Tag Archives: Cooking

We seem to be on a Mexican food kick! I love Mexican food, so I don’t mind.

Monday – Tacos
Tuesday – Stir-fry (new recipe, carryover from last week)
Wednesday – Pizza Margherita (new recipe from Skinny Italian)
Thursday – Tacos and Mexican rice
Friday – Curry
Sabbath – Breakfast burritos
Sunday – Spur of the moment meal based on cupboard contents

I’ve been working on breakfasts lately. We don’t usually eat breakfast together as I’m ok just eating fruit but hubby needs something substantial. He doesn’t always get to eat lunch and doesn’t like being hungry all day! Instead, I’ve been setting my alarm for the past week and getting up early enough to make muffins or pancakes before he has to leave for work.

So far, here’s what I have for breakfasts. We’ve been eating a ton of oranges lately!
Muffins & Fruit
Pancakes
Cornbread & Fruit
Cold cereal & Fruit
Hot cereal (for me)

Maybe one of these days I’ll try making breakfast burritos for breakfast instead of dinner!

Menu Plan Monday! We are doing a couple of new recipes this week that I’m really excited about.

Monday – Tacos
Tuesday – Breakfast burritos
Wednesday – Penne Arrabbiata (new recipe from Skinny Italian) and Oatmeal Whole Wheat Quick Bread
Thursday – Stir-fry (new recipe)
Friday – Curry
Sabbath – Hot dogs
Sunday – Spur of the moment meal based on cupboard contents

Last week’s successes
Cranberry Orange Muffins – These were REALLY good. I’ve made them three times already. This morning’s batch was made without salt and we didn’t notice a difference.
Oatmeal Whole Wheat Quick Bread – My loaf came out a bit shorter than it was supposed to, as it spread too much on the cookie sheet. I’ll try adding a bit more flour to the next loaf so that the dough isn’t so thin.

Our menu reflects the current daytime temperatures hitting a high of around 60 degrees. We are still only running a tiny space heater and our apartment only reaches 65 degrees during the day! Thus, we’ve picked a lot of our favorite comforting warm foods.

Monday – Orange “chicken styled” tofu
Tuesday – Spaghetti with marinara sauce (new recipe from Skinny Italian) and Oatmeal Whole Wheat Quick Bread (also a new recipe)
Wednesday – Pizza with mushrooms, onions, and olives
Thursday – Breakfast burritos
Friday – Curry
Sabbath – Unknown…
Sunday – Tacos

This week’s menu is mainly what we didn’t eat last week. I was sick all week (still have a bit of a cold) and didn’t cook at all. At least that makes the menu planning and shopping really simple this week.

Monday – Haystacks
Tuesday – Breakfast Burritos
Wednesday – Sloppy Joes / Potato Salad
Thursday – Spaghetti
Friday – Curry
Sabbath – Lasagna
Sunday – Homemade Pizza (postponed Christmas meal with my mom)

Hopefully next week’s menu will be a bit more exciting!

We’re not doing anything great for this week’s Menu Plan Monday. The menu is mostly based off of successes from last week, rather than a bunch of new recipes.

Monday – Breakfast burritos
Tuesday – Pizza
Wednesday – Enchiladas
Thursday – Sloppy Joes
Friday – Curry
Sabbath – Lasagna

The only new recipe this week is the sloppy joes and I’m actually going to attempt to create my own recipe based on several others I’ve tried. Hopefully they turn out. To me, a sloppy joe involves BBQ sauce. Most recipes I’ve seen use tomato sauce and a few spices but that doesn’t taste the same.

We’ve been watching a Japanese television series titled Bambino. It’s about a college student who decides he wants to become a chef. He is hired at a fancy Italian restaurant in Tokyo, but has to start from the bottom rung as a waiter in the dining hall. His greatest love is cooking but instead he only delivers the food to the patrons!

