Menu Monday

Skillet Greens with Eggs and Mushrooms (Martha Stewart)

M bought me the Martha Stewart 'Meatless' cookbook for Christmas, since I've been trying to cut back on my meat consumption. This was the first recipe I tried from the cookbook, and it still doesn't disappoint. I use coconut oil instead of olive oil since it has a higher smoke point and I skip the sage-chile butter in favor of just sprinkling on crushed red pepper flakes at the end.
 

 

Baked Garlic Lemon Tilapia (Skinnytaste)

Meh. Not great, not terrible. Honestly, I had some frozen tilapia that had thawed in the fridge and needed to get used ASAP, so this did the job. Not the most flavorful recipe, so I doubt we'd make it again.

 

Chicken and White Bean Enchiladas with Creamy Salsa Verde (Skinnytaste)
Admittedly not the prettiest of pictures, but these were great! The recipe was a little more fiddly and time-consuming than I normally like on a weeknight, but my guess is that you could prep these on the weekend, freeze them, and then just bake them for about an hour and you'd be fine.  

 Baked Sausages with Apples and Potatoes (Dinner: A Love Story)

Another really unappetizing photo of a really delicious meal. This is one of my favorite fall recipes. It is so easy and there's only one pan to clean up afterwards. I used an entire package of Trader Joe's sweet apple and maple chicken sausages, which are 5 to a package instead of 4, and used dried thyme instead of fresh (maybe a teaspoon?). Make sure you serve it with the grainy mustard! 

Tuscan White Bean and Garlic Soup (Giada De Laurentiis)

Remember when Giada didn't suck? I mean, she always has done her annoying pronunciations of Italian words and had an abnormally large head, but back when it was just Everyday Italian? I loved that show so much and wanted to be her cooking BFF. Then she switched over to Giada At Home and I cannot stand her. There is just something about her now that makes me want to punch her in the teeth. M has a theory that off-camera, she is a total bitch to Todd. I'm inclined to agree.

 

Anyways. The point of all of that is to say that this recipe is vintage, good Giada. I used to make this soup for myself when I was just out of college and broke and living by myself. It felt tres gourmet, but because it is basically beans with some broth and cream, it is tres budget.

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That's it for last week's meals. A few notes on my current way of meal planning:

For the most part, I'm still doing things the same way as I was in this post. Instead of printing off and filling in the menu planner each week, I just have a dedicated menus notebook in Evernote and I create a note for each week.
 

Last year, I realized that I was making almost all of my meals exclusively from Pinterest recipes. Not that that's a bad thing per se, but I have all of these great cookbooks and tear-outs from magazines at home that I wasn't using. So I challenged myself to start cooking more from those. Ever the lover of rules, I also introduced Tex-Mex Tuesday and Pizza Friday into our lineup, in addition to Meatless Monday and Soup Sunday (during the fall and winter). I don't follow those rules to a T, but they've definitely helped me cook through more of my magazine tear-outs and conquer my fear of homemade pizza.