Exceedingly Mundane

Fairly straightforward menu this week. I seem to just be pulling up recipes that I have made before, and I know we really like. I keep wanting to try some new recipes, but I can’t seem to get either motivated or organized or inspired enough (or something!) to get them added to the menu. So, here’s the general plan:

Sunday– rumien

Monday – Honey Mustard Chicken sandwiches, coleslaw, parmesan potato wedges

Tuesday – Mini Meatloaves, garlic smashed potatoes, sauteed cabbage

Wednesday – Light night before Tim weighs in – eggs, oatmeal, toast

Thursday – Cheeseburger Soup, homemade bread

Friday – Sloppy Joes, oven fries

Saturday – Date Night or Spaghetti

Be sure to hop on over to Laura’s site and check out the rest of the menus. There are tons of links to some really good-sounding menus, a lot of them with recipes or links to recipes. Go check it out, and play along if you would like! 🙂

I don’t have much of a menu to post this week. Tim is going to be out of town some on business, and so I won’t be cooking a lot. He doesn’t really want me to advertise when he’s going to be gone, so I won’t do it by day, but here’s the general idea for the week:

Grilled Salmon (me)/Grilled Chicken (Tim), steamed green beans, rice or potato
Leftover take-out Chinese food
Ribeye Steaks, Baked Potatoes, salad
Spaghetti

I will probably also have one night where I’ll just have something easy like a bowl of cereal or oatmeal and some cinnamon toast.

Be sure to hop on over to Laura’s site and check out the rest of the menus. There are tons of links to some really good-sounding menus, a lot of them with recipes or links to recipes. I’m sure everyone’s menu looks a lot better than mine this week! 🙂

Hope everyone has a great week!

I’m really late today with my menu, but there’s a reason. I have a refrigerator overflowing with food left from our Super Bowl party yesterday! I probably don’t need to cook that much this week, but hey, let’s face it – this is all junk food, and as much as I’d like to live off of chips and dip, sausage balls and Lit’l Smokies for a week, I don’t think that’s very prudent. 😀

So, here’s a basic plan for the week:

Monday – Super Bowl party leftovers (Taco Soup over Fritos, hot dogs)

Tuesday – Chicken Stir Fry, Egg Rolls (trying to use up the carrots, broccoli and sugar snap peas in the veggie tray from the party)

Wednesday – Light Night before Tim weighs in at work…. either Tomato Soup and Grilled Cheese or a big Grilled Chicken Salad

Thursday – Crockpot BBQ Chicken, Smashed potatoes, Sauteed Green Beans

Friday – Date Night or Spaghetti (didn’t have this last week)

Saturday/Sunday – TBD

As always, be sure to cruise on over to Laura’s blog and check out the other participants’ menus. Last week, there were over 80 that were posted!!!

I didn’t post a menu last week, and believe me, I’ll be glad to have one this week, so I at least have some idea of what to fix each day. We may not stick to it 100%, but at least I have an idea 🙂 I still have to finalize my Super Bowl menu, but I have the bulk of it figured out, I think. We’re having a lot of family and friends over, so I’ll be busy on Saturday, getting the last of the food, fixing dips and mostly – cleaning the house up 🙄

Hope everyone has a good week!

Monday – Slow Cooker Thai Chicken, whole wheat spaghetti noodles, broccoli or green beans, maybe a salad. We’re having a buddy over to watch 24 🙂

Tuesday – Soft tacos, pinto beans, spanish rice

Wednesday – tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches

Thursday – Crockpot Chicken with Potatoes, butter peas, salad, homemade bread

Friday – Date Night or Spaghetti with Meatballs, garlic bread

Saturday – TBD or pizza

Sunday – our Super Bowl party, menu coming soon, but the bulk of it is taco soup, burgers, hot dogs, dips, chips, veggie platter, fruit platter, cheese and sausage platter, Li’l Smokies, and Tim’s prized bacon wrapped deer backstrap. I’ll skip that one 🙂

First, I thought I would do a couple of quick updates from last week’s menu. I didn’t make the new recipe for the Taco Pie, so I’ll have to move that to another time and week. We had the Golden Potato Soup on Thursday, while my sister Gail and her husband were here, and I think they enjoyed it. I usually add diced ham to that soup, but this time I didn’t have ham and just browned 1 lb of ground meat and added it. I think we both liked this better, so I may just do that from now on. We did have our Date Night on Friday, and I blogged about that here.

