Last week I did quite a bit of shopping to prepare for 2 weeks worth of meals. If you missed what I bought you can find it here. Here are some of the meals I have already come up with:
- Red Sauce Pasta – Pretty basic idea we had this last Thursday night. Ansen made the penne from Target, used one can of red sauce & added some left over mushrooms and frozen spinach and ground beef.
- Bruschetta – Inspired from Rachel Ray Every Day magazine I got a free subscription to a while back, though I did my own spin. This is where 1 can of tomatoes, part of a bell pepper and the french loaf bread come in. We actually had this Saturday and Sunday for lunch!
- Grilled Chicken & Corn – For Mother’s Day, my sweet hubby offered to cook my lunch (or dinner) if I told him what I’d like. So we marinaded some of the Sam’s chicken in a lemon juice/vinegar/soy sauce concoction Ansen googled and grilled them with 2 ears of corn (one for each of us). We grilled the other 2 ears for later.
- Linguine with Chickpeas & Spinach – From Every Day. I have had a can of chickpeas for a while and have no idea what to do with them, so we’ll use them up, along with the linguine from Target and spinach I picked from our church’s community garden. It also calls for the parmesan and bell pepper I got from Aldi.
- Corn Salad – Another idea from Rachel Ray. This calls for lettuce (picked from the church garden) grilled corn cut off of the cob, cheese, black beans, avocado (left over from last week’s Branson trip), lime juice & EVOO (and a few spices if desired). This is for tomorrow. We grilled a couple extra ears of corn Sunday for this to have tomorrow night.
- Baked Mac ‘n Cheese – This one is inspired by Shaq, believe it or not, from an article in last Sunday’s Parade Magazine. It’s one of those make-ahead meals for one of the nights I work, if Ansen isn’t feeling creative. This one used the elbow pasta from Target, milk, cheese (from last month’s Sam’s trip), bread crumbs (we’ve had in the cabinet for a while), and anything else I feel like throwing in there. I made this today and froze TWO pans of this. One for later this week and one for later this month.
- Chicken Parmesan – This is one of hubby’s favorites and he offered to make it, so this will be for one of the evenings I work this week.
Next week I’ll post some more dinner options for yet another week based on the items I bought last week. The only flaw with this $30/week plan so far is that Ansen is having a hard time finding lunch. Luckily we have some left overs and random things, so we’ll see how far we can make it before I have to start shopping for lunch items.