Meal plan #15: 7-day dinner menu

Family meal plan for the week:

Sunday: Sous-vide tri tip and baked potatoes

Monday: Salmon and caesar salad

Tuesday: Costco chicken pot pie

Wednesday: leftovers

Thursday: Pork & broccoli stir fry, salt & pepper tofu

Friday: frozen pizza

Saturday: Moussaka with pasta & greek salad

Keep reading for all the details about each dinner.

And now for the details…

Sunday: Sous-Vide Tri Tip and Baked Potatoes

I go a year or more forgetting I have a sous-vide machine, but it’s such a great way to cook bigger pieces of meat. If you’ve never cooked this way, I recommend you try it. My sous-vide machine is several years old now and I’m not sure that model is still sold, but there are lots of great options on Amazon if you click here. I usually use this kind of container to do the cooking in, but you can see from the pic that I did these in a big pot because I needed more room. I love that big pot though, it’s a Lodge brand enameled cast iron and I use it several times a week lately.

My local store has had a great price on tri-tip lately so I’ve been buying them a lot. I’m not sure if this is a common cut of meat everywhere, but it’s been popular in California for a long time and I think it’s becoming more well known. It’s the tip of the sirloin, and is called tri-tip because of it’s triangular shape. It’s typically grilled, seared at a high temp, and left rare to medium rare in the middle, and served sliced thin, often on fresh rolls as like a steak sandwich. I’m not a big griller - even though I’ve been cooking for decades I feel like grilling is just not something I good at, I have a knack for setting my grill on fire. So I like to look for other ways to cook meat like this. The sous-vide is a great way to do it.

This is the recipe I loosely followed, I put a little butter in the bags with the meat as well as the seasoning in this recipe, and I cooked two because leftover steak is never a bad thing. The flavor was really great and I will definitely do it this way again, although it was maybe a tiny bit more rare than my kids like it so I’ll probably cook it a degree or two hotter next time.

Tip: leftover steak makes the best quesadillas. I chopped up a bunch of the leftover sliced steak and made a big stack of steak quesadillas one day for lunch. One reason I like to leave meat like this on the more rare side is so that when we have it left over it just cooks a bit more but still doesn’t get too done.

Monday: Salmon and Caesar Salad

I went to Costco on Monday so we got a couple of salmon filets and their big container of Caesar salad. As much as I like to get creative, my people like their salmon very simple. I drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle a little salt, sometimes a squeeze of lemon, and put in a very hot oven for 5-7 minutes. I prefer this over grilling (see above comment about always catching my grill on fire), even though I usually manage to fill the house with smoke and set off alarms when I put oily fish in a super hot oven. You can do this with the broiler too, but then my house gets even more smokey. Oven grilled salmon and Caesar salad is such a simple and delicious meal.

Tuesday: Costco Chicken Pot Pie

Tuesday is usually taco day in our house but we had a meeting at the high school, and I’d just been to Costco, so it was easy to just cook the pot pie in the late afternoon and leave it for the people to serve themselves whenever they wanted dinner. I try not to buy too many already made things at Costco, but the chicken pot pies are so good that I'm pretty much not allowed to come home from Costco without them. I always get two and cook both because we will eat a whole one for dinner and the second is ready for leftovers. My family eats it for breakfast.

Wednesday: Leftovers

Thursday: Pork & Broccoli Stir Fry, Crispy Salt & Pepper Tofu, Steamed Rice.

I’m not sure I’ve ever used a recipe for a stir fry, but I’m sure there are plenty of good ones out there. I do pork for stir fry a lot, because it’s a relatively inexpensive meat and my family gets tired of chicken. Most of the time I end up just cutting up pork chops because I buy them in bulk at Costco, they’re a good price but my kids don’t love just eating a pork chop. I season the pork with soy sauce, garlic, white pepper, a little sesame oil, sometimes a bit of lime juice, maybe some onion powder, a little corn starch and a little baking soda. Let it all marinade for a while, and then cook in batches in hot oil in a hot pan. I like a mix of a little sesame oil for flavor, plus a high heat cooking oil.

Tip: I use baking soda to tenderize meat. You know that tender texture of the meat you get in dishes at the Chinese restaurant, that you can never seem to recreate at home? Well baking soda does this. Use it sparingly, just a teaspoon or so, but it makes a world of difference. It changes the pH of the meat and causes the proteins to relax. You can read a bit more about the science behind this here.

After you’ve cooked the meat, then you toss in the veggies to cook those. My stir fries always vary depending on what I have, but broccoli is common, onions, cabbage, sometimes carrots, celery. Season with ginger and garlic, some salt and white pepper. I like to cook the veggies until they are starting to soften but still have some crunch.

Then I add the meat back in, and the sauce. For the sauce I do about a cup of cold chicken broth and a teaspoon or so of corn starch - mix this well, and then add some flavoring. I love oyster sauce, it’s got a sweet, salty, umami flavor. You can add ginger, soy, whatever you like. Pour the mixture over the meat and veggies and stir to combine, and you’re done.

Next up - salt & pepper tofu. You can google for crispy salt and pepper tofu recipes, there’s a lot out there. But honestly how I do it is a lot simpler than most of them and we love how it turns out. I use extra firm tofu, I slice the block in half and stack it between some dishtowels for an hour or so to get some of the water out. Then I cut in cubes, toss in a bit of sesame oil, and then toss to coat in a mixture of corn starch, salt, and white pepper. Just season some corn starch with salt and pepper and dip a finger in to taste it, and add more seasoning if you need it. Then I fry the cubes of tofu in hot oil until golden on all sides. After I’ve cooked all the tofu I sometimes toss some chopped green onion and minced garlic in the oil just long enough to start to brown and sprinkle that over the tofu along with a generous sprinkling of coarse salt. It’s delicious. This is one you want to serve pretty quickly while it’s still crispy and hot. It’s still tasty leftover but no longer crispy.

I also served steamed rice with this. You can find my tip for perfect steamed rice in last week’s post.

Friday: Frozen Pizza and Bag Salad

Sometimes I need to take a week off from making all the homemade pizzas so we just go for frozen ones and a bagged Caesar salad.

Saturday: Moussaka!

I’ve never made moussaka before, but I started browsing some greek recipes recently (see last week’s post about making gyros) and was reminded that I really like it. Moussaka is described as like a greek lasagna, and I guess it’s sort of like that, in that it’s layered with a meat sauce and a bechamel. But there’s no pasta. It’s been years since I had moussaka, so I figured I would give it a try. One of the ways we save money in a big family, but still get to be foodies, is because I try to recreate a lot of my restaurant cravings at home.

Photo is from Themediterraneandish.com - source of the recipe. click the image to get the recipe.

This is the recipe I used and I would definitely do it again. I followed in fairly closely, except I added a bit more seasoning to the sauce because I was using ground beef and it doesn’t have as much flavor as lamb, and I made extra of the sauce. Also it seems like a mistake or oversight in the sauce section of the recipe that they don’t include salt at all. This sauce most definitely needs salt. I salt the meat a bit while it’s browning, then add all the spices and taste and salt some more.

This dish isn’t hard to make, but it’s not a quick weeknight meal. There are three separate components that each need to be cooked before you assemble the casserole. It’s a good one for a weekend when you have time to spend cooking. It would be great on a weeknight though if you made it all the components ahead of time.

We had it with buttered pasta on the side, and a greek salad of just cucumbers, tomatoes, greek olives, feta, and a simple olive oil and red wine vinegar dressing.

That’s it for this week!