It’s fun watching all of the cooking going on in the show and it makes me want to become a good cook. I’m a mediocre cook. I can follow a recipe and I can make a couple things without a recipe (mostly family dishes from my childhood). But I’m not actually skilled at cooking or a baking, especially involving vegan dishes. I want to learn more about cooking and baking but I’m not sure how. Simply following recipes isn’t really teaching me more about cooking other than what doesn’t work. Are there books or online tutorials that teach cooking skills? I’ll have to look into that and see if I can find anything. I love food. I love to eat. Now I just need to learn how to cook!

My husband and I are very lucky in that most of our food preferences overlap. Occasionally we run into some minor differences, such as my love/his dislike of peas and his love/my dislike of mayonnaise. Blech.

Probably one of our biggest differences in taste involves soup. I LOVE soups, whether it’s vegetable soup, taco soup, tomato soup, etc. Hubby doesn’t exactly dislike soup, but he prefers it not to be the main course for dinner. I can eat a bowl of soup and a slide of bread and be content. He prefers something more solid.

Thankfully, hubby is awesome about letting me try out new recipes! I bribed him on this one, promising him a loaf of fresh garlic bread on the side. So, tonight we are finally trying out the curried butternut soup. It looks yummy!

First I found this awesome tutorial on how to peel and cut butternut squash. Oddly enough, I’ve never done it before and wanted to find a pain free method.

Beautiful!

The only problem with my butternut squash is that it looks exactly like cut squares of cheddar cheese. I’ve been vegan now for 11 months but sharp cheddar cheese was one of my favorite forms of dairy. Give me a block of Tillamook extra sharp cheddar and I was a very happy person. I used to make pasta salad quite often – WackyMac veggie spiral noodles, olives, cucumber, peas, ranch dressing, and little cubes of sharp cheddar cheese. YUM! I miss my (very unhealthy) pasta salad.

As soon as hubby is finished with work, we’ll run over to the grocery store and pick up a loaf of french bread so that I can make garlic bread. One of these days, I really need to learn how to make my own french bread… Hopefully the soup tastes as awesome as it looks in the recipe photo!

I really am loving Menu Plan Monday. I’m happy that my menu planning is finally organized.

Something I’m trying to do with our diet is to make food from scratch as much as possible. I’m not making huge changes, just trying to make something new each week that we previously bought packaged. For the past three weeks, I’ve been making “refried” beans in the crockpot. Then we have beans for burritos all week and there are no weird ingredients in them.

Next week I’m going to make udon noodles from scratch. We recently finished a Japanese television series that featured a girl who was known for her handmade udon noodles. The food looked really good so I thought I’d give it a try! It doesn’t look too difficult and will be a lot more fresh than anything I can buy in the grocery store.

This week’s menu:

Monday – Skillet Lasagna – new recipe
Tuesday – Vegetarian Gyoza and Miso Soup – new recipe
Wednesday – Riblets, mashed potatoes, vegetable
Thursday – Thanksgiving
Friday – Curry
Sabbath – Spaghetti
Sunday – Enchiladas

Time for another Menu Plan Monday! We haven’t gone grocery shopping yet as hubby worked at a client site all day yesterday. Hopefully we can go tonight!

Monday – Curried Butternut Soup – new recipe (carried over from last week)
Tuesday – Apple cinnamon pancakes with homemade applesauce – Applesauce is a new recipe.
Wednesday – Riblets, mashed potatoes, and a vegetable
Thursday – Spaghetti, garlic bread, and a vegetable
Friday – Curry
Sabbath – Soba noodles, mushroom, and spinach soup
Sunday – Enchiladas

This idea of Menu Plan Monday is really helping me out. I’m not losing my menu in the mess that is my desk. I just pull up my blog and find the last menu posted!

Sunday – Orange “chicken”
Monday – Subs
Tuesday – Curried Butternut Soup – new recipe
Wednesday – Spring Rolls with Tofu – new recipe
Thursday – Subs
Friday – Curry
Sabbath – Stuffed Shells – a new recipe from an Adventist cookbook

Extra – Pumpkin pie! If I perfect the balance of the spices, I’ll post my recipe.