On Our Plates

I've got about five million tabs open in Safari right now of recipes I need to file and then Pin on Pinterest to keep track of. I think some combo of Ziplist and Pinterest may end up being the best way for me to keep track of everything we make, particularly since we don't repeat often (mostly because I can't find the recipe or the review of what we thought of it!) Mixing in here with some pictures Brent took of Lilli at the park "feeding" the very unhungry ducks on Saturday.Slow Cooker BBQ Chicken - this was really pretty good and easy. Not much to it and a great and fast meal to come home to on a weeknight. I'm sure there are better sauce recipes out there, but this was pretty good.

Marinated Spicy Pork Chops - This one used up some local pork chops from the CSA we were in last summer. We marinated overnight and the key is to not overcook them. We're not huge pork fans but this was pretty good. Brent made this homemade mac n cheese along with it (because we didn't have the box stuff). We were out of the cheddar cheese soup but I had a nacho cheese soup can in the pantry and that gave it a nice spice. However it was way too "mixed" for Lilli and I don't think she even tried it.
For St Patrick's Day, I made this Green Monster Smoothie. The spinach in it makes it green, and I just don't think I could get past it. It just had a really bland taste. We did add a little sugar and that helped, but it was missing something. We had it alongside Racheal Ray's Smoky Turkey Shepherd's Pie which is always delicious. We don't make it a ton because it's fairly involved (and always takes us longer than 30 mins), but sometimes instead of making the potatoes from scratch we'll cheat and use a mix for that part.

Quinoa is sort of a new food for us, though it's been around a while. It's packed with all kinds of healthiness and it tastes delicious. We tried this spinach and fruit quinoa salad and all really liked it. I'm just not a huge grapefruit person, so I think in the future I could sub that out for oranges though. I accidentally made about three times too much quinoa, so I also found this recipe for another fruit infused quinoa salad on Pinterest and made it. In some ways I liked it better, though it's totally a different thing altogether. The dressing was just okay, but I loved the blueberries, mango and other things mixed together with the quinoa.
When we had friends over for dinner last week we made an "upscale" Mexican fiesta. We cooked pork carnitas in the crock pot all day. That's one of our fave recipes and it's so incredibly easy and flavorful. We serve with corn tortillas, rice, pico, cheese, sour cream, lettuce and avocado. We made the Cilantro Rice to go along with it, and it was SO good (and also easy). And then I also served a black bean, tomato, cucumber salad to go alongside it. We mixed that in with the tacos and it was great, and would also probably be really good with just chips to dip it in. Everything tasted so fresh, was easy to prepare, and literally once we got home from work we were ready to serve dinner in less than thirty minutes.
We had a big to-do at church last Sunday and had various dish assignments. One of mine was cole slaw, which is really not something I eat or enjoy (or have ever made). I will eat it, but I'm not a huge mayo person so it's just not my thing. I had found a great apple based cole slaw but our awful grocery store didn't have the type of cabbage it called for. So we went with a fairly traditional recipe. I never tried it but Brent said it was good. I also had a dessert assignment, which is much more my thing! I was trying to do something fairly simple but really good and then remembered it had been a while since we had made Mexican Chocolate Cake. It's very fast to make and the kick of cayenne pepper adds a great spicy flavor to it. Of course it looks like any other traditional chocolate cake so some people probably get surprised by it! But it's seriously so delicious.
And now, we have about 500 less recipe tabs clogging up our Safari session!

