Last week was a bear.  There, I said it.  It started with a very romantic Valentine’s Day dinner that I made for our little family.  I followed this up with a dessert of nausea, vomiting, chills, sweat, achiness, and a headache.  I’m sure my husband found me tres attractive.  Actually the most romantic part of the evening was that he took care of everything (cleaning up and posting on the other blog) and took care of me too.  So nice.  Luckily he worked from home the next day and that let me rest and on Thursday, I was feeling much better.  Unfortunately on Thursday night, he was not.  It was his turn.  We weren’t sure if it was some sort of food poisoning or if it was the flu until he got it and had an achy body, chills, etc. also.  His seemed to be more severe, though, and it wiped him out most of Friday, into Saturday.  Unfortunately this messed up his plan of running a half marathon on Sunday.  Boo.  And did I mention Miss K popped another tooth?  We couldn’t tell if it was the tooth or if her milk allergy is back or if she was sick, but she was F-U-S-S-Y and sadly inconsolable.  I felt so bad for her.  She was throwing up milk a little here and there, she was crying and crying for no apparent reason and she wasn’t sleeping well.  Our biggest fear was that she had what we had.  But it looks like it was mostly her tooth and it seems she’s caught a cold.  Poor little dumpling.  All this sickness made it tougher to cook at home.  Let’s see, we had Rice, Dal, and Raita, Quinoa Burgers, Veggie Mac n’ Cheese, and ate out pretty much ever other night.  Eeks.  Working on making this week different.

Sunday:  Enchiladas with Veggie Shreds cheese.  Cheese was a little weird.  I think we’ll stick to the real deal.  We hardly ate any enchiladas, mostly because we had a monsterous late lunch in Pasadena before coming home on Sunday.  So now I have eight enchiladas to eat over course of this week’s lunches.

Monday:  Vegetarian Chili and Apples.  Baked Sweet Potato Fries, Avocado, and Cheese for Miss K.

Tuesday:  Spaghetti Squash, Broccoli, and Pasta Salad.  I’ve never actually made spaghetti squash so I’m kind of excited to try it.

Wednesday:  Gonna make that ten bean soup from a dry mix from last week.  Will serve with sandwiches.

Thursday:   Hubby is heading out to hang out with the guys to celebrate a friend’s birthday.

Friday: Spinach, garlic, onion, tomato and cheese omelets

Saturday:   Some friends are coming over and I have yet to decide what we’re having.  Better hop on that.

We out a LOT last week.  Three birthday dinners for my husband, breakfast from a bakery, and three lunches out…all between Friday and Sunday.  Geez Louise.  While all that food was fun and delicious, both hubby and I are feeling gross.  Time to see what we can do about fixing up our habits.  I have a bunch of vegetables that are just losing their nutrients in the refrigerator, waiting to be eaten!  Must do something about that pronto!  I don’t know that I’ve ever really used the word pronto before.  It’s cheesy.  I like it.

I was kind of happy about the meals that we DID eat at home though.  I was confused about what to make (Did I do a meal plan last week?  If I didn’t I didn’t follow it at all) so I threw together some meals.  I made a spicy pasta dish without a real recipe…I just made a sauce with Rotel tomatoes and chilies, olives, pasta sauce, red pepper flakes, garlic and onion and then tossed with pasta and tofu.  My husband actually liked it!  Yay!  And then I made a quinoa kichadi, with peanuts, chillies, spices, quinoa, and potatoes.  Mixed it with a yogurt sauce made of pepper, yogurt, sugar, salt and peanuts.  I was trying to emulate a kichadi that my mother-in-law makes.  It wasn’t nearly as good as hers but it wasn’t bad!

Here’s the plan-o, Dan-o:

Sunday: Lucille’s…oy…such exciting foods to order.  But I did pretty good.  Got a salad without the chicken (leaning vegetarian these days) with the dressing on the side.  I did, however, split a huge biscuit with my daughter and had a watermelon jalapeno margarita.  If it counts for anything, it was on the lite menu.    And come on, with a description like that, there was no way I was staying away from it!

Monday:  Quinoa burgers, and Broccoli.  Saw this on pinterest and was intrigued.  The blogger seemed to love it so I thought I’d give it a try.  AAAAND we’d be using some of that quinoa we have.  Ya, I bought a three pound bag, in case I hadn’t mentioned it.  I do want to make quinoa once a week.  It’s a great protein source and so much better for you than rice or pasta.

