It just hit me that it is volume 6 of my ‘Week of Dinners’ series, which means it has been 6+ weeks of social distancing and I didn’t even start these posts at the very beginning of the crazy times… On a less depressing note, we had another week of yummy dinners so let’s get to it!
Monday: Paul told me after Monday’s dinner that my teriyaki chicken, rice and broccoli bowls are right up there with my salmon and asparagus specialty… how kind! When we were planning meals for this week we wanted to avoid the same mistake we did last week where we were cooking these recipes that required so many different ingredients and could feed a small village. Although we do enjoy trying new recipes, we are trying to be more aware of price per meal. Not only are crazy recipes costly, but we end up wasting food if we don’t eat the leftovers right away. If I were to guess, I think our chicken spaghetti dinner last Thursday cost $25+ in ingredients.
When making the grocery list for this week, I had found a garlic butter chicken and rice bowl recipe, but the ingredient list was out of this world. A majority of the items it called for aren’t typical staples so if we had decided to try it out, I am sure it would be at least a $20+ meal and we’d have leftover ingredients that we wouldn’t use right away. For my chicken bowl recipe, all I did was coat the broccoli in olive oil, garlic salt and pepper then bake it in the oven. I marinated the chicken in teriyaki sauce, pepper, garlic salt, sriracha and a little bit of soy sauce then cooked on the stove. And of course, white rice is easy to make.. plus, we made a little extra for Rex’s dinner. Simple, yet delicious and healthy!
Tuesday: A round of applause for Paul and Olivia because we finally got around to our Insapot cajun red beans, rice and sausage recipe before our ingredients expired. If you saw last week’s dinner post, you know that we were supposed to make this meal last Wednesday, then on Monday, and finally Tuesday when we remembered to soak the red beans overnight. The dish turned out well, however, it took 2+ hours to make. When picking the recipe, we failed to review the total time to cook so that was a fun surprise. Even though it did take from 4:45-7:00pm when we finally ate, the cost of this meal is fairly cheap. Rice and beans are inexpensive and then you just need sausage and a few produce items. But unless we want to start dinner in the Instapot and go run errands for 2 hours, we probably won’t make this again.
Wednesday: We cooked up one of our staple meals, Chipotle-inspired chicken bowls. If we already have the sauces and salsas we want to use for this meal, all we have to buy is chicken, avocados, onions and peppers. Anyway, I think I’ve written about this dinner idea on my blog 5 times now so enough said.
Thursday: In the fashion on using more of what we already have rather than spending $$$$ on a bunch of random ingredients from the store, on Thursday we cooked up a pasta sausage dish with a Brenda salad on the side. We already had the pasta, sauce, and sausage from previous grocery trips so all we bought from the store this week was a Brenda salad for a healthy side.
I am interested in staying on the trend of more budgeted grocery shopping and recipes. I’ll throw the idea past Paul and maybe we will do a quick inventory in our pantry and fridge to see what we can whip up for meals next week, rather than finding recipes that rack up the grocery bill. Also, maybe a post around what a family of 2 spends in a week on groceries while cooking at home 4-5 times a week would be interesting as well!
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xoxo Olivia
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