What’s To Eat This Week?

Technorati Tags: meal plan,rachael ray,recipes

How do I plan my meals?  There are two websites I always check first.  I am a huge Rachael Ray fan.  About 5 years ago I started watching 30 Minute Meals and it has changed my life.  I learned how to make quick meals that were all from scratch – good bye mixes and cream of soups!  By watching I also learned about vegetables and spices I had never head of and learned how to chop everything in a jiffy. 

It made cooking a complex meal easy to do because you could watch how she multi tasked and had 3 pots going at once.  Better yet?   How to make a meal and not have to worry about coming up with 2 other sides to go with it – these meals had it all built right in. 

Since then I’ve really leaned what I like and how to swap things I don’t like out for things that are more to my tastes.  So the first two places I always go are two RR weekly meal sites to see if anything good pops up: 

Weekly Grocery List – on her day time talk show she always cooks something.  This list gives you the ingredients you’ll need to cook along.  They don’t post the recipe until the day of the show, so it’s  a bit of a mystery on what you’ll be cooking.

Weekly Menu Planner – Each issue of the Rachael Ray Magazine always has a section that is a weekly meal plan.  On the magazine website they also have a different meal plan for each week.

After that?  Well then I go through other recipes I’ve pulled from other magazines and websites.  If I don’t have enough for the week I go to my trusty recipe binder.  Each time I find a recipe that we really like, it gets numbered and catalogued into my binder.  Yes it involves a spreadsheet – I’m a nerd like that.  But that way everything is in a random order and I can just open it up to the middle somewhere and take the next 3 recipes in the book and be done with it.  And yes, if I’m looking for something specific I can sort my spreadsheet alphabetically, by category, by type of meal and by main ingredient – no joke – I’m that much of a nerd.

So here’s where that brought me this week!

Sunday – Pancetta Wrapped Pork Tenderloin, Parsley Potatoes and Johnson Family Corn
Monday -  Meatloaf with Cheesy Cauliflower
Tuesday – BLT Mac & Cheese
Wednesday – Chicken and Ham Rolls with Spinach
Thursday – Warm Provencal Chicken Salad
Friday – LMM’s day off :)
Saturday – Date night – Steaks, Fried Ravioli and Creme Brulee

Cooking I did last week that you might be interested in:

• Dill Pickles
• Spaghetti Sauce (back from the Spaghetti Sauce Adventures of 2008!)
• Peach Cupcakes

Which recipes do you want to see??

~LMM