Food and Fun

Love, love, love this little shirt. After much protesting she finally wore it, and then bragged the whole time at church about how it has a built in belt (what she hated about it to begin with). It came from Zulily - which along with Facebook, Amazon, Pinterest and Paypal would be the five websites I would have to have if on a deserted island. I get such great deals on unique things there that I'm really not all that into consignment season this year!One of our dinners over the last couple of weeks were these banana snowman pancakes. It's from a Taste of Home Kid Approved cookbook that has tons of cute family recipes to make together. Our book buyer got a sample and brought it over to me because she knows how much Lilli loves to help cook. It's got some really cute ideas in it, and the first thing I wanted to make from it were these pancakes.
It was just a simple banana pancake batter, and as you make the pancakes you make your circles touch so they all cook together. Sprinkle with powdered sugar, use craisons and choc chips for face/buttons, and pretzels for arms. I wanted him to have a scarf so I added some organic gummy worms we had in our candy bowl. We also made berry smoothies to drink that night (from the same cookbook) to glam up the whole evening. It was a simple recipe with cherry yogurt, strawberries and mixed fruit (and some milk). Delicious! We rarely make smoothies but it's one of the things I'd like to do more often. That week we also made a Southwest Tuna Casserole from the same cookbook that was just ok - just your typical tuna casserole. There are a ton of other cute ideas we'll be trying (like turning simple hot dogs into butterflies).
Kid approved for sure! This was a big hit since we've had no actual snow this year and she's been telling me for ages to put up our snowmen.
Some dress up fun - Spiderman pajamas on bottom, Ariel on top.
Old Buzzy does hang around in the back yard some. This summer there is definitely going to be some territory battling between Buzz Lightyear and Pippin for backyard domination! Since Buzz is the outdoor street cat and Pippin is the spoiled indoor lap dog I'm pretty sure I know who is tougher.
For Fat Tuesday we made our absolute favorite Cajun Jambalaya recipe. We've been making this forever and absolutely love it. I like a good bit of rice in my jambalaya so I add more rice and stock, and keep adding stock as it cooks. We also put more meat in it than it calls for. We boiled up some corn on the cob from my parents farm and had a fantastic Fat Tuesday! That day I had gotten an email from Home Simple with a recipe for Fat Tuesday punch - we just mixed grape juice with pineapple juice, lime juice, chopped up some orange and then topped it with Sprite. So delicious and it tasted a lot like our wedding punch! Lil thought the orange slices floating in it were fantastic.
Uno attacks!
Some of our other recent meal plan items include our fave homemade spaghetti - Rachael Ray's cowboy spaghetti. It's really not much more difficult than just opening a jar of pasta sauce and any spaghetti that has bacon in it has to be good! We also made our very first brisket last week. Brisket is just not a meat I know much about, and this crockpot recipe sounded pretty simple, and the cut of meat was pretty affordable ($5). But, it shrank way up and it really was pretty dry. It didn't cook much longer than the recipe called for, but it was a pretty dull piece of meat. I think the worst thing was HOW GOOD the house smelled - like this amazing french dip or something, and then it was super bland.

This week's meal plan-

Indian Chicken Tikka Masala
Skinny Cajun Chicken Pasta
CrockPot BBQ Chicken
Marinated Spicy Pork Chops
Baked Pork Blade Steak

I'm still trying to clean the freezer out to make room for the new popsicle maker so a few old cuts of pork from last summer's CSA have got to go!

Weekend Wrap-Up, Recipes, Groceries

Man, this has been one of those weekends that just FLEW by!!! The best part about being super busy is we never had time to make a mess in the house, which is always a good thing. Of course this kiddo was still going strong both days and absolutely never tires of energy. These couple of pictures are from after church today, running around outside in the "snow". It did snow pretty hard during church and right after, but it was way too warm to stick to anything but the big flakes were very pretty and I'm sure contributed to Lilli's teachers saying "they were all wild this morning". Which I think is code for "I'm glad Sunday is but once a week."She had a blast celebrating both Ella and Brayden's birthdays yesterday. Any time she can celebrate with some icing and running wild with friends is a good, good time. We'll have lots of pics of those to come, eventually.
Groceries - The last two weeks I haven't been quite as good, but still much improved over the good old days. Last week I just needed a lot of things, plus we made a nice Valentines dinner at home with choice cut steaks and so on. Our Valentines menu was probably about $20 in cost, but way cheaper than a steak meal out. My total bill last week was $135 before taxes, so $55 over budget. This week my stuff just seemed to add up, but I didn't get a thing that wasn't on the list. We noticed her juice went up $1 in price, which is annoying considering that's suddenly a 20% increase. We need to check into juice at Costco, I'm just picky about that stuff and will only buy certain brands not made in China. It's ridiculous that juice is even made in China. So my total bill today was right around $99. So, about $24 over from just needing a few extra things today (particularly I was running low on chicken and we only buy organic.) Still not bad considering I used to somehow manage to spend $250 a week and still not see anything work cooking in the pantry, or have a plan. I did do some cleaning of the pantry this week and threw away a seasoning packet that expired in April 2000. That is not a typo. Almost TWELVE years ago this packet of ranch dressing mix expired. Most likely I bought it not long after we got married in 1999, and that thing moved with us to our house in Smyrna, our house here, made it through our major kitchen demo when we cleaned out a lot of stuff and was STILL in the pantry. Gross.

