Thursday’s Meal Plan

 

Ok, here is the switch, I will now be doing the meal plans on Thursday so that I can plan ahead of time! 

Another easier week with only making muffins again.  This is a recipe that I have made and is good and fairly healthy, I will share it with you later this week.

Meal Plan Monday

I am thinking about changing this up a bit and making the meal plan on Thursdays…I think that it will help if I can go shopping on the weekend without the munchkins.  It will work for the winter as we seem to keep close to home on the weekends but I’ll probably have to adjust it again for the summer.

So the plan this week is pretty simple, I had kids with colds last week and now it seems that I have their cold so I have no desire to do anything too fancy this week.

The only thing that I am making this week is the muffins. 

Creative Sandwiches

I think that most families with young children eat a lot of sandwiches.  In my house I try to give a variety of sandwiches but it usually ends up getting thrown (my 18 month old) or sits un-eaten unless it is a cheese or peanut butter sandwich.  So I was trying to get creative and make some fun shaped sandwiches to see if that helped…and it did for a bit…but now my kids just want fun shaped cheese and peanut butter sandwiches.

I am fine with that but what comes with making these cute shapes is a whole lot of this…

And I am getting tired of eating that!  LOL   I do have one sandwich cutter that cuts off the crust (which is a necessity in my house) and makes 2 cute dinosaurs but those are expensive.  Guess I will have to keep my eye out for a sale and/or a coupon and get some more.
Any other idea’s out there for eating other sandwiches?  So far tuna, ham and grilled cheese with avocado are a bust.  But grilled cheese, grilled peanut butter with banana’s, peanut butter & jam roll ups and sandwiches area all a hit.

Fall Table Setting

I haven’t been much into seasonal decorating, for one my husband and I both worked full time so we were never home…didn’t see much reason for doing it.  Then we had 2 boys 21 months apart, there just wasn’t any time to do it during that time AND Munchkin #1 was likely to climb on the table or said surface and “look closer” at it.  (Which would be why our house currently does NOT have any coffee tables, end tables or breakable things)
So I attempted my first table center piece.

The plants are these cute little pepper plants that I just couldn’t resist…and the wheat just screams fall and harvest.

I actually have them facing the other direction on my table but I have big south facing windows and a picture just wasn’t going to happen facing that direction.  But this picture shows my great old extremely old, huge table.  This is from my grandparents, they got it as a wedding present and they were married for 50 years, then my mom and dad had it for almost 10 years when my mom refinished it in this dark color (and white seats on the chairs…yah, seriously still like that and totally disgusting after 2 boys have touched them) and now I have had this table for 6 years.
I am going to be re-doing the table and still trying to decide what to do.  I have the material for the seats and I think that I want to do the table and chairs in white but not sure how much work it is going to be.  I have been looking for inspiration on the web but haven’t found anything yet…I guess the table is about 70 years old and not an antique (in the worth money sense) so I may just take a chance and if I hate it I will have to cough up the dough to buy a new one.  But right now new table on the cheap sounds good to me.
Now to find the time to get started…might just have to bite the bullet and do one chair at a time, one step at a time, until they are ready to be painted.  Then I will just have to take over the garage and take a weekend to just finish them.  I am going to set a goal of starting them next week…after the baby sale and while it is still nice enough for the boys to play outside in the afternoons…yah, I’ll do it then…

Meal Plan Monday

 

So today is meal plan Monday but I am not really doing a meal plan this week as my husband is out of town for the week and my freezers are in dire need to being cleaned out.  So this week is “Clean out the Freezer” week.  I figured it was a good time to do it since my toddler and preschooler don’t really appreciate it when I make an effort to cook and usually end up eating a few bites then asking for a sandwich.  “sigh”

My plan of attack this week is looking in the freezers each morning and pulling something out…quite simple. 

But don’t worry, I won’t leave the post just at this.  My family had an early Thanksgiving Dinner last weekend so Saturday I made a nice home cooked meal with the left-over turkey…Home-made Turkey soup, cheddar biscuits and apple pie.  I got the 2 recipes from my favourite food site – Our Best Bites…it is a fantastic food blog, it makes me laugh and I haven’t had a recipe fail on me yet. 

