Week of March 12

In the fridge now:
1 head cabbage
about 4 large carrots
a bowl of cauliflower pilaf made today (Monday)
about a dozen farm eggs from a friend

In the freezer:
Italian-style green beans

Dinners:

Hot Plates:  French, Greek, Thai, Moroccan??
Little meatzas (pizza topping on beef patties)
Cottage Pie with mashed-cauliflower topping
something fishy or veggie for Friday

Shopping List (Aldi):
3 packs frozen boneless skinless chic breasts
wound up buying 2 packs breasts, 1 pack leg quarters
4 frozen ground turkey
1 ground beef
bought a pack of frozen beef patties
3 heads cauliflower
cauliflower looked gross, but I still had one head left anyway, so didn't buy any
2 bags spinach
other produce??
I bought two little packs of grape tomatoes to have on the side one night
frozen veg??
Aldi has some really good thin green beans;  got two bags
4 cans tuna
4 c tomato paste
2 bags sliced almonds
3 gal milk
3 doz eggs
tarragon

Thanks to car repairs run amok and a couple of other unexpected expenses, this has been another one of those low-point-in-the-budget weeks;  hence the rather abbreviated shopping list. I ended up feeding us this week on about $80, rather less than my usual grocery expenditure. Here's what we actually ate, to the best of my decaffeinated recollection:

Sunday 

Brunch after Mass:  sausage patties and scrambled eggs

I forget now how we ended up with beef patties before I went to the grocery store on Monday.  For Sunday's supper I used them to make mini-meatzas:  really just burgers that I first baked in the oven, then topped with herbs, garlic powder, tomato paste, and a pepper-and-onion mix, before running them in the oven again for about 15 minutes.

Monday

breakfast:  oatmeal/eggs
lunch:  I had eggs again, while the kids had little cakes made of the leftover oatmeal and wheat flour (ok, the kids aren't too paleo) with peanutbutter and apples. This is essentially the lunch they ate all week. In fact, this is how lunch went in general all week. Dinner leftovers and tuna went with the work/college dudes.

How I make those little oat cakes:  It's very simple. I take whatever's left in the big bowl of oatmeal, add a scoop of wheat flour (thanks to our general quasi-paleo-ness, the ten pounds in my big glass cannister have been just sitting there waiting for me to have a low-budget week), and pour on milk to make a batter. I add one egg, stir it all up, and drop the batter in rather flat, cookie-like dollops on a greased cookie sheet. They cook up, in fact, just like cookies, with a nice crispy bottom, only they don't have sugar, and the kids don't seem to notice. This is where I'm starting with my kids:  weaning off sugar (as if). Anyway, it was a way to use up the leftover oatmeal, reassure my kids that the house can still smell like baked goodness, and provide something for them to snack on, in a week when I had to trim our usual snacks off the list.

dinner: We had been missing chicken on the bone, and leg quarters are cheap. I rubbed ours with a sort of North African spice rub of cumin, ground coriander seed, cinnamon, garlic powder, and black pepper and baked them. As a side dish I made a big bowl of cauliflower pilaf with raisins and some dried cranberries and blueberries left over from hot-cross-buns making with the American Heritage Girls on Saturday, plus sliced almonds. I made it at lunchtime and chilled it, so we had it cold for dinner, and it was very good with the chicken. We also had roasted green beans. In fact, green beans were the side vegetable of choice pretty much all week.

Tuesday

breakfast and lunch as above

dinner: ground turkey browned with Italian-sausage spices & mixed with a can of tomato paste and a large can of stewed tomatoes, then layered in a baking dish with cabbage leaves to form a kind of "lasagne." Fast and pretty tasty. Green beans and grape tomatoes on the side.

Wednesday

breakfast and lunch as above

dinner: beef patties liberally dusted with garlic powder, basil, oregano, and sage, baked with onion and the other can of stewed tomatoes. I don't know what you'd call this, other than "I had to cook something before Mass and choir." Not really cookbook-worthy, but the family raved.

Thursday

dinner: chicken rogan josh and baked whole sweet potatoes

Friday

Breakfast and lunch as usual for this week. Dinner was off the rails:  I had to take the two younger kids with me to drive my 8th-grader and numerous of his friends to the diocesan Confirmation retreat for the weekend. In the morning I threw out the paleo taboo on legumes and put together a crockpot navy-bean soup for my husband to have when he came home:  beans, 1 onion and 2 carrots finely diced, a can of tomato paste, water to cover, and garlic powder, basil, and oregano for seasoning. It was smelling delicious by the time the kids and I had to leave in the afternoon.

For dinner on the road, the whole confirmation group  had -- pizza. Father's choice. Oh, well, it was meatless, and it was good. No wonder I feel tired this morning, though. That, plus four hours of driving.

Saturday

Breakfast as usual. We'll have the bean-soup leftovers for lunch. For dinner we'll be at a potluck and ceili at church;  got to think of something to take . . . I didn't do a big cookup this week, so find myself thrown back on my usual by-the-seat-of-my-pants approach, which I really dislike . . . I might do up another big pilaf, if I can get to the store for some decent-looking cauliflower. That's something we can eat a lot of, and if I don't say anything, nobody will know that the "grain" is cauliflower. They'll just assume it's something like couscous.

And that takes us to the end of our week . . .