Meals and Chores

We do all our grocery shopping on Sunday mornings after church (a mega benefit of going to early and then Sunday school). We work together to get everything on the list as fast as possible and get out of there because I absolutely hate grocery shopping. One of us works as the runner and the other pushes the buggy with Lilli going aisle by aisle. And that works well for us and we do get out of there pretty quickly each week.I do all my meal planning on Saturday each week for the following week. I've found if we don't have a plan then the evenings are NUTS. I've got a few quick meal cookbooks and use a lot of websites to come up with fun stuff to eat each week. One of my other main goals for 2011 is to eat down our pantry!! If World War 3 ever strikes then you could probably come over to our house and eat from our pantry and fridges until order is reestablished to the world. So this year I'm planning at least one meal each week to eat down something that's been in there for a while and just needs to be used up (like 15 cans of tuna or seasoning packets from 2007.)
I think I'm going to start posting my meal plans for the week just so I can go back and find recipes more easily. Since I use the web so much we'll make something once and then never be able to find it again which is so frustrating!

I don't plan specific days for things which helps us stick with the "plan" better - some days you are just in the mood for some things more than others. We get everything on Sundays because we do not make mid-week grocery runs!!!

This week:

Chicken Spaghetti - We actually made this one Sunday night and it was good! It didn't need to bake as long as the recipe said, and I was out of Cream of Mush so I used Cream of Chick and it was just fine. I also cooked the onions and peppers with my chicken in the skillet, which I also think helped with the flavor.

Garlic Chicken Wings (this one uses up a pantry seasoning packet for wings)

Chicken Suiza Burritos - We made this one tonight, super easy and so good! And Lil loves burritos so we made hers with avocado as directed and added rice (since we all love rice). I grilled my chicken on our George Foreman, but other than that followed as directed. Def a keeper and got 3 thumbs up in our house!

Tex Mex BBQ Turkey Tamale Pie
Slow Cooker Chicken Taco Soup
Slow Cooker Pepper Steak

I'm also trying to use my slow cooker more often, there are so many websites out there with crockpot recipes for every night of the year and I would be more than happy to come home and have dinner already cooked for me!! Just let us know what night you're coming over for dinner and we'll have some extras!

Since Lilli LOVES to help with dinner we've started giving her chores. Right now she has 3 chores each night - she sets the table with napkins, sets the table with forks, and then is responsible for letting Pippin lick the spoon we use to scoop his food out of the can with. He probably hates that chore!! She LOVES doing her chores:

Napkins:


I love that she is sneaking cheese off her plate. The chicken spaghetti did take FOREVER to cook (30 mins bake + 15 minutes bake), so we were really late eating and she was starving. We had ALL been sneaking some cheese.

Forks:



She really does need to learn to NOT RUN WITH FORKS.