Sunday, September 13, 2015

Weekend Cooking Chores again

We now interrupt this "Frugal Eating on Vacation" series (mostly because I've written #5, but not #4) to discuss weekend cooking again.

My weekend cooking has been coming and going with the crazy weekends and back to school stuff.  Oh, I usually cook at least one thing.  And I make something for the pot luck.  But honestly, the thought of prepping everything for a week is kind of daunting, and I haven't been doing it.

Yesterday was a busy day with swim lessons (I helped a friend with twins who needed a second adult in the pool with her 2 year olds), then beach, then lunch out with toddler friends, then more beach.  It ended with babysitting the neighbor girls (3 of them) so that their parents could celebrate their anniversary.  Our kids are all great buddies, so they played, screamed, made lots of noise, ate popcorn, spilled popcorn all over...you can probably imagine.

But Sunday, well, that's food prep day.  My nine year old decided to try playing baseball.  The practice league just started, so today was his first game.  They left at 9:30 and didn't get home until 1 pm.  Toddler didn't want to go, so I got busy cooking for 2 hours while he spent way to much on the pad.

Here's what's cooking:
Pork chops in crock pot (easiest way to cook them). I know, a waste of good pork, but I'm going to stretch it by putting it in fried rice.





Fried rice: I cooked up some rice.  I chopped a million tiny green onions, plus some cilantro. I will also add peas and maybe carrots. This is going to be dinner/ lunch for much of the week.

Blueberry muffins.  So, we have these freeze dried blueberries from Costco, that you buy on line - big bucket of various fruits.  Cheaper than the little bags at Trader Joe's.  But this one bag got opened and then left  open, and they are soggy not crunchy.  So I have this buttermilk, and I found a recipe for muffins with buttermilk... (I have buttermilk because I came home from a school function to find that spouse hadn't put food away after dinner, including the ranch dressing.  So I bought buttermilk and made some instead of buying it.)

Butternut squash. Yes, in this heat, I had the oven on. I need veggies for the week, so I roasted the squash.  It gets mashed and mixed with pomegranate seeds (first of the season), toasted walnuts, chopped apple, raisins, and cinnamon.  Yum.

Salad.  Yes I washed 2 heads of lettuce.  At least they were small.

Green beans and yellow peppers.  Washed and sliced, and destined for a stir fry side.

Salmon salad (with mayo, cottage cheese, and pickles) - half for today, half for tomorrow.

Only half the dishes

On an unrelated note - I realize those of you who occasionally read my blog do not do it for my awesome photography.  And that's a good thing.  Because I cannot seem to get photos anymore.  My computer doesn't recognize my phone to download, and the few other ways I had it set up (google photos, google drive, picasa albums), well, those don't work either.  It's like my phone is it's own little monster.  If I figure it out I'll add them back in.  (Had to email them to myself.)