chicken, cubed and cooked (I like to season it with garlic salt and pepper)
2 strips bacon, cooked and chopped
1 green onion, slices
about 2/3 of a tomato, chopped
mozzarella cheese

Layer it all on to your heart's content. I do sauce then cheese, chicken, bacon, onions, tomatoes, then a little more cheese. Yum.

Chicken Cordon Bleu

To be completely honest,  not everything I make is from scratch. Like most people, I pull some convenience food out of the freezer for dinner occasionally. Last summer "the meat guy" sold us a box of chicken and a box of steak. I was organizing our chest freezer and saw the box of chicken cordon bleu, and I was so excited to see that we had two left.

So using a little convenience food with some homemade sides makes for a really easy, delicious meal. On the side we had lemon pepper rice and green beans.

The lemon pepper rice just takes a little bit more effort than cooking plain white rice, but is so worth the little extra time.

Lemon Pepper Rice
1 cup rice
2 1/4 cup water
2 tsp chicken bouillon
lemon zest from 1 lemon
juice from 1/2 lemon
fresh cracked pepper

Combine rice, water, and bouillon. Bring to a light boil, turn heat down to low, cover, and cook for 20 minutes. Add lemon zest, juice, pepper, stir, and serve.

For the green beans, I just washed some fresh green beans from my bountiful basket, broke off the stems, and then broke them into about 2 or 3 pieces. I sauteed them in butter for 5-10 minutes with salt and pepper, then sprinkled with lemon zest and a little lemon juice. Yum!

Jicama Corn Salad

We received 2 jicama in our bountiful basket. I'd never had jicama before, so I went on a  recipe hunt on pinterest. I found this recipe. I didn't follow it exactly because I didn't want to make a huge salad.

Here's the recipe:

Ingredients

• 4 cups frozen corn kernels, thawed
• 2 pounds jicama, peeled and diced
• 4 medium mangos - peeled, seeded, and diced
• 1 cup chopped red onion
• 1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro
• 1/2 cup lime juice
• salt and pepper to taste

Directions

1. In a large serving bowl, combine the corn kernels, jicama, mango, red onion and cilantro. Pour the lime juice over, and season with salt and pepper. Toss until well blended.

I  also used green onion instead of red and left out the cilantro. Strangely enough, at first taste I thought jicama tasted like fresh green beans. Weird. 

Baby Food-Carrots

I'm a fan of making your own baby food. I do have a stash of jarred food in my storage room for convenience, but when I can, I like to make my own baby food for my kiddos. When Dallin was a baby, I did it mostly from scratch. I'd slice carrots and put them in my steaming basket. Or sweet potatoes. I even made applesauce a couple times (tip: don't make apple sauce unless you have an over abundance of apples or unless you just really want to try it. It's cheaper just to buy it, and it saves time and energy.) With Ruby and Pieter, I've figured out that using canned veggies is a great way to quickly make baby food. I found canned carrots for $.25 a can a walmart a while back and totally stocked up. So for lunch today, Pieter had carrots.

The nice thing about making your own baby food is that you can control what goes in it and do portion control well. Carrots are good mixed with apples or potatoes, or any other flavor you think could go well. To make it go even farther, I'll make baby cereal then mix in the solid food.

P.S. It took me about 1 minute to grab the can, the immersion blender, and puree it up.