what we ate

Once upon a time, 

I menu-planned for the entire month.

I even taught a class on it.

These days - I wing it.

We keep a (very) well stocked pantry

and either Tyler or I will hit Aldi and Walmart for produce

and Sams for meat and cheese

(and mayo and pet food, etc)

a few times a month.

I'm not saying it's a good plan, mind you,

just that it's what we do these days,

and it works reasonably well.

A friend wondered what we eat,

so I thought maybe someone else might wonder too?

Here's what we had for dinner this past week:

I would never dirty all these extra dishes;
these were relocated to the table as they were emptied,
 and re-used as dinner plates.

Monday
Creamy Chicken and Veggies, on shredded cabbage
garlic cheddar biscuits
(recipe to come as soon as I've perfected it. I'm close...)
kids had rice as their carb option

Tuesday
Cheeseburger Pie and tossed salad
corn for kiddos

Wednesday
Roasted Chicken and radishes (and potatoes for the chilluns)
the rest of Tuesday's salad

Thursday
Quick Gumbo
(made with dark meat from yesterday's roasted chicken
and bone broth made from the carcasses)
Everyone (except me) added rice to theirs.

Friday
Chicken club pizza

yes. I suppose it looks like I dirtied extras here, but didn't. I can explain:
the chicken and tomatoes leave cutting boards in need of washing before they can be used again, so even though I used 2
I didn't create more to wash in the long run. I *could* have cut the pepperoncinis on a corner of one of those boards,
but not everyone prefers them on their pizza, so I didn't want the juices co-mingling.
Technically, I guess I did dirty that one extra plate, but it was thoughtfully done, in love.
The foam plate was re-used as a dinner plate, though, so it makes up for it.  Yes. I think about such things. regularly...

(using a double batch of this dough per pizza, precooked, for the crusts
and breast meat planned over (as opposed to 'left' over) from Wednesday's dinner)
and salad

for dessert, kids had pilsbury cookies
and Tyler and I had wheat-free volcano mudslides with whipped cream

Saturday
Chicken breast  topped with cheddar, guacamole, and pico de gallo
and salad dressed with chuy's dip
seasoned rice (leftover from gumbo) with black beans for the carb peoples.

Okay; fine. You caught me. I put the Chuy's dip on my chicken, too.
You know you'd have done the same...

Ordinarily, I'd have served another veggie;
I like to have 1 carby and 2 low carb  side dishes per meal,
but as you can see, it doesn't always happen.
I guess we had 'sides' as toppings this night ;-)

Sunday
is snacky dinner night (when we're home.
Several Sundays a month we do the 'family' program at church,
and for the life of me, I can't figure out when moms are supposed to make dinner)

Jalapeno Dip with celery and/or crackers (Ritz, from Sam's)
summer sausage with cheese (moz or cheddar)
buttered popcorn
baby dills
black olives
orange and apple slices

This snacky dinner was a little sparse,
but we were out and about late afternoon,
so we'd grabbed a $5 pizza from Eureka for the kids,
so I figured we could do a bit less than normal.
Plus,
we'd decided to watch the last of the Star Wars movies
with our dinner
instead of our usual Psych,
which meant we needed to get started earlier,
so we were in a time crunch.

~
I started writing this post two weeks ago,
but found I couldn't remember (even close to) an entire week of dinners,
so last week,
I snapped pictures with my phone right before we ate.
Lucky ya'll ;-)
On the nights I forgot to take a picture,
I just typed in what we had real quick,
before I had a chance to forget...