Recipes - Here's some of our recent meals:

We made this steak and fries recipe for Valentines. Super easy and very flavorful. Brent does a great job with cooking the steaks to the correct temp and then we pull them off. Totally the key to a great steak. The fries were good, but I'd rather have a baked potatoes or mashed potatoes with steak. We made those for Lilli and with the seasoning and lemon on it she wouldn't even eat them. We also made this "love potion" drink I had seen on Pinterest and it was just ok. It was pretty and pink and Lilli had a good time with it since an older lady at church had given her a big heart shaped straw, but it was pretty tart and just not something we were crazy about.

We made this baked potato soup on one of the colder nights. It takes awhile to do everything, so not a great weeknight meal but it had good flavors. It's from my fave healthy eating site, so not as good as a restaurant version, but way better for you with the cauliflower snuck in. It was a bit thick and could have used more broth to it. The bacon totally made the dish though!

This Tuscan Pasta dish was a big winner for all of us. It wasn't a really cheap meal to make though, the raviolis are about $6 and the nicer jar of pasta sauce was $3-something, but it tastes restaurant quality and made enough for all of our dinner and lunch the next day, so again much cheaper than eating out. It was also very fast and perfect for a weeknight! This one will def be made again.

We made our Greek Chicken Pitas again this week. It's one of our fave all time recipes. For Lilli we wrap it in a tortilla like a burrito. For us we put the grilled chicken in a whole wheat pita pocket with saffron rice, feta, and a little ranch on top. Delicious!!!

Other than that, we've stuck with our meal plans the last two weeks and had chicken sausage and rice one night, a tortilla soup mix from World Market one day, a Southwest chicken skillet mix from an old pantry seasoning packet I had on hand, Baked Ziti from my 5 ingredient 5:30 cookbook I really like and then other little sandwiches and soups as needed. We're really starting to trim down our pantry backlog of "stuff".

This week looks like:
Chicken Enchilada Crockpot Soup
Jambalaya for Fat Tuesday
Indian Chicken (helps clean out pantry)
Stir Fry Chicken (helps clean out pantry)
Banana Snowmen Pancakes with Fresh Berry Smoothies
Southwest Tuna Bake
And for the Wednesday night meal at church we'll be having "Breakfast with all the trimmings"!!

Time to relax before it's back to work and school tomorrow!

Meal Plans And Groceries

We've been doing great since Christmas on our meal plans and grocery budgets. I'm looking for some sort of program to keep my recipes more organized and easier to re-use. I'm leaning towards either ZipList or using Pinterest. Or I may stumble on something better than either of those for food planning. Most weeks we've been very close to or right on our $75 budget, even with birthday ingredients to buy. One week I knew I was right on plan (I add everything up as I shop on my IPhone) but it rang up higher than I expected. When we got to the car I noticed the girl had rung up Lil's nighttime Pull-ups twice - that was an extra $9.99. So of course I went right back in and had them pull that off the bill. In the past I probably would have never noticed since I rarely look back over the bill.

Lilli enjoys playing with my old Bananas in Pajamas toys....

Some recent recipes-

I made these cupcakes for Lilli's class and half of her big party. They were SO good and super easy to make. I used strawberry cake mix for the top half, and for her class I made homemade buttercream icing (the best), and for the big party I made my absolute favorite Martha Stewart strawberry icing. There is really not a better icing in the world. Homemade icing makes all the difference. And it only takes about 10 minutes to make.
Lilli has the biggest crush on Johnathon, a 3rd grader at church - also the preacher's son. Anytime he goes up to read scripture, etc we have to pretty much muffle her. It's a pretty fatal attraction.

