Family Meal Plan #16
One week family menu.
My meal plans are real - this is what my family is actually eating every week.
Here’s the menu for this week (plus a couple extra days):
Thursday: Chicken & vegetable stir fry, with crispy salt and pepper tofu
Friday: Pizza
Saturday: Salmon, mixed green salad with strawberries
Sunday: Carnitas taco bar
Monday: Salmon patties (with leftover salmon)
Tuesday: Green enchiladas (with leftover carnitas)
Wednesday: leftovers
Thursday: pasta with pork & veggies
Friday: Pizza again
Extra: We also made beignets for a treat.
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A bit more about each meal:
I don’t always have this extra, but this week I’ve described each of these meals for you in a lot more detail. I hope you enjoy!
Thursday: stir fry and crispy tofu.
I don’t have a recipe for stir fry, you can find plenty on google or pinterest, but I think it’s one of those things that once you’ve made it a couple times you really don’t need a recipe. I cut up whatever meat I’m using into bit size pieces, and then I season that with a bit of salt and pepper, a little sesame oil, sometimes a little soy sauce, and then I add a couple spoons of corn starch to coat it - and here’s the real trick: baking soda. There’s chemistry here that I don’t bother to get into, but I think it changes the pH of the meat and tenderizes it. The amount I use depends on the type of meat. For chicken that’s already pretty tender, I use just a little, maybe a teaspoon. For beef or pork I will use a bit more. Mix it all well to coat and refrigerate for a few hours until ready to cook. Then I just brown all those bites of meat in batches in a little oil. Meanwhile I’ve chopped all my veggies, and the selection is a little different every time. This week I had onions, celery, carrots, cabbage, a little zucchini, some broccoli, and always plenty of garlic and ginger. After the meat is done I dump all the chopped veggies in the pan and saute them until they are starting to get tender. Then add the meat back in and a little something for sauce. Sometimes I just use a little bottle oyster or hoison or black bean sauce. This week I mixed about a cup of chicken broth with a little cornstarch, some soy sauce, white pepper, and a little oyster sauce and stirred that all in to coat everything. Easy and pretty fast. Although I always make a mess of the stove.
Crispy salt and pepper tofu is one of our current favorite things. It seems like no matter how much I make, it always gets devoured. I’ve written up my recipe and that will be posted soon.
Friday is pizza day.
Always and forever. My people expect pizza on friday. Sometimes it’s delivery, sometimes it’s frozen, but most of the time it’s homemade. I make a lot, usually 4 or 5 pizzas, because we love leftover pizza. We have a mix of preferences here so I usually make two thicker crust, and two or three thin crust. The thicker crust are usually cheese, or sometimes one will be half cheese and half with other toppings. Most of the time these days I am using my sourdough for the crust which is just done by feel and no recipe, but my basic yeast bread and pizza dough recipe can be found here. This is my tried and true basic recipe that never fails. The toppings are a bit different each time, there’s always some pepperoni and onion and tomatoes in the mix, and then it’s whatever else I have that I sounds edible on a pizza. My sauce is a simple one: crushed tomatoes, a little olive oil, salt, thyme, rosemary, garlic. I’ll post an actual recipe one of these days.
Saturday: salmon and salad
I’ve cooked salmon a million ways and I will always come back to my stance that simplest is best. I like to actually taste the fish. Lately my seasoning is just salt, nothing else. I usually get whole filets, season them well with salt, and then cook in a very hot oven (like 550 convection) for 5-10 minutes depending on how thick the fish is.
The salad is one I’m obsessed with this summer. Spring mix greens, blueberries, strawberries, pickled red onion, salted pistachios, bacon crumbles, and a lemon vinaigrette dressing.
I also made a simple white pasta for the kids. My one-pot pasta method, with some butter, cream, and salt. Never fails to please the kids, and I’ve found that even though they don’t like to admit it, most adults love this pasta too.
Sunday: carnitas
Tuesday is usually taco day at our house and my kids were a little stressed that I was serving tacos on a sunday. But our guest was leaving monday and I knew he wanted some mexican so I did it anyway.
Don’t leave me nasty comments about how any of this is not traditional, I never pretend to be Mexican or to make anything the traditional way. I cook what tastes good to me.
