As I go back to being a stay at home mom (now to 3 instead of 1) I have to rework my cooking/grocery shopping habits again. I was successful for a few weeks cooking down all the food in our freezer and pantry and still working on the pantry. The twins who are now 8 months old are still eating pureed food, but starting to eat little pieces of things like cheerios, steak and brownies 🙂 Luckily for now, they eat anything I put in front of them. Let’s hope that keeps up! Karina, who is 3, is a pretty good eater. She, like all kids, goes through stages of I hate “x” and then loves “x” the next week.
We just came back from a trip to Boston, so our fridge was fairly empty. I made an easy pantry meal last night for our first night before our groceries were delivered this morning from AmazonFresh – Pasta with a tomato pumpkin sauce. For the sauce I just poured a jar of tomato basil sauce into a saucepan, added about 1/3 cup of canned pumpkin, 1/3 cup of fat free 1/2 and 1/2, 1/2 tsp ground coriander and salt and pepper to taste. Cook until heated through and pour on cooked pasta. I added some frozen peas as well for a little more veggies. However, Karina has decided this week that she doesn’t like peas (used to be her favorite!). At least she got some veggies from the pumpkin + tomato. I got the highest praise, “Mamma, I like the sauce. I’m going to eat all my pasta!”
Tonight, we are having some chicken with rice and edamame. I haven’t decided yet how I am going to cook it, but probably will bake the chicken with a soy glaze (soy sauce, molasses and ginger), make the rice in the slow cooker and microwave the edamame. Simple and quick.
Tomorrow night is frozen pizza with salad and some frozen corn heated up in the microwave, Sunday is going to be ground turkey with some curry + apricot jam on top of couscous to which I’ll add some frozen peas + diced dried apricots. Monday I’m going to go for some salmon, risotto and edamame.
Tuesday night is going to be Thanksgiving night. Whole frozen turkeys were on sale for .88 per pound so I bought a 14lb one that is in my fridge defrosting. Will make enough food for many meals, which I will post about later.
I am trying out various menu planning tools and this is the one I’m using this week: http://www.vertex42.com/ExcelTemplates/meal-planner.html I’ll let you all know how it works. Hopefully more posts to come now that I am not working outside of the house!