We've also gotten the crockpot out quite a bit lately -

This crockpot chicken was fantastic. We aren't big fans of olives so we skipped that, and then used a can of diced tomatoes instead of plum since tomatoes aren't in season. It was great - the chicken was so tender it fell right off the bone and everything was still fantastic for lunch leftovers the next day. Lilli likes shredded chicken so it was an easy sell for her if you scraped off the other "stuff".

On the other hand, this crockpot spaghetti sauce did not do it for us. It was a lot of work the night before, and it really just didn't have a lot of flavor. It was ok, but not worth it. We have lots of other homemade spaghetti sauces that taste a lot better.

Painted nails Lilli (above and below).
One Saturday we made these Thai Chicken Flatbreads. Lilli loves to help make pizza, and she made hers with chicken, pepperoni, carrots and just a host of ingredients. All of that doesn't sound tasty to me, but she ended up with a great mix of veggie and healthy chicken protein, so who cares! Brent and I followed the recipe, minus the bean sprouts since that's not something I keep on hand. It was SO good. I'll definitely be making that one again.
Are those pants not the cutest thing ever? You may have to click in to see - but it has an embroidered Pippin on the rear end.
And the real Pippin, hidden under a Memphis pom pom.

Other than that we've had just the normal staple foods - Indian chicken, Turkey Tacos, Birthday Spaghetti dinner, soups, and just the normal non-new dishes. This week's meal plan is for:

Baked Potato Soup
Chicken Enchilada Soup (Crock Pot)
Southwest Chicken Skillet (uses up older pantry ingredients)
Chicken Sausage and Rice
Baked Ziti

We've got a Super Bowl church party tomorrow night and I've got some really cute things I'll share that we're doing for that!

Groceries and Meals

We've been doing pretty good with our meal planning and groceries lately. The holidays have meant more parties and dinners and such to go to, but we just build that in at the beginning of the week. My freezer is looking MUCH better as we've been planning more things specifically out of it. Thankfully it's at a point where you can a) open it without things falling on you and b)in a pinch if someone brought us a freezer pie we'd have a spot for it. Major improvement!
The last two weeks I've ended up spending $85 pre-tax, which is $10 over my goal. Both weeks I've gotten caught up in dog food, which is $16/bag (he eats organic). The first week I needed dog food, last week it was a good deal with a coupon, so we'll have dog food for quite a while. It will realistically be about 6-8 weeks before I need to buy more, so that should work out well. I've noticed our other big spend each week is on dairy. With Lilli's being "special" (lactose free), plus my milk, we end up easily spending $15 a week on milk, which is a pretty big chunk of a $75 budget.
Overall it's been a great exercise for us in not buying frivolously and keeping more $$ in our pocket this holiday season!
Some recent recipes -

Modenese Pork Chops - We had a nice thick cut from our CSA left in the freezer. We were careful not to overcook and it turned out really nice. Nothing superb, but good. I just don't love a pork chop. We had a salad, mac n cheese and some delicious homemade bread a friend brought me as a Christmas gift with it. Yum-o.

We did another crock pot chicken using this brine recipe. It was extremely tender but not super flavorful. I think we're down to just one more whole chicken in the freezer. I do have a new appreciation for the value and versatility of the whole chicken now, plus some great ways to cook it.

These chicken crescent squares were delicious and super easy. We made 2 cans of crescents with it, I think otherwise they would be way too stuffed. We also some Oscar Mayer carving board meats (in the lunch meat section) as the meat in it, and that turned out great.
Aren't those two so precious? She's into telling us everything she loves right now (big kids, Rudolph, Santa, milk, various food items, shoes, etc) and she'll tell us she just LOVES her Pippin. HA!

Groceries, Meals and Crafts

A few more of the Thanksgiving crafts we did this year...

