09/23/2013

Monday.  Not enough caffiene, and certainly not enough weekend.

My weekend was uneventful.  Officer had Navy this weekend and decided to stay in Fort Worth instead of driving back and forth.  It makes more sense, in fact he originally thought he’d be able to stay on post but when they calculated the milage it came out to 49 miles.  It needs to be 50 to qualify for a free room. The base hotel is like $70 a night so he stays with his mother or father when he can.  It’s hard on me, but I guess if he went active (Which he’d like to do) and deployed somewhere, or ever gets approved for that 3 month training he needs I’ll have to deal with single parenting.

I did use my time wisely though.  I managed to clean the house and get laundry done on Saturday.  I took advantage of the under 80 weather and opened up the house.  It was nice to have fresh air.

I also got a ton of cooking done.  In addition to a small pan of cabbage rolls I did one of those Crock Pot freezer meal plans that  pop up on Pintrest frequently.  I think I picked a good one though as the original blog entry had a full week’s meal (well 5 days) and then links within to 3 other blog posts she did with 5 more meals each.  I picked a few from each of the posts and made the following:
Meatloaf (although I went with my normal recipe instead of what they posted)
Beef & Beer stew
White Chicken Chili (although I forgot the beans so I used corn.  Not sure how it will turn out but should be similar.)
Honey Sesame Chicken (I also thought I had soy but only had half of what it called for so I used half teriyaki half soy and cut the honey in half. We’ll see about that meal…we may end up eating grilled cheese that night as in the back of my mind I’m expecting a sticky too sweet dish.)
Thai Chicken Wings with Spicy Peanut Sauce.  I’m looking forward to this one a lot.  If it’s good I’ll post it, the ingredients in the sauce were kind of easy-a can of salsa and ginger, lime juice, some soy and peanut butter. 
Chicken Cacciatore
Beef Stroganoff

Obviously I haven’t made any of these before except the meatloaf, but I think most should yield at least two meals and a lunch.  If not more.  The beef stew is in the crock pot and I wasn’t sure I’d get the lid on it so I think we’ll be set for lunches this week with just that. None of these were hard to put together, or something I wouldn’t be able to pull off in the morning anyways. But…take today’s stew for example. I can easily throw beef and some stock in the pot but it’s chopping all those veggies holding me back in the morning.  So having it prepped ahead of time is good for me.  I wrote all the directions out, but most boiled down to "6 hours low.  Make rice & brocoli".  So even Officier could handle it I think.

As far as health concerns go with these meals the only out and out "bad" one is the stroganoff. The honey chicken looks kinda sketchy too given the amount of soy and honey/sugar in it. But I’ll serve it with a good portion of brocoli and probably quinoa instead of rice.  But my real insterest is the time I hopefully save and the money too. Far too often I opt for take out than cooking because it’s normally around 6:30 by the time I get home.

I guess that’s about it.