What's for Dinner: This Week's Menu

Okay, soooo I didn't post up the menu plan for last week.  Why?  Well, because I didn't have a menu plan last week (which in all honesty was really HARD to deal with since I was constantly winging what I was doing all week).  Why?  Well...exhausted...busy...exhausted...take your pick there *laugh*.  It just seemed like such an insurmountable task to make a menu plan last week, which honestly I'm sure I wasted more energy and brain cells coming up with one meal after the other all week, but we got through it.

Alvah had another spectacular day at speech therapy today (two out of three appointments so far have been really good, so I'll definitely take it!) and had a good meeting with the psychologist this morning as well.  We're going to keep him on the meds he's on now but upping the Stretera to twice a day to see if we can get the rest of his outbursts under control and maybe help him sleep better too (at this point I'm not sure I am holding out much hope for sleep...it's been REALLY rough on that front for a long time now, but the last week or so has been really bad with like two hours of sleep a night...not fun).  We shall see how it goes.  Honestly at this point I'll deal with lack of sleep if we can get him concentrating on the world around him and not hitting himself constantly in frustration.  I'd be golden at that point.

Right, back to the menu plan.  The highlight of last week's menu plan was probably yesterday when I made a pork roast in the crock pot with oven fries and salad as the sides (with four different types of home made dressing to choose from) and made strawberry shortcake for dessert (I used the frozen strawberries from the freezer from earlier in the year to make it...I was going to save the strawberries for jam, but I have a TON of strawberry jam and preserves in the pantry, so I am good for this year I think, so I thought I'd make us a treat :).  I have to say I've never made shortcake from scratch before.  My mom always bought the shortcakes from the store (which always made me sick to my stomach...I'm not sure why, but they really get to me...probably because they are glorified Twinkies), I always just bought an angel food cake and served the strawberry shortcake on that instead and then the last few years I tended to just have it on regular cake because angel food cake was kind of hard to make (well I thought it was...I need to try my hand at making it and see how it goes).  I thought for sure that shortcake would taste like...well...like the store bought shortcake that I don't really like and got to my stomach.  Turns out, after my husband pushed me to check it out a bit, that shortcake is basically a cross between cake and biscuit (or a light and fluffy scone for those of you abroad) and I figured I'd give it a shot for dessert last night.  And it was REALLY good!  I am so making that again in the future!  And it really did go perfect with the whipped topping and strawberries.  I was impressed (seen up top before I tucked into it ;).

I also tried my own variation of red beans and rice and even my husband admitted that it was pretty good (and the daughter even liked it), so I called it a win.  I need to try making it again and write it down as I didn't really do traditional red beans and rice (I used dehydrated peppers and things so I needed to veer from the traditional formula to have enough moisture to rehydrate things) and share it as it's still a frugal recipe, but does fill you up really well (a bonus shot of it is seen above there to stand in for the menu plan that wasn't for last week *laugh*).

By the way you'll notice a considerable lack of recipes calling for eggs at the moment.  For the third time in as many months I have broody hens.  This time all three of them were good for about a week and then did the domino effect again and they all went broody within a couple of days of one another, so I have no eggs at all this time where before they managed to stretch it out so I could at least get one egg at time out of the coop as two of them would be broody at once).  I've tried everything to break them and keep them producing eggs, but they don't seem to be getting the memo (ice cubes, putting them in a make shift cage to get air under their bellies, dunking their bellies in really cold water, collecting all of the eggs...well I'd do that one if I was GETTING ANY, etc).  I'm about ready to just cull them and put them in the freezer and just BUY eggs again.  I'm getting really frustrated with the whole "raising chickens" thing at the moment.  Especially since broody hens BLOW through feed like nobody's business.  They peck around and get greens and bugs when they run off of their collective imaginary eggs, but they're still blowing through the feed like it's going out of style as they tend to make a bee line straight for the feed dish when they decide to jet off of their nesting spots.  Just...ugh. 

So, yeah, I have three hens and had to go out and BUY eggs this week (at least I got some cheap at Fred Meyer).  I gave a dozen eggs (well ten eggs because I grabbed the wrong container of eggs...it was a long week what can I say) to my mother-in-law before the hens went broody on me and then I got a call from Shani out of the blue and she told me she was staying in Alaska.  Some shenanigans happened with moving in with her daughter and she can't do it until her house sells up here now.  Which with the market the way it is right now, due to everyone not knowing if the legislature is going to try and kill the majority of the state the way they are going, she hasn't even gotten a bite on the house.  So, she has sold everything she owns pretty much (both vehicles, her bed, etc etc) at this point and now she's stuck here until...whenever, she is worried the cancer has progressed bad in the last months due to the amount of nausea and pain she's in and she can't go to California until September to start treatment as that is when they'll have the scanner she needs to figure out how progressed her cancer is.  Basically, the only thing I could think to do was to drop off the last dozen eggs I had (which three days later the chickens are all broody now).  I hope that at least cheers her up at this trying time in her life :(.  At least when I told Shani that the chickens might be chicken dinners here soon she just laughed and said if they aren't giving you eggs they should be good for something right?  I love that woman!

So, anyway, onto this week's menu plan!

Wednesday:  Leftovers

Thursday:  Chicken Teriyaki, rice, garlic peas, salad

Friday:  Pork roast with pantry friendly fig sauce, mashed potatoes, apple sauce, salad

Saturday:  Chicken in mushroom sauce, left over mashed potatoes, salad

Sunday:  Waffles (blueberry for husband, chocolate chip for daughter, plain with pancake syrup for son...whatever for me), bacon, eggs

Monday:  Fruity Meatballs, garlic toast, salad

Tuesday:  Fried fish, rice, salad

Desserts:  Renaissance Apple Pudding (believe it or not this was a recipe that was popular during that time in history.  I want to give it at try as the ingredients are simple :), strawberry shortcake, Mississippi Mud (doctored brownie mix to make it work), mincemeat cookies (made and are pretty good!)

Breakfasts:  Granola by itself or with yogurt, banana nut muffins, English muffins, oatmeal, toast, cranberry orange breakfast bread (mix from pantry)

Snacks:  Beef jerky (getting low, but still have a LITTLE bit left), strawberry milk (I mixed the strawberry powder that was left over at the bottom of the can of freeze dried strawberries...which there was actually a decent amount of powder...with some sugar and voila!  Way better than store bought strawberry Quick ;), apples, watermelon (got one cheap at Carrs last week when I went shopping...it's really good!).

And there you are folks.  Our menu for the week.  How about you?  Eating anything good this week?