Any project involving glue is a home run...The finished turkey family - can you guess which one is Lilli's??
We also did the hand-print turkeys, you trace your hand and then decorate with googly eyes, feathers, etc and then we glued a Popsicle stick on it to make puppets. I had seen a few various variations on it, but came up with that method on my own. This is Lilli's tracing of my hand. Not bad considering her age!
We forgot to get a close up of her turkey. Lots of feathers and creative licensing. And of course she's wearing that awful Jasmine dress.
Pippin is not impressed by arts and crafts.
As far as the grocery challenge goes, I didn't hit my goal this week, I ended up spending $85 pre-tax which is still a huge improvement from where we had been at and just $10 over budget. I did save 18% or just over $19 between my coupons and Kroger plus savings. With it being the end of the month there were a few more coupons expiring that I wanted to use on things we always use. The kicker was $13 for Tide, but it is the best at keeping colors bright.

A few new recipes from over the last week, I did a lot of my menu planning from Plain Chicken this past week.

Chicken Chalupas Casserole was to DIE for. I had some Perdue grilled chicken strips in the fridge I needed to use, so I used that for the chicken in the chalupas. My casserole dish only held half as many chalupas, so I halved the half and half it called for and it turned out perfectly, with enough for our dinner and lunch leftovers. And since all the work is done the night before it was great for a week night meal for us. I'm sure I also snuck in some extra hot sauce because we like it spicy.

Rosemary Ranch Chicken was also delicious. We were out of ranch salad dressing (bizarre) but I did have a new bottle of spicy ranch that we used that turned out just fine. We grilled indoor on the George Foreman due to weather. It was such a pretty piece of chicken that this one would be great to serve when hosting people or taking food to others!

Due to the holidays our other meals were either at relatives' homes or simple soups and other freezer stuff!

Grocery Challenge Week 2

We had another great Grocery week today, I ended up spending $80, which was $74 before tax so I'll count that as hitting my $75 goal. With coupons/Kroger plus I saved 16% which is right around the norm for me. The big one this week was milk, I needed lots of Lillis and mine and that was $15 right there.

We ate some good things last week, here's a few of the recipes:

Napa Cabbage Salad - this dressing is SO good and makes the recipe. Now that our CSA is over (thank goodness) other than the ton of fall squash we have this was about the last thing left in the fridge from it.

Garlic Lime Pork Chops - I'm not a huge pork chop person, but these were pretty good. The pork chops were also from our CSA. We marinated overnight and it was pouring rain so we grilled indoors on the George Foreman. We did get Lilli to eat some and she liked it so that was a win.

Chicken Taco Cornbread Pie - This was also super easy and really good. The leftovers for lunch the following days were also really good.

We also did some other simple things like Breakfast for Dinner, Hamburger Helper (not really great but does help clean out my pantry) and one night we had dinner out at Chuck E Cheese with some friends.

So far so good with the Grocery Challenge and I'm sure Lilli and I can find some ways to spend all the money we're saving around town, especially at the new Nordstroms!

Groceries and Randoms

Silly birds....

I think she picks this idea up from Brent. And I hope you like this awful Jasmine dress because it's her favorite thing in the world and as soon as it's clean it's the next outfit she wears. When she wears it to school she makes her teachers rub it all day. No lie.At school. Wearing jeans. That only happened because the day before her BFF wore jeans (she also on wears dresses/skirts/tights) and I made a huge deal about it, so she did actually wear them once. But as soon as we got home they came off "because they hurt her body". It's going to be a long and cold winter....
The back door neighbors promptly got their turkey out the day after Halloween.
This caused much rejoicing!
I did great with my grocery challenge for this week. My goal was $75, which is $25 per person. I ended up with $82 for the week, which does include $6 of tax. Back that off and I was just $1 over which isn't bad considering $10 was for a pack of Lilli's overnight Pullups which will last a couple of weeks. And I needed a ton of produce this week (all organic) which really adds up. So I was really pleased and very impressed, that's the lowest our bill has been in some time. I stuck to the list, and the only things I bought that weren't on the list were strawberries and bananas, which were on a good sale.

A couple of new, good recipes of late:

Asian Peanut Beef & Noodles - this one was really easy and something we all three enjoyed. I think it's the first time I've ever had Catalina dressing and it was really good!

