(This is the weekly post where you share your week of food. Did you have anything that really made your week, such as your favorite soup, a lunch out, or maybe you had something new? Find a new food product? A new appliance? Please do share!)
We are getting low on meat, so I only thawed 2 small pieces this week. We have no new chicken, but I'll get to that in a minute.
I loved the first meat dish. It was meat strips with baby Brussels cut in 1/2. The Brussels got golden brown, which was extra tasty. We had that over rice with the au jus that I made from the meat drippings, after it cooked.
The 2nd time was a cube steak, those tenderized steaks. I think that they are a tougher area of the sirloin, so they tenderize them.
Even though it wasn't huge, we were able to cut it into 4 pieces to cook it. We each had one, and there were 2 for the next day. We had the first night's with spiced masa served like mashed potatoes, with the pan sauce over it, and with rice the next day with the other 1/2 of the sauce. The sauce was very rich with meat flavor. I'd like to bottle that!
This week I tried 2 out of 3 of the new mustards that we got with Dh and Ds's mayonnaise. (They were having a site-wide sale, which made me happy to get the extra mayonnaise then.) Generally, I don't buy any kind of special item for myself when shopping, as so many products don't have good practices, and cross contaminate their foods, even if the ingredients are okay.
But, this time, I found a honey-mustard, and a 'spicy' mustard that I could theoretically eat. 2 honey-mustards, actually, 2 different brands.
I make honey-mustard for a couple of things...to marinate chicken breasts when bbqing, sometimes, and for a glaze sometimes. So, I thought that I knew what the store-bought honey-mustard would taste like. I didn't.
At first, it was kind of strange, to me. But, it wasn't horrible, either, and I got used to it after a couple of bites.
The next day, I tried the spicy mustard with my meat. It was much more what I expected, though with a *slight* underlying sweetness. There are no extra ingredients to make it a spicy mustard, so they must use a different variety of mustard seed. It reminded me of a grainy or not grainy brown mustard.
Since a lot of mustards are not gluten-free, even if the ingredients seem fine, I would have to make my own mustard to get a taste that's even close, which I will do, just not quite yet. So having this mustard will give me something to look forward to with meals.
I'm trying to pin down a date for our shopping, as we are already down by a week. Ds thinks the 5th, but he has a little of his tax return left that he could borrow it from, in order to shop a week earlier, or so. I am not sure that will happen, but he said that we could decide today, so that all menus and shopping lists will be made, and I will know which day the fresh items will come in. There's no point in having salad or tacos on the 2nd, if we don't shop until the 5th, because no one will have lettuce or tomatoes.
As soon as we decide, I will jump forward to the menus and lists. They take a bit of time. My menu is done, and my list is maybe 1/2 done. Besides what I'm out of, I need to go through the menu over and over to count how many of things I need.
So, let's say that the item is broccoli. I don't want to randomly buy 10 heads. So, I go through and look at the menu, counting how many days broccoli is a side dish, and how many days it's part of the meal...such as in a soup or beef and broccoli. Once I've counted, I jot it down. Then go to onions, celery, etc. etc.
Also, I have a list on which I count how many times a meal is for dinner. So, let's say that it's chicken pot pie. And, let's say that it's on the menu every other week. In 6 weeks, that's 3 times for dinner. I will make a larger amount, then freeze the 2nd and 3rd x's, plus, a couple of lunches if I can.
I need to know all that, because if I count 6 stalks of celery per chicken pot pie meal, that means that 18 stalks are needed, not counting lunches. But, it doesn't really work that way. I doubt that I'd need more than 10 stalks when making the larger amount of filling. Each food is different, sometimes you do literally double or triple an ingredient. SO, I need those numbers to also figure out how much produce to buy.
It sounds complicated when I write it down like this, but it's really more time consuming than difficult, which is why I need to get to it now.
I have found that when you shop for 1-2 months at a time, you can't just wing these things. A - It's a lot of work for Ds, shopping big for more than one family, so it needs to be organized. B - If I wing it, I'll probably have too few of something for meals, such as onions in the soup or spaghetti, or else I will have too much of something which can then either go bad, or make my heavy after-shopping workload even bigger.
Well, enough of that!
How was your food week?
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