Well the last few days have involved me meal planning. I thought I would try it on my own. I have always purchased pre-prepared meal plans, but much like the pre-made curriculum for Max this has advantages and disadvantages. Mainly, it is hard to customize it, and in the case of meal plans, doesn’t include desert, breakfast or lunch. So you get a great dinner, and mediocre breakfast, lunch and desert… okay maybe not that last one, but you get my picture.
So I signed up for a trial version of a program that helps me do this. So far I love it. It is certainly costing less then our meal plans that we would have pre-prepared.
In order to do this this week though, I needed to get a bit of help. So I purchased 2 books by Kitchen Stewardship. The breakfast and the lunch books.
I set the meal plan up so that it would start this morning. However that is an issue since I went shopping yesterday morning. So I came home and gave Max a peanut butter and honey sandwich while I had a bowl of cold cereal for lunch. Then I went about cooking some cod I got for dinner last night. I LOVE the way it turned out and it was my own recipe so here it is:
My Cod
1/2 – 3/4 cup mayo (I make mine but I bet store bought would work)
2 Tablespoons prepared mustard (dijon or spicy)
1 teaspoon prepared whole mustard seed mustard (this is optional – but I had it so I threw it in)
old bread or season breadcrumbs
Seasoning of your choice if using old bread
4 fillets of cod
olive oil
I combined the mayo and mustard in one bowl.
I then took some old bread ends (that we had in the refrigerator) and toasted them lightly. I then shredded them with my hands and put them in a gallon size zip lock bag. I then took my stick blender to the toast and made bread crumbs. I could have done this in a food processor but the stick blender was needed to make the mayo anyway so why dirty another appliance.
I then put the crumbs in a bowl (roughly 2 cups if I had a guess, but they looked more like panko then the fine bread crumbs you get in the store) and seasoned with about 1 teaspoon all purpose (salt free) seasoning, 1 teaspoon lemon herb seasoning, 1/2 teaspoon (roughly) salt, and probably about 1/4 teaspoon pepper.
I used frozen cod so I made sure to dry it as much as I could with paper towels. I also prepared my 13 by 9 bake pan with putting a layer of olive oil in the bottom (pour in some olive oil and swish it around to coat it).
I then dipped in mayo mixture and then in bread crumbs on both sides and lay in pan. I fixed my finger marks when done with a bit mayo mixture and breadcrumbs.
I put it in a 350 degree oven for 10 minutes, then flipped it. I noticed it needed more oil so I added some more. Then put it back in for another 10 minutes and realized mine needed another 5 minutes more.
It was really tasty and we will have to do this again! Not bad for a spur of the moment meal!
Okay here is our meal plan for this week:
Today:
Breakfast: Sausage and biscuits (made dairy free – my own creation with the framework from the e-book) from Breakfast book (from above link) and eggs
Lunch: Meat muffins, potato salad, fruit of choice from lunch book (from above link)
Dinner will be sweet potato enchiladas and Quick and Easy Shrimp Fried rice
So far we have been very happy! Tony and Max LOVED the meat muffins.
Tomorrow is: Breakfast – left over apple cranberry baked oatmeal
Lunch – fish sandwich (a staple around here, this is pre packaged fish in a roll with mayo and a pickle)
Dinner – Sweet pulled pork sliders and nacho cauliflower (dairy free)
I also hope to make some snickerdoodles and a beet chocolate cake this weekend.
Well it is time for me to start dinner so I will try to update tomorrow. We are getting a bit of a snow storm right now that is said to be changing to ice later (don’t know how that works as it is already dark) so going to church should be fun in the morning. We will see.