Now, for this week, I don’t have much of a plan, but thought I would post what I had. A lot up in the air this week, and not too much cooking on the horizon. You’ll probably get a lot of good ideas if you peruse the menus posted by other participants over at Laura’s blog, they should be a lot more inspiring than mine!

Monday – Chicken Squares, Tomato Soup

Tuesday & Wednesday – Free Days (Tim out of town)

Thursday – Spaghetti and Meatballs, garlic bread, steamed broccoli

Friday – Date Night

Saturday & Sunday – TBD

Planning this week’s menu was a little bit of a struggle for me. This week, I have several ingredients that I am trying to use up and I have a lot of them! I bought a huge bag of potatoes at Kroger last week, on sale, and we’re having potatoes almost every day! I also bought a big thing of portebellini mushrooms (baby portobellos) and those are going to appear in the first couple of meals. It turned out to be an odd menu, but I’m sure we’ll survive!

Be sure to stop by Laura‘s blog and see what everyone else is planning for the week!

Monday – Tortellini with Portobello mushrooms (I don’t have a jar of alfredo sauce, so unless I run back to the grocery, I may try it using this alfredo sauce recipe), Salad, bread

Tuesday – Baked Potatoes with Creamy Mushroom Sauce, Salad

Wednesday – Grilled Chicken Salad with homemade zesty Italian dressing

Thursday – Golden Potato Soup, homemade bread

Friday – new recipe for Taco Pie

Saturday – Frito Pie or Wings – it’s Playoff Time, baby! Saints play at 7 PM, Woo-Hoo!

Sunday – TBD or Breakfast Food

The Creamy Mushroom sauce for the baked potatoes and the zesty Italian dressing recipes are older ones I have on recipe cards, and are not entered in our recipe system. They’re pretty simple recipes, but if anyone is interested in them, just email me or leave a comment if you want to see them, and I’ll be glad to type them up. 🙂

Have a great week!

I have an odd request, and it’s going to come off like I’m asking for something or begging, because, let’s face it, I am! It’s not a big thing, so if it doesn’t work out, I won’t break down and cry or anything. 🙁

I noticed on a box of Nabisco brand crackers I bought before Christmas that Rachael Ray’s picture was on the box. When I read the side of the box, I noticed an offer for one of her cookbooks, Express Lane Meals, if you collect a certain number of box tops and mail them in with a check for 4.99. Unfortunately, it calls for 6 box tops and I only have 2 of these boxes. We don’t eat a lot of crackers, but I did buy some for a cheeseball and some dips I made at the holidays. I might buy one or maybe two more boxes at most, around the time of the Super Bowl. But I seriously doubt that I will buy 6 boxes of crackers in the next few months.

So, here’s my shameless begging – if you have a box of these crackers that has this special “cookbook point” on it and you are NOT going to use it for yourself, would you mind mailing it to me? Like I said, I won’t break down and sob if I don’t get it, but on the other hand, I didn’t think it would be too awful to ask. Or is it? Am I just a shameless horrible good-for-nothing blogger??!

Here’s what they look like:

Thanks!

I am so ready to get back to normal, back into a routine, and also trying to eat healthier. You know, my days are so messed up with the holidays that I just now realized this is Monday. I guess I’ll be off track all week! Thankfully, Laura over at OrgJunkie is back with this fun menu meme. Pop on over and check out some of the other participants menus for ideas and inspiration!

Without further ado, here’s my menu for the week:

Monday – traditional NY Day food (ham, greens for Tim, cabbage and cornbread. Due to a scheduling snafu the terribly traditional black-eyed peas did not get made). For supper, we’re having Tim’s world famous Rumien 🙂

Tuesday – Easy Baked Fish, coleslaw, mashed potatoes

Wednesday – Grilled Chicken Salad (Lite Night before Tim weighs in at work)

Thursday – new recipe for a Sausage and Potato chowder, homemade sourdough bread

Friday – Spaghetti or Date Night

Saturday – TBD

Sunday – game day food; our alma mater plays in a bowl game that night and I hope to order pizza delivery 🙂

I tried a new soup recipe yesterday, for a “Hambone Soup”. It’s really just a vegetable soup, but it does use a hambone to flavor it, hence the name. Since I still had the bone left from our Christmas Eve ham, I went looking for recipes to use with the bone. (The ham was delicious, by the way, and only the second ham I’ve ever made in my life. It was spiral sliced and I did a honey glaze on it and it was deee-licious!)

