7 day family meal plan, including breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

I'm still working on that big blog post about how I approach menu planning - it's taking longer than I thought.  I promise I'll get it to you soon!  And it will include my templates that I use for my menu planning and shopping list, and lots of detail about the method to my madness.  But I thought I'd at least go ahead and share what I've got planned for the meals for the coming week.  My plan is to start sharing my meal plan every week, so please keep me honest and ask me for it if you haven't seen it posted!

Whenever I cook something that involves a bit of work, I ALWAYS cook extra.  Why go to all that trouble and only get one meal out of it?  So as I'm making one meal, I'm already thinking about what the next meal will be using the same food - sometimes that's just reheating the leftovers and eating as-is, and sometimes it will be re-purposing the leftover into a completely different meal. 

• This morning for breakfast I made some blueberry muffins.  I'll write up exactly what I did and try to post it later, but it was essentially my basic pancake recipe, with all whole wheat flour and I added oat brand and oats, and a couple extra eggs, and frozen blueberries.  I made big batch and put a bunch in the freezer.  The kids will have those for breakfast one day this week, and lunch one day.

• We had pot roast for dinner Sunday, so I will take the leftover meat, mushrooms and potatoes and make that into a stew - I'll thicken the leftover juices to make a gravy, add some carrots and maybe a few other veggies, and it will be a super easy dinner.

• Saturday night I cooked a bunch of chicken thighs, with a creamy mushroom gravy.  I'll take all the chicken off and dice it, and that will become a creamy chicken & mushroom stew for dinner Tuesday, and I will make some biscuits to go with it, and a simple coleslaw.

• For Thursday's kid food dinner I've been wanting to try a corn dog muffin for a while.  I've looked at a few recipes, and basically they use a corn bread recipe and put a piece of hot dog in it.  So I will use my favorite corn bread recipe for this one, with Applegate hot dogs. If there's any leftover they might get it for lunch friday, or maybe I'll see how well they freeze.

• Saturday night I'm going to make burgers, and I"m thinking about making some extra mini burger sized ones, to use for a lunch one day next week.

• Sunday dinner will be whole chickens in coconut milk.  I loosely follow this recipe, and it is so good.  I always cook 2 chickens so there is plenty of leftover meat, and enough bones to make a really good broth.  So then I'll have chicken and stock for a dinner the following week.  We will have some rice with it, which I cook in my slow cooker.  When I'm making some kind of Asian flavored dish like this, I like to put a can of coconut milk in with the water for the rice.  It's a super simple way to make a really delicious rice.