So anyway, my latest method for carnitas is to buy the pork country style ribs at costco. They’re not actually ribs - it’s just cut strips of the pork shoulder. I used to always buy the whole shoulder, but it’s a mountain of meat and I don’t always want that much. The ribs cut is usually the same cost per pound and it’s a more manageable quantity. I season these pretty simply - salt, pepper, cumin, a little chili powder, sometimes a bit of garlic and onion. Sometimes I cut up an onion to throw in there, sometimes I quarter an orange. I use all kinds of different cooking methods, but this time it was in a deep casserole dish, covered well with foil, and in the oven at 300 degrees for several hours, until the meat was falling apart. Then uncover and turn up the oven to about 375, use tongs to break up the meat, and cook another half hour or so to let the juices evaporate and the meat brown a bit.
We serve this with a selection of usual taco fixings - tortillas, cheese, sour cream, tomatoes, lettuce, salsa, chips - as a taco bar and everyone makes their own. It’s one of my favorite meals to make for a crowd.
Monday: salmon patties
I know some will scoff at the idea of even having leftover fish, but I always buy a little extra salmon and cook more than we will eat that night because I want to make salmon patties. I keep them simple, the fish, a little diced onion, egg, breadcrumbs, a bit of garlic salt.
We had these with a kale & quinoa salad and the leftover pasta from the salmon dinner, reheated with a bit of cream.
Tuesday: enchiladas
Another meal made with the leftovers - the extra meat from the carnitas dinner, mixed with chopped onion and shredded jack cheese, and layered with green enchilada sauce, tortillas, and more jack cheese, cooked until browned and bubbling. This is a very easy meal to make if you have extra cooked meat of any kind. Sometimes I roll them into ‘real’ enchiladas, but sometimes I just layer it all like a casserole because it’s much faster and tastes just as good. Just go easy on the cheese. I know as Americans we love our cheese, and I love to drape everything in cheese just as much as the rest of you, but meat enchiladas really should be mostly about the meat and sauce and tortilla, with just a little cheese at each layer.
Wednesday is always leftover night here. We have scout meetings that night and need to eat fast and get going, so it’s nice to have lots of options we can easily heat up. I always make extra of everything so we have plenty.
Thursday: pasta with pork & veggies
This was an accidental dinner once that my family loved so much that it’s now become something that is regularly requested. It’s a great one to make when you need to clean the veggies out of your fridge and you don’t have a whole lot of other stuff. I brown some kind of ground meat, usually pork, or a pork sausage is best. This week I had a package of breakfast sausage so I used that. After the meat is browned I add a variety of chopped veggies. The first iteration of this had just onions and cabbage, and that is a really great combo with pork. These days I find it a fun challenge to see just how much veggies I can pack in here and have the kids still love it. This week I had onions, cabbage, zucchini, baby kale, mushrooms. I feel like there was more but I’m not remembering now. Get all the veggies sautéed until soft, sometimes I add a little butter, and then the real secret is canned soup. I don’t use a whole lot of this stuff but this is one occasion where I love it. It’s a quick way to make a yummy meal. My choice for this is Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom with Roasted Garlic. It’s all about the roasted garlic flavor here, so try to find that one and always keep some in your pantry. I usually don’t add any salt until after I’ve added the soup, because the sausage + canned soup is often all the salt you need. After the sauce (aka, soup) is in, then it’s time for the pasta and there are two ways I do this. You can either just cook pasta separately (or it’s a great way to use up leftover pasta), or you can now do my one pot pasta method - just add it all right in the pan: one pound of pasta and four cups of water. It soaks up the flavor of the meat and veggies and soup as it cooks and it’s delicious and always a crowd pleaser.
That brings us back to friday and pizza again.
Extra treat: beignets
This is a fun one that we’ve made a few times now. My kids love the beignets that we get in New Orleans Square at Disneyland, so when we found the recipe in the Unofficial Disney Parks Cookbook we definitely had to make them. While this isn’t a fast recipe to make, it isn’t hard. And it makes a lot. We made the mistake of doubling the recipe the first time and we ended up delivering beignets to all our neighbors because there was no way we could eat them all. Sometimes we even make them Mickey shaped using a Mickey cutter, sometimes we just cut them in squares. They all taste great no matter what. This dough also holds well in the fridge for a couple days, which I recommend because they really are best when they are fresh, so don’t cook more than you plan to eat while hot. We made the dough and cooked half on Thursday, and then cooked the second half on Sunday. Deep frying can be intimidating at first, but if you have a good thermometer that makes it easier. I don’t have a deep fryer, I just use a pot on the stove.