I looked online, and found a recipe on AllRecipes.com (one of my favorite places to search for new recipes, since I love reading all of the feedback and reviews that people leave). I made a ton of changes to the original recipe, so it is quite different from what is posted.

For those of you who don’t “get it” – I love, love, love that the soup is technically named “Hambone Soup”. It’s really just a flavorful vegetable soup, but I knew I had to make this because of the name. Get it, Hambone. Our main site is called Hambones.org and we’re sometimes called the Hambones. Get it??!! Funny, huh?! 🙄

Anyway, I’ll post the recipe, along with my numerous changes, in the extended section. Be sure to read all of my notes at the bottom. Here’s a couple of pictures of the soup, and also the bone cooling on the counter. Guess who eyeballed the bone for a long time, before he started barking at it?!! He’s going to get the bone later today… we saved it for a rainy day. It’s been raining here since before we got up this morning, and I’m afraid it may rain off and on all day. Beau won’t be able to go outside and play, so we thought the bone would make him happy! 😆

Click on the extended link for the recipe itself…
Read the rest of this entry »

Well, this week is totally up in the air! I have no idea what we will be doing half the days and no idea if we will be here to eat, if others will be eating with us, or we’ll be out running around and will eat out. Sigh. A feeble stab in the dark is all I can make this week at a menu plan! Hopefully, we’ll be back on track soon, after the holidays!

Here’s what I have so far…

Sunday – we ordered pizza for the Survivor finale. Yeah Yul, I’m so glad he won!

Monday – the guys are going hunting, so a free night for me. I’ll eat some leftover pasta or leftover pizza

Tuesday – Italian Sausage soup (that I didn’t get to last week!)

Wednesday – TBD or maybe breakfast for dinner – eggs, biscuits, bacon and grits or oatmeal

Thursday – TBD or Crockpot Creamy Italian Chicken, homemade bread

Friday – TBD or Date Night or maybe Tacos

Saturday – Out of town for Christmas at my in-laws. I’m taking meatballs and some other finger foods

Sunday – Christmas Eve… not completely sure, but probably the ham I didn’t bake last week

Merry Christmas everyone!

Laura was on vacation last week, but is back now and once again hosting Menu Plan Monday. Cruise on over to her blog and check it out! I love surfing everyone’s menus for the week and getting some good ideas and good recipes 🙂

Here’s the tenative plan for the week at our house:

Sunday – we had meatballs subs for Game Night 😀

Monday – Grilled honey mustard chicken on wheat sub rolls, pasta salad, glazed carrots

Tuesday – baked ham, Pineapple Casserole, mashed potatoes

Wednesday – Light Night before Tim weighs in. He voted for tomato soup and grilled cheese last week, so I’ll insist on breakfast food this week (eggs, oatmeal, cinnamon toast)

Thursday – whole wheat pasta with alfredo sauce and grilled chicken, homemade bread, veggie

Friday – Date Night or maybe Italian Sausage Soup and bread

Saturday – out of town for a family get-together

Sunday – Game Day food, maybe buffalo wings or burgers, not sure yet

Yesterday was really cold. We barely hit 40º and I was chilly all day. I had already planned my menu earlier in the week, and had checked the weather (being the slightest obsessive-compulsive planner that I am!) and had planned to try a new recipe for soup for Friday night. It turned out really good! I found this recipe over at Miranda‘s blog, via the Slow Cooking Thursday meme that Sandra sponsors each week. Thanks Miranda!

The recipe is for Chicken Taco Soup, and I have entered it, with my comments, over on our main site. Click here to check it out 🙂

P.S. Sorry about the picture! Tim was ready to eat and I didn’t even think about taking a nicer looking picture of our bowls filled with soup. Only afterwards, when I was going to dish up the leftovers for lunch today did the thought cross my mind …. Gee, I should have taken a picture of this yummy soup for my blog!