Tuesday:  Enchiladas of Love with veggie cheese instead of cheddar.  We’re cutting back on cheese at home and when you combine this with vegetarian meals, it can become a bit dicey because everything we love has cheese!  But I wanted to see how this tasted so I picked some up at the store.  I figured even if the cheese is grody, we know we’ll like the enchiladas!

Wednesday:  Soup and Sandwiches.  Last week I picked up some 10 bean soup mix from the bulk bins at Sprouts.  the problem is that the mix only has beans.  And no instructions (DRAT!) so I’m going to try and make some nice veggie soup with it.  All the suggestions I’ve received from my “cooking for your family” board includes ham.  I’m going to not use ham (see above where I mention the vegetarian eating at home).

Thursday:  I think hubby has poker night so baby and I are on our own.  I just discovered today that she loves Trader Joe’s veggie burgers so maybe we’ll make that and some baked sweet potato fries.

Friday:  Rice, Dal, and Raita.  A simple dinner.  I bought some premade dal and we’re going to give it a try.  If it sucks, in the future I’ll work on just making plain ol’ dal like my husband likes.

Saturday:  Eating out

It’s 2012!!!!  A new year already.  I haven’t been posting much these last few weeks; the holidays got the best of me, I guess.  It was a really fun few weeks and I really think my waistline is paying for it.  So time to start lightening up the menu a bit and getting back some better habits than I have right now.  Also time to start posting more regularly too.  Here’s what this week looks like:

Sunday:  Refrigerator clean up; made pizza for an afternoon “snack” so we finished that up, made a salad and polished off some chili.

Monday:  Spinach and Feta Pasta, heirloom tomato salad, and Rolls.  The pasta was pretty tasty and relatively healthy.  Spinach, feta, tomatoes, onions, and garlic.  Simple and filling; that heirloom tomato salad was awesome.

Tuesday:  Quinoa bowls

Wednesday:  Khichadi

Thursday:  Soup and Sandwiches

Friday:  Eat out

Saturday:  Tofu Stir Fry with Rice

I’m starting to feed Miss K. more table food and she loves it!  Tonight I gave her some pasta and she gobbled it up.  Good news is that she seemed to like the veggies in the pasta just as much as the pasta itself.  I just gave her some food off of my plate so I’m not sure how much she actually ate.  There’s something nice about all of us eating the same thing.  I’m going to try to make a little extra each night so I have food for lunch this week.  Lately I’ve been craving taco bell and Dr. Pepper something fierce.  MUST RESIST.  Just saw a Taco Bell commercial with a burrito that had spicy fritos in it.  I should have been grossed out. Instead, my interest is piqued.

Holy guacamole!  Only six more days til Christmas!  Yikes.  I still have a few more presents to buy, some cookies to bake, and some holiday decorating to do.  Eh, it’ll all work out.  It always does.  Like every year, I think my poor father-in-law is going to be the big loser in the gift department.  I never know what to get for him.  He’s such a good sport about it though.  Always smiles, never complains.

We did well last week in the eat-at-home department.  Made dinner six nights in a row!  We had  Arroz con Pollo, soup and sandwiches, crispy seitan with Mac n’Cheese and an heirloom tomato salad, vegetarian chili, enchiladas, and homemade pizza.  Ya us! Everything tasted good this last week, it was awesome.  It’s fun to eat food that you like!  The heirloom tomato salad was delish – just avocados and tomatoes with a dressing the was bleh.  But the tomatoes and avocados were just so delicious that really all they needed was a little salt and pepper.  Sooooo good.  The seitan turned out tasty too.  Good week for us.

This week we have some social stuff going on so we’re eating away from home some:

Sunday:  Broccoli Rabe Sausage Parmesan Pasta – took this over to SIL’s house.  They made a salad and some dessert and we called it a meal.

Monday:  Vegetarian Quiche

Tuesday:  Garden Burger Melts and Fries

Wednesday: Quinoa bowls

Thursday:  Hubby has poker night

Friday:  Going to a holiday party

Saturday:  Going over to my mom’s for a family get together.

It’s my baby’s first Christmas!!!!  Happy holidays everyone!