Chicken Spaghetti - Anything Recipegirl makes is going to be good and this was no exception. Nice and creamy (we always sub Brent and Lil's special milk in these recipes) and was also enjoyed by all three of us. I had cooked a whole chicken in the crockpot earlier in the week so I used the leftover chicken in this recipe, which worked out perfectly. Lots of leftovers for all our lunches, too!

Pumpkin Cupcakes - I used some leftover pumpkin puree from another recipe in this baking recipe. They were really moist and soft, and of course the plus with recipes from this website is that they are reduced fat and better for you! I wasn't super crazy about the icing, I think when it comes to icing I enjoy a high fat, high sugar icing, but for being healthier it was good and the pumpkin flavoring went well with it! I baked them during Lilli's naptime today, but let her help me ice and decorate some of them so I think Brent got some cute pictures of that. She loves to help in the kitchen, with dishing, cooking, etc so she had a lot of fun icing and decorating them with candy corns and candy corn pumpkins.

Fall Foods

Just a couple of recipes to share so I can close a few browser windows I've had open for a while!!

Last Wednesday was our final delivery in the CSA we've been in the last 26 weeks and we were GLAD! It's just been overwhelming as we got into summer and busier work, travel and everything else. It's just been a crazy past few months and it became a third job trying to use everything up and find recipes for things and even find the space in the fridge for it all. We ended up having a lot of it ruin, which was never our intention. I don't think we will do one again, unless it has every other week deliveries/smaller portions, at least not for a while. We will continue eating local and organic, just buying from the farmers market/organic sections in quantities we know we can eat. We only eat organic produce and meats, and will continue to do so.

A lot of the other foods we eat are also organic, which of course drives our grocery bill higher than I'd like. I'm going to try to do the All You grocery challenge, which puts you at $25/person, so $75 per week for us. (And then add extra for the week each month I have to buy Pippin's food, which is $15/bag.) Considering our bill is usually $100-$150 per week, including saving about 15-20% with coupons, it's going to be interesting but we can do it. My pantry and freezer are ridiculous and out of control, so we're going to make a lot of pantry meals!

We got an insane quantity of fall squash, many of which have become a lovely dining room table display for this fall. I did finally find some time a week or two ago to use some of them for actual eating purposes! First I made this Butternut Squash Soup and let it simmer all afternoon on a Sunday. It was SO good and was a great excuse to try out my new immersion blender. We all loved it, and since Lilli is a soup fan and it was creamy (vs chunky) she happily ate it, especially when we called it our special Halloween soup. Win! We had enough leftover for each of our lunches the following day and to make the Butternut Squash Risotto. Since all the hard work was in the original soup, this one made for a quick and easy (and healthy!!) week night meal we all enjoyed. We had roasted some chicken earlier in the week, so we ate that as a little bit of protein on the side, but it's really filling enough to be the main course.

I also made these low fat Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies for a meeting at work. Lilli helped me with them one evening, and they were easy to make and really delicious. They didn't taste low fat at all, and the pumpkin spice flavor was perfect for fall! I've rarely been disappointed with a Skinny Taste recipe, and there's no reason a dessert can't be lowfat and also taste good!

Good Eats!

Our last two CSA boxes, we'll be getting a new one tomorrow already!They're starting to have less greens and more summer veggies, just as we've gotten so used to the greens and how to use them! Above is beets, cucumbers, squash, broccoli, I ordered sharp cheese (yum!), mint sprigs, the meat was 4 hamburgers and bacon that week, I also ordered chicken, kohlrabi, green onions, Oregon peas (so tired of those, that was bag #4 of them), cherry tomatoes and our eggs.
This past week we got 3 ears of corn, 4 cucumbers, 1 squash, 1 zucchini, beets, an albino green pepper (so cool!), kohlrabi, a red onion, green onions, carrots, blueberries, I ordered applesauce and chicken, and we got our eggs and the special meat this week was another whole chicken. Lots of variety and things with a good fridge life. Can't wait to see what we get tomorrow!
We've repeated several of our favorite recipes lately, Crock Pot Carnitas, always a major favorite of ours. We also made Turkey Nachos again and Indian Tandoori chicken. These helped use up some meat I had in the freezer and other stuff I had on-hand to use.. I'm really trying to eat through a lot of groceries that seem to stockpile around here. I'm the opposite of all those crazy coupon people, I want less stuff in my cabinets!

