Food Thoughts

The last few posts from my brother have all been about the restaurants he was planning on eating at when he went back to Sacramento to visit. They made me hungry. So now I am going to return the favor and talk about our planned menu for the upcoming week. Today I've been doing a lot of cooking--I browned over 7 pounds of ground beef, putting it in bags in the freezer. I'm also cooking some chicken breasts to cut up. Some of those will go into the chicken enchilada casserole we're having tonight, along with the leftover rice from Monday's tangy pineapple chicken. The rest of the chicken will be put in a freezer bag for a casserole or soup to be named later. I also took out a pork tenderloin to thaw, and we'll probably have my easy teriyaki/mustard glazed pork tenderloin on Saturday with wild rice. I bought a big bag of meatballs awhile back at Sams, so I'm going to put those in the crockpot on Friday with a great, easy sauce that Michele S. had at her open house back in August. The boys all loved her meatballs, so we'll try them here over egg noodles. What is driving my specific menu choices is that I need to defrost my garage freezer before it gets cold, and to do that, I need to make it a lot emptier! So I also see beef barley soup in our future, to use up the chuck roast out there, as well as a beef and broccoli stir-fry for the top round. There's a ham taking up an unwieldy space, so that will certainly be eaten in the next week or so as well.

I also think I need to make some room in our kitchen freezer so I can put some stuff in there while I'm defrosting. Two things that are taking up a lot of room in here are a box of fudgsicles and a box of ice cream sandwiches. Being the sacrificial wife and mother that I am, as well as being one of the few persons in the house that is not either lactose-intolerant or allergic to dairy, it falls upon me to clean those items up. I go willingly--I must do my duty!! I'll try not to complain. : )