We did pretty well last week – I had planned five meals at home but we ended up eating in four times because I had forgotten that our friends’ daughter’s birthday party was in the late afternoon rather than the early afternoon.  So we met our goal.  Out of the simple dinners we had, only the cheeseburger mac n’ cheese was new.  I made a few modifications (oh crap!  We don’t have butter!  How do you make a roux without butter???  Turns out you substitute olive oil) but all in all, it was quick, easy and pretty darn tasty.   We used ground turkey but I’ll bet it would be even tastier with ground beef.  Everything else was simple – we keep tacos relatively healthy by using refried beans as the protein and we use chopped spinach to up the nutritional factor.  We don’t use sour cream and go easy on the cheese so really the only “bad” part is that we use fried taco shells.  But otherwise, not bad on the nutritional scale.

Here’s the plan for this week:

Sunday:  Since we were at the birthday party on Saturday, I pushed the Arroz con Pollo dinner to Sunday.  It was tasty but for some reason took FOREVER to cook through and even at the end, the rice should have been softer.  I know part of it was because I used brown rice (again, trying to up the nutritional value whenever possible) instead of white but I felt bad because my poor husband was so hungry.  Would would have been a 30 minute meal turned into half an hour.  I guess all’s well that ends well because we polished off the entire skillet.  None left.

Monday: Crispy Seitan with Heirloom Tomato Salad and homemade mac n cheese.  I have a small amount of macaroni left that I’d like to finish off.  This side portion will be a great way to accomplish that.

Tuesday:  Soup and Sandwiches (ol’ faithful at my husband’s request)

Wednesday:  Out?

Thursday:  Vegetarian Chili

Friday:  Enchiladas

Saturday:  Out

Miss K has an upset stomach, possibly due to teething (although some say that’s a myth).  She doesn’t seem to be bothered by it; she’s still eating, drinking, sleeping, and playing ok.  Just the diaper situation over the last few days has been…not fun.  Anyhoo, I’m looking around to see if there are any recommended foods that will be easy on her stomach.  I can tell you she just inhaled a huge bowl of apples and oatmeal for breakfast.

Here’s to the start of a great week (despite the rainy weather here)!

It’s another Monday, and luckily no traveling for us this week.  Yippee!  I wanted to try a few new recipes but really only found one and it’s not even vegetarian.  Luckily I have some ground turkey that I want to use up.  For those of you keeping track (and that would be…no one…), we made our goal of eating at home four days a week, despite traveling three days last week – woohoo!  We had exactly what the plan said; homemade pizza, Tofu, Bean Burritos (oh except without the kale – it’s still sitting in my fridge), and egg rolls and salad!  Yay for us!

I did feed Miss K. some store bought food on our trip – we tried Plum Organics and it was easy.  And she liked it.  Sigh.  Some part of me wanted her to hate it so that I would feel better about all the effort I exert to make her food (ok fine – it’s not really that hard.  Just feels that way sometimes).  But she’s a flexible little bugger and she sucked it down.  Also bought her Baby Mum-Mums.  But not a six pack (disregard that).  She liked those too.  These things are pretty cool – they don’t crumble and make a mess.  It’s one of the the few foods that she can hold and eat; usually she just has small pieces of finger foods.  It was cute – she just kept looking at it and eating it and then examining it again. I don’t know why I feel bad about feeding her the store bought foods…I just do.  At some point she’s going to eat “normal” food.  And she does drink formula twice a day, after all.  That’s totally processed.  I think my mom fed me gerber baby food from a jar and look at me…I’m fine.  Well, no I’m not.  I love sugar and fried foods and sweets and all that to the point that I have to set goals to change my ways.  I even write about it because it’s so hard to stop eating this stuff for me.  But my mom’s not to blame for that.  It’s my personal indulgence.

Back on topic – So what’s for dinner this week?  Well let’s see here I have a feeling the meals won’t end up on these days but that’s ok:

Sunday: Japanese take – out (I didn’t care for this dinner very much.  Should have stuck with tried and true Vegetable rolls)

Monday:  Soup and Sandwiches

Tuesday:  Pad Thai

Wednesday:  Cheeseburger Macaroni & Broccoli, Avocado and tomato salad

Thursday:  Tacos

Friday:  Out

Saturday:  Arroz con Pollo