We’ve seen a few movies lately that have been on my want-to-watch list. Granted, they are older movies that we never got around to seeing or renting, but still… they were movies on my list that I wanted to see. You know, we haven’t rented a single movie from the rental store (and no, we haven’t signed up for Netflix yet either!) since we got our new TV! We got digital cable at the same time, along with our cable company’s offer of free HBO. So, we have like 15 HBO channels at the moment and have just been watching movies there, or on our cable system’s “On Demand” feature. One day, we’re going to go wild and do a Pay-Per-View movie! Woot! 🙄

Anyway, we love to watch movies. I’m perfectly happy to watch them at home. I like to rent them or have them where I can stop for bathroom breaks, to answer the phone, let the dog out to go to the bathroom, stop and fix popcorn, etc. Tim is the polar opposite of me. He likes to go to the theater, spend lots of money to sit there and eat expensive popcorn and diet Coke, and not be interrupted in the big dark theater. I guess that’s why we’re such a good pair, we like different things and are both fairly willing to compromise. I go with him (we saw Casino Royale at the theater on his birthday, two thumbs up, good movie!) and he stays home and watches movies on HBO or DVD with me.

I was in Target the other day and saw this microwave popcorn popper. I have been wanting to buy one of those electric, air-machine popcorn poppers, but I just honestly don’t have room in any cabinet or pantry shelf for it. So, I compromised and thought I would give this thing a try. We really like it! I put some plain popcorn (Orville Redenbacher brand, thank you!) in it, no oil or salt, and pop it in the microwave. I wanted to start doing this because I thought this would be healthier for us than the microwave bags. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I feel like it’s better for us 🙄 We do spray some fat-free butter on it, and then sprinkle on some toppings, but still, I think it’s probably a little better for us 🙂

So, in summary, the purpose of this post was to say that I have been trying to have “popcorn and movie” night lately. We’ve watched some movies I have had on my list for ages, and I’ve popped us a big bowl of popcorn. We’ve seen “The Perfect Man” with Hillary Duff and Heather Locklear (cute and sweet and pretty clean), then “Transporter 2” (just like the first one, mindless action, but we like it!), and then a couple of nights ago, we finally saw “Cheaper by the Dozen 2” on HBO. I am planning on us watching “Polar Express” on ABCFamily Saturday night, but we’ll see if I can get us to stick to that plan. Tim is not big on planning stuff to do at home on the weekends.

So, that’s today’s Question of the Day: Do you like popcorn with your movies? Do you pop it at home, and if so, do you do microwave popcorn or something else? Also, what was the last movie you saw that you liked?

Have a great day!

I’ve blogged before that my favorite fast food type place is Sonic. Tim and I both love their food, plus we love how convenient their food is packaged. It makes it a lot easier to travel with their food the way they wrap it up and the containers they use. We often pick up their food on the road when we are traveling around or going back and forth to visit family. Which we did this past weekend, and I decided to splurge and try their new cheesecake bites:

They were good! Nice and gooey and the strawberry dipping sauce was nice to have with them. We usually like to try most of the new monthly or seasonal offerings that Sonic has. We’re usually not disappointed. I will say though, that I was hoping to see something like they had last year or the year before – a gingerbread shake or blast. I LOVED those things and got several of them the last time they had them. Sigh, I guess I’ll just have to hit Starbucks instead!

You can always tell when it’s the holiday season at my house, because I start going nuts, buying these flavored coffee creamers from Coffee-Mate. Last year, I was a total gingerbread-aholic, only buying the Gingerbread flavored creamer. This year, after trying the Peppermint Mocha drink at Starbucks, I decided to “branch out” and get the Peppermint one as well. I like both of them, and love having all of these flavors at the holidays. I haven’t tried their Eggnog flavor yet, because I’m not a huge eggnog fan. Last year, I bought a small container of eggnog-flavored soy milk and it was just so-so. Not sure I’ll go that route this year. I’d much rather have flavored coffee or hot chocolate!

When it gets to be fall and winter here and it’s chillier, I love drinking “warm” drinks. I have just recently picked up coffee (about 2 or 3 years ago), but I have always loved hot chocolate. I make my own mix and give it out as Christmas gifts to friends and family, and we always keep some for us to have in the winter. Gail and I used to make a spiced tea mix, and I might want to go back and dig out that recipe and make some of that this year, as well. Gail also makes a good cappuccino mix, and I have a toffee coffee mix from a good friend of mine that is really good. I also will drink hot tea this time of year, which I never do during the summer months. I like having a cup of hot herbal tea at night (decaf, of course) when it’s cold and I’m wanting something hot to drink.

So, that’s today’s Question of the Day: Do you have a favorite drink you like to drink this time of year? Something seasonal or brings back memories, or just something you like the taste of. Maybe it’s a certain flavor of coffee, hot chocolate, hot apple cider, hot tea or something else? What’s your favorite?! I’d love to know 🙂