Here is the second post in a series sharing the dinners that I have planned for the week at my house, and any food prep or baking that I am doing.
Just a note on last week: I didn’t get around to making the bread rolls, but I hope to this weekend, and everyone keeps eating the bananas before I can make banana bread!
I didn’t really have a meal plan this week, which is why I’m posting it at the end of the week. I just had 2 or 3 recipes I wanted to test out and some pork steaks, chicken breasts and minced beef I wanted to use.
This Week’s Dinners
- Monday: We went out for sushi (bad day, couldn’t face cooking!)
- Tuesday: Thai green chicken curry and rice, and the kids had homemade chicken nuggets with green beans and rice.
The Thai green curry recipe was one I was testing to see if it would be ‘kid-friendly’ if I made my own curry paste and left out the chillies. I made the kids something else for their dinner to take the pressure off and just gave them a small taste. My daughter liked it and asked for more, but my son didn’t like it at all! Typical.
I made and baked the chicken nuggets a couple of weeks ago (testing a recipe using minced chicken) and froze them. They took 15 minutes to heat through in the oven from frozen.
- Wednesday: Minced beef Hungarian goulash with fettuccine.
I have never made goulash with minced beef before, but I thought I’d try it as a change from bolognese. The kids loved it; a definite hit. My son (who has been very suspicious of new dinners lately) had 3 bowlfuls! I adapted a recipe from Annabel Karmel – I’ll post the recipe in the next week or so.
- Thursday: Sausages, potato wedges and slaw.
- Friday: The kids had leftover goulash, and my husband and I had pork, mashed potato, cabbage and homemade honey mustard sauce.
- Saturday: My husband decided on takeaway pizza (and nobody will turn that down!)
- Sunday: Roast chicken, gravy, potatoes and vegetables
Food Prep and Baking
Vegetable sticks – I chopped carrots into sticks while I was making the kids packed lunches on Monday morning as usual. I keep them stored in the fridge in sandwich bags with a little water to keep them fresh and ready to grab for lunches and snacks all week (I change the water every couple of days).
Houmous – I made a batch on Tuesday. My daughter had some in her lunchbox on 2 days this week with crackers and carrot sticks. My son doesn’t like houmous, so he had cheese and crackers on those days.
Popcorn – I made a batch of popcorn for snacks again and put it in an airtight container. This has lasted 3 days so far and there is still some left.
Wholemeal bread rolls – I didn’t have time to make these last week, so I’ll do them on Sunday.
Energy/Protein/Bliss balls – The first recipe I tried last week was ‘too datey’ for the kids, so I tried making up my own, more chocolatey recipe and it was a sticky mess! Back to the drawing board…
Banana bread?? – I’m going to have to hide 3 bananas so I can make this at last!
I’ve been less organised this week, but I still had enough ideas for meals to see us through, even if I didn’t have it all written down at the beginning of the week. Not having a dinner plan fully worked out did make choosing what to cook more tiring though (because I had to think about it again every day), and I can feel ‘choosing dinner fatigue’ setting in! I think as an experiment I will get the kids to choose 3 dinners each for next week’s meal plan. I also had to go shopping more times to pick up random things, which took more time, and I bought a few ‘extras’ each time, so I spent more money.
See my post on Meal Planning in 5 Steps here.
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