Weekly Menu Planning
It is one of my favorite and at the same time least favorite things to do… plan our weekly dinner menu. I love it because, when planned well, it ensures we will have a variety of healthy dinners through the week and end up ordering as little take out as possible. I dislike it because I feel like if I am going to sit down and put that much thought into a menu it should be filled with new and fancy recipes. I am in search of the balance…. well planned and practical with the occasional new and fancy.
With all this planning I figured it would be fun to share. I am going to (try) and keep up with this, no promises, but every Sunday I am going to post the menu I created for the previous week. By delaying a week that will give me a chance to share notes and thoughts on what did or didn’t work well. A few disclaimers… we try to eat Paleo in our household but we aren’t perfect. I tend to make substitutions when recipes call for olive oil or butter we use coconut oil, flour we use coconut flour, and I usually always leave out any sugar depending on the recipe. I write the menus based on our week, if we have a particularly busy evening we do grab take out or I try to plan to have leftovers from the night before. I also write our shopping list in the order the grocery store is laid out (we always shop at Whole Foods) and I usually make our shopping list based on what we need to buy, I will try to make it inclusive for all ingredients needed. We usually always have coconut oil, vinegars, etc already on hand so be sure to double check my shopping list if you are following a recipe. Another tip is to buy the spices from the bulk section and get just what you need. This will guarantee they will always be fresh and save a lot of money.
With all that said, this is the menu and recipe links from the week before. Enjoy.
Monday and Tuesday’s Indian Spinach via Cook’s Illustrated Sept/Oct 2012 issue.
Tuesday’s chicken recipe found HERE via Smitten Kitchen.
Wednesday’s Pork Chop recipe via The Great Meat Cookbook (recipe below) and served with Collards via Southern Living and Black Eyed Peas via The Wanderlust Kitchen.
Thursday we had plenty of Collards and Black Eyed Peas left over so we bought three chicken kabobs from Stick’s to fill in for the meat.
Well, that was week one. A few notes… I forgot to add canned tomatoes to the weekly shopping list because we still have canned tomatoes from the summer.
The black eyed peas were awesome, this recipe is certainly a keeper. I ended up using the “fresh” be peas from Whole Foods so that cut down on the cooking time a bit.
I had a heck of a time finding mustard greens but they were worth the search… if you can’t find them I would suggest just using more spinach, any other substitution will end up being quite bitter.