I pulled out a jar of Sweet Chili Sauce I've had for a while and used All Recipes to find a recipe to use it in. I'm trying to do that with one recipe per week to eat down our constantly overflowing pantry. I ended up finding a great recipe for a Sweet and Spicy Pork and Napa Cabbage Stir Fry. This was SO good and helped us use a pork tenderloin in the freezer, the last of our napa cabbage from our CSA box as well as some other things in it, and the whole bottle of Sweet Chili Sauce. And it was SO good, it was Brent's favorite thing we've had in a while. We did a lot of the chopping the night before, and also let the pork marinade overnight and all day.
(This is the new bumblebee Pillow Pet she got for planting her pacifiers in the backyard. The following recipes are of her harvesting all the candy that now grows in the backyard since she sleeps without her pacifiers now).We've had a lot of very different for us side dishes with the things we've been getting in our vegetable box. We had this cucumber-watermelon salad tonight that was SO good. I cut the portion size in a 1/4th because it sounded like a lot. We made this Massaged Kale Salad with the last of our kale, we didn't care for it. It was mega salty and just not our thing,maybe if we ever did it again we'd lay off the salt some. The other things in the salad were good, the salt taste was just overwhelming. This Parmesan Corn on the Cob was just ok. We've made better before, and the corn wasn't super juicy (but I think that's more the type of corn than the recipe).
This Sour Cream and Cucumber side was also really different for us, but good! Not something I'd make a ton, but it was a nice change. We made several different salads with the cherry tomatoes we got. We've never been big on tomatoes, but I think these recipes were all really good. I think this Cherry Tomato Corn Salad was probably my favorite and it also helped me use one of my many cucumbers we've had lately! Brent's been making fun of me because really, pretty much everything has cucumbers in it! We love feta, so this feta cheese tomato salad was really good and simple. And of course this one helped me use cucumbers, tomatoes and the mint we got!
I roasted the chicken we got from our CSA box using this Slashed Chicken with Bacon recipe from a website I really like. I think it turned out really well and was a very moist chicken. I still don't love whole chickens, I don't think we do a great job getting all the meat off or making the most of the bird.
We used the remaining chicken for this Chicken Salad Wrap recipe and it was SO good! It's not a super traditional chicken salad recipe, but it goes great in a wrap. And of course had a cucumber in it! I really hope cucumbers are a "super food".....

Good Eats!

Here's the rundown of what we've been eating lately!

Here's last week's CSA box:Red Onions, Garlic Scapes, Broccoli, the Meat was Sirloin Steak, I also ordered Chicken, eggs, Chinese Cabbage, lettuce, 2 Kohlrabis, a bag of Snow Peas and a bag of Swiss Chard. Lots of fun and green stuff!!
Brent's been dying for these chicken tacos we saw on a food show for ages! They were very good but WHOA spicy!!! Next time I'll lay off some of the adobe peppers. Lilli took a bite of her little burritos and I think her ears blew off, ha. We had enough for leftovers the next day and I didn't think it was quite as hot but Brent did, so it might depend on what bite you get. Very easy and great flavors!
(Last Friday I took Lilli out for Italian Ice for doing so great wearing only her big girl undies for a solid week!)

