Menu Plan for Week of Sept. 27

We did really well last week following the plan.  Now that we are on a roll, it it onto this week.

Sunday:  Forage in the Fridge (FITF)

Monday:  BBQ Chicken in the crockpot

Tuesday:  Tri-tip, dilled carrots, crashed potatoes, salad, peach or pear crisp (my grandmother and great-aunt are coming over for dinner and to see the house for the first time.

Wednesday:  FITF

Thursday:  Stovetop Taco Pasta

Friday:  FITF

Saturday:  Homemade Pizza

Homemade Marinara Sauce - The Second Part of the Tomato Bounty

After making enough pizza sauce to last until next spring, I had several of my father's tomatoes left.  However, they were not enough to make a big pot of marinara sauce.  So I headed to one of our local farms  (William Bos Greenhouse & Farm) to buy some more tomatoes.  To my delight they had some beautiful, red, ripe Roma tomatoes so I grabbed myself a peck and made plans to spend the day making sauce.

What type of sauce?  Marinara Sauce.  Yum!

I started with this recipe from Allrecipes.com.  However, because I always like to change things up, I made several changes that are reflected in the recipe below.  The number of cups is approximate because I just estimated 3 Roma tomatoes equaled 1 cup.  After seeing how much it filled the pot, I think that estimate may have been a bit high.

With this basic marinara sauce, you can mix it up any way you want later.  Add ground beef or turkey, fresh basil, mushrooms, whatever strikes your fancy. 

Homemade Marinara Sauce
(Note:  This makes a very large pot of sauce, enough to fill 3 quart freezer bags)
Ingredients
9-12 cups fresh tomatoes, peeled and run through the food processor to remove chunks
12 oz tomato paste
4 Tbs Italian herb blend
1 Tbs salt
1/2 onion
1 green pepper
1 head garlic
4 Tbs olive oil
3/4 c red wine

Directions
In a food processor, mince onion, garlic and green pepper
Add olive oil
Hat a large Dutch oven or other heavy bottomed pot
Place olive oil, onion, green pepper and garlic mixture into the pot
Saute until soft
Add tomatoes, tomato paste, salt, red wine and Italian herbs.
Mix to combine thoroughly.
Turn down heat to low.
Simmer for at least an hour.
Cool and place in quart freezer bags.
Freeze for future use.

Menu Plan for Week of Sept. 20

I am pleased to report that we followed the menu plan from last week.  So we must officially be getting settled in the new house since we are able to actually stick to a plan.  :-)

Flush from last week's victory, here is this week's plan.
 
Sunday:  Leftovers (Baked Salmon on a salad, cheesy potatoes, corn on the cob)
Monday:  Crockpot Roast with Herbs, potatoes, corn on the cob, salad
Tuesday:  New York Strip steaks rubbed with Chicago Steak Seasoning, corn on the cob (it is that time of year), salad, potatoes
Wednesday:  Leftovers
Thursday:  Leftovers and pizza (if necessary)
Friday:  Out to dinner and a show
Saturday:  Homemade Pizza with BBQ sauce and chicken

Check out http://www.orgjunkie.com/ to see what others are planning for their dinners.

Homemade Pizza Sauce - Just One Part of the Tomato Bounty

We have decided that my father is the tomato whisperer.  Why?  Because he was able to grow, in a cold and rainy summer, a tomato bounty.  I was the lucky recipient of some of that bounty. 

With a big bowl of peeled tomatoes at the ready , I decided to make homemade pizza sauce.  Starting from this recipe from RecipeZaar, I created the recipe below. 

Once it had cooled, I used ice cube trays to freeze individual pizza sized servings, enough to last all winter long.  Now I just need to get started on making the pizza dough to go with it.

Homemade Pizza Sauce
Ingredients (Note this is a BIG batch.  You may want to halve the recipe if you don't want a year's worth of pizza sauce)
4 Tbs olive oil (add more if necessary)
3 cups fresh tomatoes, finely chopped (I ran them through the food processor).  Make sure to peel the skins off of the tomatoes to ensure a smooth finished product.
1 jar tomato sauce (24 ounces or more)
1 onion, minced (run through the food processor)
1 head garlic, minced (run through the food processor)
12 oz tomato paste
4 tsp Italian herb blend
4 Tbs sugar
1/3 cup red wine

Directions
Heat olive oil in large Dutch oven or other heavy bottom pot
Add onions and garlic, sauteing until soft.
Add tomato sauce, fresh tomatoes, tomato paste, herbs, sugar and red wine.
Mix to combine completely.
Turn down heat to simmer.
Cook for 20-30 minutes to allow flavors to meld.

