Weekly Eats: Mon Apr 16 to Sun Apr 22

A weekly roundup: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  Flank steak vs Flat Iron Steak edition.


Weekday Breakfasts

Avocado and Tomato Toast

Breakfast Burritos

Cereal bar, string cheese, and fruit

Weekend Breakfasts
Surprise...avocado toast with a side of bacon.

Cheddar, egg, sausage, and avocado scramble

Weekday Lunches
M,T,W,H: Budget Bytes sushi bowls.  You're looking at a base of rice (I heat it up for 30 seconds to get the chill out) topped with imitation crab, carrots, cucumber, avocado, sesame seeds, wasabi, pickled ginger, and sriracha mayo. 

F: Baked ziti from the freezer

Weekend Lunches
Snacks both days.  Saturday's snack fest started with a slice of almond butter & honey toast.


Weeknight Dinners
Monday & Tuesday (family meal): leftover tacos!

Wednesday (date night): Flat iron steak on the grill with leftover cilantro lime rice from the tacos and frozen broccoli.  +++Yum! I'd never had flat iron steak before but the grocery store was low on other options so we gave it a try.  Three reasons why you should try it: It's cheap,  It's lean.  It's yummy. 

Thursday (fend for yourself night): he had chicken noodle soup, I had pan fried salmon with the very last of the cilantro lime rice and peas.  The fillet had a very uneven thickness so I was afraid that I would have a mix of overdone and underdone fish on my hands, but the salmon gods were smiling and every bite was perfect. 

Friday (family meal/only child night): Stepson #1 was off at a scouting event, and since stepson #2 isn't very much into food except for cereal bars and chocolate, we didn't strain ourselves.  Ravioli and veggies and then a long walk with stepdog.

Weekend Dinners
Saturday: family birthday party for one of the cousins.  Pizza and ice cream cake.

Sunday (family meal):grilled flank steak with Gimme Some Oven scalloped potatoes. I only made half the recipe because Ali said that it doesn't freeze very well.

So flat iron steak vs flank steak?  Flat iron crushes it!  There was nothing wrong with the flank steak, but I couldn't help but remember how good the flat iron was.

Meal Prep
Breakfast Burritos

Spinach Artichoke Pasta.  I cooked this late on Saturday afternoon about an hour before it was time to leave for the party.  It's a funny thing, I've made this so many times but no one else in the house has ever seemed interested. Hubs was working out and when he was done he came upstairs and said that he was trying to keep focused on his workout but kept smelling delicious food.  The boys both chimed in that they liked the smell as well.  So maybe I'll spring this on them some night.

The final thing that I prepped was a hybrid of Chrissy Teigen's Drunken Noodles and Gimme some oven Korean stir fry.  I made Chrissy's sauce but horror of horrors, didn't have enough soy sauce so I improvised with extra sesame oil and rice wine.  I used tofu and eggs for protein and let the tofu soak in the sauce after cooking it.  I used the veggies and glass noodles called for by Gimme Some Oven.

Other

Workouts:

• Weekdays: the usual round of weights and treadmill runs.
• Saturday: I was determined to run outside no matter what, so for once I didn't let the mid 30's temps stop me.  7 miles!  This is only the 2nd time in my life running this distance.  Last week was 6 miles at 11:44 pace, this week was 7 miles at 11:38 pace.  If I can just keep getting a little bit faster each week... 
• Sunday: outside hills!  I ran up and down a bridge in the park near my house a few times for a total run of 3 miles.

Watching (from the treadmill): A Place to Call Home

Watching (from the couch):

• With hubs: Brooklyn 99 and Ash vs Evil Dead.
• On my own: Boston Marathon 2018 Documentary Special: Qualifying For Boston and a few episodes of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries.

Reading: Finished Tangerine.  This is the book that got blurbed “as if Donna Tartt, Gillian Flynn, and Patricia Highsmith had collaborated on a screenplay to be filmed by Hitchcock—suspenseful and atmospheric.”  My take: yes it's 20,000 times better than anything that I will ever write, but this one is a solid meh.  The excellent: the beginning.  The good: it's a quick read.  The meh: everything else, especially the characters. I just couldn't get into them.  I love the person on Amazon who titled their review "You'll enjoy eating a tangerine more than reading this book."

Your Turn

• What are you cooking this week?
• Have you read Tangerine?  Like or dislike?