The week's menu

You can see the week's menu here:

I plan breakfast, lunch (for the adults, for the kiddo, we wing it), and dinner a week at a time.  I am trying to get this done by Friday night so that I can get my grocery shopping done on Friday.  The goal is to do one shopping trip and be done with that for the weekend.

In order for that to be successful, I have to correctly estimate how much we will eat of everything.  I am not quite there yet.  This week, I forgot one item, then I bought a wrong item.  So that required another trip.  Then we ran out of a few things, which will probably require another mid-week trip.  Ugh.  I am also trying to ONLY buy what we are eating that given week.  My pantry is no longer stuffed to the brim, and the freezer isn't so bad either (it's mostly stuffed with breastmilk).

Saturday night is hereby designated as casserole and grill night.  We grill-baked chicken (apparently my husband half grilled it, then we ran out of gas, so he finished it in the oven).  We are trying to grill at least once a week.  You see, dirty secret...I know how to cook, and I took two grilling classes, but we don't know how to grill!  If it's not pre-cooked sausages, we're lost.  So the last couple of months we've been grilling more.  I've decided we should grill almost every weekend, try new recipes, and when we get proficient, we will actually start grilling and inviting people over!  Not that I don't have people over, I just don't grill when I do it.

I also made Averie's salsa and cheezy vegetable bake casserole.  I even used vegan cheeze!  Because I bought some accidentally a few months ago.  That stuff never expires.

I'd planned to have the chicken last 3 nights, but it's only going to last two with three of us eating it.  I could stretch it further in a casserole.  So Monday I'll have to sub in meatballs from the freezer.

Lunches are the leftover steak with stir-fry vegetables and brown rice.  Which changes to beans and rice when we run out of the steak.

You'll see I keep a list on the bottom of the calendar of each day and what I'm supposed to make on that day so that we don't go hungry.  On Tuesday night, I need to prep the ingredients for Crockpot Sausage Stew, which will go into the crockpot on Wednesday morning.

It's such a glamorous life I lead. :)  The honest truth is that parenting is hard work. And parenting with a job? Makes getting food on the table even more challenging.

I swear the only time I sit down on the weekend for more than 5 minutes is when I'm nursing the baby.  I eat about half my meals standing up, sitting on the bed while trying to get the baby to sleep, or in less than 5 minutes.