Optional:
Let cool completely.
Spray ice cube trays with Pam.
Pour sauce into ice cube trays, then freeze.
Once frozen, remove and place into a zipper freezer bag. 
Each cube is perfect for a personal pizza.

Pantry Love!

Our new house has a pantry! And it is a walk in pantry to boot. It was love at first sight. You see, I am so excited to have an actual pantry. In our old house, the pantry was a bookcase secured to the wall on the landing of the stairs to the unfinished basement. Well, there was a lazy susan in the only under-the-counter cabinet but it was hard to access and didn't hold much.

However, there was a big problem with my new pantry which was threatening my budding love affair. Someone, in what I can only imagine was a caffeine induced frenzy while being snowed in, had covered the walls from floor to ceiling and wrapped most of the shelves in the ugliest contact paper I had ever seen. All I can ask is why on earth you would use a contact paper that has gray and dark green in a tiny closet with a small light? It makes it dark and depressing and you would never know if things are clean.

Here is a close up of the contact paper. Ug and ly are the only things I can come up with.

My solution, strip all the contact paper off. I don't have any actual before pics since I was in a frenzy to get that stuff peeled off. This is the best I can do.

I removed all the contact paper, filling a large garbage bag, and wiped down the walls and the shelves with an adhesive remover, Goo Gone. I love this stuff. It seems to disolve that sticky residue with ease. Once that was done, here is what I was left with. Pretty scary stuff. But I especially love the blue-ish paneling that was used for the walls instead of drywall.

I then used two coats of Kilz primer and two coats of stark white semigloss paint. I resecured several pieces of loose hardware and reinstalled the shelves. Once the interior was complete, I painted the inside of the door with chalkboard paint. What better place for a shopping list than the pantry itself? The only thing I still need is the chalk tray Hubs said he would make me.

Here is pantry filled with all the things that had to live in tubs while waiting for me to get done with the panty.

I am in love all over again. And what a transformation. I am hoping that this is a sign of what great changes we can make to our new home.

Make sure to stop by our home renovation blog Claiming Our Space to check out other changes we are making to our home.

Menu Planning - An Ongoing Process

I will regularly menu plan, I will regularly menu plan, I will regularly menu plan. 

I need to repeat that to myself time and time again since with this move we just haven't gotten back into the swing of things with the planning out what we will be eating.  Part of the problem is that Mr. Gooch works out of town part of every week so I am on my own for dinner.  I tend to not plan for those nights and I need to start.  Going to the pantry and deciding that a jello cup, crackers, a bag of pita chips and bowl of cottage cheese are NOT a healthy dinner.  :-)

So here it goes for this week.

Sunday:  Family Pool Party
Monday:  Rotisserie Chicken in the Crockpot
Tuesday:  Brats on the Grill, corn on the cob, salad
Wednesday:  Stovetop Taco Pasta
Thursday:  Leftovers
Friday:  Out to Dinner
Saturday:  Leftovers

Wish me luck in sticking to the plan.

Check out http://www.orgjunkie.com/ to see what others are planning for this week's menus.

Menu Plan Monday-Down to the Wire

It has finally happened. Our new kitchen is ready to use. I finished the pantry redo, cleaned all the appliances, unpacked all our dry goods, took stock of our frozen goods and actually ran to the grocery store to get some perishable items.

With the kitchen in action, it is back to menu planning for us.

Monday: BBQ Chicken on our new grill
Tuesday: Steaks with Southwest Marinade, corn on the cob, roasted potatoes, salad.Wednesday: Salmon with Pesto on Puffed Pastry, Cheesy Parmesan Orzo, dilled carrots
Thursday: Leftovers
Friday: Large dinner salad with grilled chicken
Saturday: Spicy chicken sausage with mac and cheese
Sunday: Out to Dinner at Famous Dave's

Menu Plan Monday - Have No Idea What Comes Next

We are finally in our new home. Yeah!!! However, it has taken over a week to get things cleaned to the point where I feel comfortable putting food in the fridge and freezer, furniture on the carpet and our dishes in the cupboards. I am actually still working on getting the caked on grease off the grates for the stove top (thank goodness for Copper Boy scouring pads and Simple Green) so we haven't been doing much cooking yet. That will probably start next week (I hope).