We used the pork chops we had gotten in our CSA box to make Garlic Lime Pork Chops. I was not a huge fan of this, but we're not big pork chop people anyway. It was kind of a drier marinade and just didn't do much to the pork chop. Probably won't make that one again.
I also used the beef I had gotten from our CSA to make this Spicy Thai Beef and Jasmine Rice. It was so good and their ground beef had a great flavor. Lilli ate some of this since it is rice based, so that's always a plus! It's not the most gorgeous looking dish but it had nice flavors!
We used the spinach we got in our CSA box to make this baked ziti with spinach. It was really good that night, I didn't think the leftovers were all that great. And it made a TON. If I made it in the future I would definitely half it. We used the rest of the spinach from our CSA box to make a hot spinach artichoke dip for a party. We got more spinach this week and I'd like to make more dip, I could eat that stuff every day.
I've read Pioneer Woman's blog quite a bit but never made any of her recipes. One of the other couples in the CSA with us made this beef with snow peas recipe of hers to use our snow peas. It was pretty good, but the sauce is super heavy and more of a winter than summer thing to me. We had enough for leftovers the following day and we both thought it tasted better then when the sauce had soaked into the rice more.
We've made several side dishes with the vegetables - plenty of salads and other things. We roasted the broccoli we had gotten. You can never go wrong with roasted anything. We've roasted all the Kohlrabi we've gotten and really gotten that one down to a science. Now that we know you have to peel the skin it tastes SO good! And we cooked more of the snow peas with this Honey Glazed Pea Pods and Carrots recipe. Of course a vegetable is going to taste great basted in butter and honey!
We used the Sirloin we got in our CSA box with this Garlic Butter recipe. I actually used a lot of butter that night, ha! But everything on this plate was local, with the exception of the carrots (which were still organic). The steak was so good, it really tasted like prime rib. And it was all just as delicious for leftovers the following day too!
And our Memorial Day ribs!! Always delicious. We use Sweet Baby Ray's sauce. We served it with a side of Swiss Chard (delicious), baked potato and corn on the cob from Mom's garden. Our CSA box from this week looked pretty similar to the last few weeks.
We got Red Onions, the meat was Chicken (yeah!), Eggs, Broccoli, Lettuce, Spinach, Snow Peas, Cabbage, a huge Kohlrabi and BEETS! Yay for Beets. I've got a few ideas for them - a lot of people in our group have talked about baking with them and there's also some great salad recipes I've seen out there.
And last night we had a Weight Watchers spaghetti with Roasted Kohlrabi and a cabbage salad. It was ok, not my favorite spaghetti recipe we've ever made though but it was nice and healthy with some extra veggies in there.

I also made some Low Fat Choc Chip Oatmeal Cookies last night for a coworker celebrating her birthday. She's in Weight Watchers and these have low points and sounded pretty good. They really were very good and for sure didn't taste as healthy as they are! Much better than those awful black bean brownies I made a few months ago for another healthy coworkers birthday!

We are still loving being a part of our CSA (Avalon Acres out of Hohenwald) and thought I'd share a few of the reasons they shared about being a part of a CSA, which are exactly why we became farm share "owners".

-Buying your farm-fresh food locally through a CSA is a way of life. Shell peas and shuck corn with your children. Teach them that food doesn't come in a box.
-Keep your dollars in Tennessee by buying locally. Support the local farmer more directly. When you buy food from the conventional grocery stores .9 cents of every dollar goes in the farmers pocket. When you buy from our CSA 60-75% of every dollar goes in the farmers pocket. Your support DIRECTLY impacts small farming and the local economy. Assures more food dollars go to farmers and not truckers. Get rid of all the middle men who end up lowering the farmers income.
-Knowing where your food comes from (who, how, where).
-Eating healthier. Free-range meats contain CLAs and are the only way to get Omega 3s other than through fish. Produce that is picked fresh retains more of its nutrients.
-Enjoying a much broader variety of foods than you find in a store. You'll certainly try vegetables that you've never had before (or perhaps had as a child and never tried again).
-Knowing that animals have been treated with dignity. Supporting hormone-free, preservative free and chemical free meats.
-Preserving heritage breeds and seeds.
-Preventing antibiotic-resistant strains of disease.
-Saving petroleum and other resources.
-Enjoying what your state has to offer in food choices!

Your farm CSA supports not only me and Tim but also 15 employees and over 45 Amish family farms, a butcher (and their employees and families), 3 dairy farming families, a baker (and their 4 daughters) and a family who cans all of our extra produce for use in our Winter CSA program. All of these people reside in Middle Tennessee.

Additionally, our vendors are also local, our farm alone spends over $6,500 each month with the local feed store! We don't just ask you to buy local, we buy local too!

Have a great Friday!