Meals for the Week

When I sit down to choose our meals for the week, I try to make sure we don't end up having the same thing everyday, like pasta for four days in a row. I like to try to mix in some rice or potatoes or sandwiches or something, so that we have some variety in our lives!

This week I ended up with a variety of recipes to try:

• baked penne (average)
  
• twice baked potatoes (long)
  
• thai red curry (average)
  
• black bean quesadillas (short)
  
• french potato salad (short)
  
• macaroni and cheese (short)
  
• chocolate banana cake (average)
  
• peppermint chocolate cheesecake (long)
  

I put about how long I anticipate the meals taking to make in parenthesis.

I don't always choose so many longer meals, but this week I ended up with a little extra time, so I thought, why not do something fun? This week, we'll have noodles twice, potatoes twice, rice once, and tortillas once. I don't usually plan a real dinner for the day we go grocery shopping, which is why I have only planned six dinners. We usually eat egg sandwiches or something else that takes about five minutes because we're too busy and hungry to wait for anything more.

I have a hard time planning sides. Since it's just my husband and me eating everyday, one dish seems to make enough food. Every once in a while we'll go on a salad streak, but I usually end up throwing away rotting vegetables that we didn't eat fast enough. So to balance our meals, I try to plan dinners that include vegetables or that I can throw some into without ruining the dish. This week, I'm going to try adding green beans to the potato salad which blends two recipes and takes advantage of the sale on green beans. We'll see how it goes.

As far as the desserts, I had a couple of bananas that needed to be experimented with and I've had cheesecake on the brain for a couple of months now. Thank you, Cheesecake Factory. Despite my lack of cheesecake pan, I'm going to move forward with a cheesecake recipe from George Geary's The Cheesecake Bible. I haven't tried any of his recipes before, so I'm in for an adventure!