So here is what we have planned.

Monday: Caesar salad with sushi, fruit salad and fresh bread (all from our local grocery store).
Tuesday: Caesar salad with chicken, fruit salad and the rest of the fresh bread
Wednesday: Baked Spaghetti Pie
Thursday: Leftovers
Friday: Lean Cuisine (I am on my own for dinner)
Saturday: Stovetop Taco Pasta
Sunday: Leftovers

Menu Plan Monday - Not Much of a Plan

This week's Menu Plan Monday is rather vague. The reason? We just moved into our new (to us) house and because we are cleaning it from top to bottom, we don't actually have any food in it yet. So we are not sure what we are going to be eating since my parents have been kind enough to let us eat with them.

But here is what I know.

Monday: Leftover Chinese

Tuesday: Chipotle Burritos
Wednesday: Large Dinner Salad with Chicken
Thursday: Salmon fillets

Friday: Your Guess is as Good as Mine

Saturday: Your Guess is as Good as Mine

Sunday: Hopefully steaks on the grill (if we get the grill purchased and assembled)

I am hoping that by the end of the week, we will have our stuff unpacked and be able to get back on track. Keep your fingers crossed for us.

We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Posts...

We are finally moving to Michigan.

We close on the sale of our current home Wednesday and close on the new house on Friday, a week early (can you believe it?)

Thus, we will not have internet access for several days and so that means no posts.

I hope to be back up and running next week, once we are settled and in the new house. In the mean time, check out our new diggs. I am so excited to start cooking in the huge kitchen and decorating it to our taste.

Stove Top Taco Pasta

(Photo is not particularly attractive , but I can guarantee, it tastes better than it looks)

I love Mexican food. OK, maybe not real Mexican food but the kind that most Americans grow up with. You know what I am talking about; tacos, fajitas, tortilla chips with salsa. I also love pasta. Mac and cheese, pesto with fusilli, creamy tomato with penne. Yum.

So it only figures that I am a huge fan of this dish - Stove Top Taco Pasta. It is a spin off of the Taco Bake which requires baking in the oven and takes much longer to prepare. This version is so easy and with only 5 ingredients, pulls together quickly for a filling meal.

I hope you like it as much as we do.

Stove Top Taco Pasta
(Source: Variation of the Taco Bake)
Ingredients
1 lb ground beef
1/4 c taco seasoning
3/4 c water
1 pkg low fat cream cheese (8 oz)
1 box pasta (we used medium shells)
optional: cheese of your choice to sprinkle on top (we used mozzarella since that is all we had)

Directions
Brown ground beef in a large dutch oven.
Combine taco seasoning and water.
Pour taco seasoned water over browned meat, stirring to ensure all meat is covered.
Simmer to reduce amount of liquid (approximately 5-10 minutes) on low.
Once reduced, add cubed cream cheese, stirring to incorporate fully.
Prepare pasta according to directions and drain.
Add drained pasta to dutch oven, stirring to coat completely.

Visitor in the Garden - Part 2

We live in a very urban area (2 miles from the city limit of Chicago) so most of our "wildlife" consists of squirrels, possums, the occasional raccoon, fox or coyote, along with lots of rabbits and birds.

With a bird feeder in our backyard, we get lots of the birds and squirrels. Our neighbor's cat, Muffin, loves to watch (and try to catch) the birds. Though to our knowledge, she hasn't actually caught any since we have moved in. She is too slow, too orange and whips her tail back and forth like crazy alerting the birds to her approach. She, on many occasion, has also decided that the best place to "hide" is in the grass right in front of the feeder. How does she do that? By laying as flat as possible. We often refer to her as the orange rug on the lawn.

That being said, she views the feeder as HER territory so imagine my surprise when I saw her squaring off against a squirrel one morning. They sat like this for about 3 or 4 minutes. (Sorry for the blurry picture, I had to take it through the screen so I wouldn't startle the critters.)

No worries though, the squirrel just chattered at her from the sidewalk then the roof of the garage. Not actual contact was made. But that little squirrel still pokes his head around the corner to check to see if the cat is there weeks later.

Yup, never a dull moment around here.