Cooking Weekend

This was supposed to be a cooking and cleaning weekend, but it ended up more of a shopping and cooking weekend. Haven't made much progress on the cleaning, but at least I have a refrigerator full of food and a week's worth of meals in my freezer.

A commenter asked about recipes a few weeks ago, so I'll share what I did:

I brought home 3 lbs of chicken tenderloins and used 1/3 of it in Brown Butter Ravioli with Crispy Sage and the remaining 2/3 in Crock Pot Santa Fe Chicken. We had the Brown Butter Ravioli for dinner Saturday night (it was really good) and froze the Santa Fe Chicken (haven't tried this yet) for later in the week.

Today I browned 5 lbs of ground beef with a little onion and bell pepper, 2.5 lbs of bacon (use the oven!) and cut up a rotisserie chicken from Costco (a great cheat!). Most of the bacon and the chicken will be used on Monday and Tuesday to make Chicken Bacon Ranch Calzones and Garlic Chicken Farfalle (this is so unbelievably delicious). The rest of the bacon went into breakfast burritos that were frozen for later in the week.

I added spaghetti sauce to part of the ground beef to be used in Skillet Lasagna and spaghetti in the next week or two. I added refried beans (along with a little cumin, chili powder, onion powder and garlic) to another part to make burritos for lunch this week. (I really, really hate store-bought frozen foods for lunch). I have several more portions of ground beef stored in the freezer for later.

Tonight we had T-bone steaks with homestyle green beans and modified version of Crash Hot Potatoes.

I'll admit that this set of recipes isn't particularly healthy. The pasta dishes use lots of butter and cream. Also, I don't regularly buy bacon, so the number of bacon dishes is an anomaly. And the 5 lbs of ground beef will probably last for a month. We are also carb-heavy. That's always my weakness. I love carbs and the kids never gripe about pasta.

But I think cooking from scratch with real ingredients has got to be better than a bunch of over-processed foods. And we supplement with lots of fruits and veggies. And, most importantly, I can have dinner on the table in less than 15 minutes every night this week.