I did do the biscuits a bit different, I used a pastry blender instead of a mixer (I didn’t want the extra dishes) and they turned out perfectly.  I also used cheater pie crust but I made it cute with a little maple leaf cut out. 

And home-made turkey soup is actually REALLY easy, the longest thing is cutting the onion, celery and carrots.  Honestly, you put the turkey carcass in a big pot and cover with water.  Toss in a quartered onion, the tops of some celery (the leafy part), some chunks of carrot and throw in whatever fresh herbs you have (or some dried parsley, thyme, and whatever else you feel like).  Let it simmer for a few hours then run it through a strainer…now you have your turkey stock.  Now just add new chopped onion, celery and carrots (and whatever other vege’s you feel like) and cook them until the vege’s are soft.  Then add the shredded turkey and some egg noodles and cook until the noodles are tender.  DONE

It is seriously that easy and you get to have a kitchen the smells delicious all day long for minimal work.

Have a great week!

Meal Plan Monday - Week 39 (leading up to Thanksgiving)

Hi All, so here is week 39.  Pretty simple this week, just a bit of baking and a few ideas for you to search on-line for some pumpkin and apple recipes.

Today is my husband's birthday, so the boys and I are going to bake a small cake and decorate it for him.  And I will make lots of extra un flavored chicken to use the rest of the week...makes suppers super fast escpecially since that is grumpy toddler time for me and it is tough to cook with 2 kids hanging off me.  :)

Tuesday morning marinate the flank steak (which tastes really good and is pretty cheap but you have to make sure you cut it the right way or it can be tough to chew) and bake the pumpkin apple muffins.

Wednesday I decided to do a fun baking thing with the kids and make Apple Pops, which are oreo's decorated to look like apples (but I am sure ours will just look like a mess!)...maybe I will post about the apple pops later this week.

Thursday morning we are going to make pumpkin pancakes as there will be left over pumpkin from the muffins to use up.

Friday I will make pizza dough in the bread maker and the boys and I will make some pumpkin bars (I wills till have pumpkin left over as I bought a BIG can).

Saturday will be get things done around the house day so I planned on left overs and a crock pot meal.

Sunday we will be celebrating Thanksgiving at my Mother-in-Law's.

Have a great Week!

National Coffee Day

Ok, so this was meant to be posted on Thursday which was National Coffee Day but I got side tracked by a showing of our house and then we decided to have a last minute Thanksgiving at our house (which I tried an awesome Chantilly Pumpkin Pie recipe!).  So anyway, here is the post!  :)

I don't know about most of you out there but I LOOOOOVVVEEE coffee.  I like brewed, french press, peculated, specialty...you name it...coffee.  And I recently came across 2 cupcake recipes that I just had to try - Pumpkin Spice Latte cupcakes and Vanilla Latte cupcakes (I had them saved in my Pinterest...I love that site!  Check it out if you haven't already).  So of course I had to make them.  :)

Don't these look Delicious! 

Mmmm, the ones below are the Vanilla Latte ones, I made them a bit different.  Instead of coffee liquior I used vanilla syrup and I put sweetened whip cream on them with some vanilla latte powder and a chocolate covered coffee bean.  These took a little longer to cook than normal cupcakes, it was about 14 minutes for the mini ones and 22 minutes for the big ones.



The next ones are the Pumpkin Spice Latte ones and they were delicious!  I basically followed the recipe for these, the mini ones took 12 minutes and the large ones took 18 minutes.  These ones were also a bit lighter than the vanilla ones.

I packaged a few of them up all pretty like (Well, pretty for me as I am not good with the whole paper crafts although I plan to try more) and played cupcake fairy!  I love giving things like this away as I don't need them all but I love to bake...plus it is like Paying if Forward, if you do something nice for someone then they do something nice for another person...and so on and so on.  You make someones day and eventually if all comes back around to you.  (Just like the other day, I was getting a Timmy's coffee and the person in front of me paid for my coffee...so nice and unexpected!)

Enjoy the rest of you weekend!