Five Days a Week

It shouldn't be cause for fanfare that we ate dinner at home for a full week. That we actually managed to come home from work and cook. But as we sat eating leftovers for lunch on Saturday, we both felt a small bit of satisfaction. How very first world, city lazy of us.

As someone who loves to cook, most weeks there's some recipe or another that I gather the ingredients for and then meticulously follow it, we enjoy it for one meal and then by the third day of leftovers we can't wait to throw it out. Or the leftovers are totally forgotten because we come home and want tex mex or thai or pizza.

This is not for lack of meal planning or most weeks even having time to shop. We've just pretended it is easier to go out or order in than actually use our kitchen daily. 

This past week I borrowed a note from my sister's book and built a menu plan based on recipes from relishrelish.com. These are not extraordinary gourmet recipes, but they are reasonably diverse and you can scale the recipe for as few as two or as many as eight.  The seasoning in most of the recipes needs to be dialed up a bit, but easily adjusted as you go.

Start to finish we had dinner within 30-60 minutes of being home most nights. How very Rachel Ray (shudder).

My first swing at sorting through the recipes proved a bit too pasta heavy, so for week two I've tried to balance it out with greater diversity. We'll see a little tex mex, a little korean bbq, a little ode to the south.

I can't see keeping up sourcing all of my recipes from this one site, and I haven't found any that I thought yes, we must make this again soon. However, it's a good way to get back into the swing of actually planning reasonable meals that can be quickly made during the week. Oh, and easily stayed within our food budget.

And the grocery store shopping list app is pretty handy.

The one thing I have made recently that's absolutely worth making again-Immediately- are the Barefoot Contessa Salted Caramel Brownies. Seriously, go make them right now.