Weekly Eats: Food Prep Extravaganza

A weekly round up: eats, watches, and reads.  In this week's edition, I made like a duck and kept calm on the surface while paddling madly underneath to keep up with a crazy work week and to restock my freezer with some yummy meals.  And we found a dinner winner that the whole family enjoyed.

Breakfasts
I was not into taking pictures this week!  The usual suspects of avocado toast, breakfast burritos, and homemade Egg McMuffin sandwiches ensured.  On Saturday I fueled a 10k with a Clif bar, and on Sunday I grabbed everything that looked good in the fridge and rolled it into a spontaneous breakfast quesadilla.

Lunches
Monday: veggie lasagna with a salad...yes friends lasagna does not reheat peacefully in the microwave.  This is exactly why I can never have Instagram.

Tuesday: spinach artichoke pasta with a salad

Wednesday, Thursday, & Friday: lunches at work

Saturday: meal prep exhibit #1 and it's a winner. Boursin Pasta via Baked Bree.  Only there's no boursin.  I stopped by the grocery story on my way home from a race that morning and couldn't find it.  I grabbed some veggie flavored cream cheese figuring that would be close enough.  And I also added a can of artichokes because I felt like the recipe was crying out for them.

The only beef I have with the recipe is that it didn't say how much pasta to use.  The instructions were "one box" and in the pictures it looked like a one pound box.  That seemed like a lot in proportion to the rest of the ingredients and a recipe that makes 4-6 servings.  I ended up using 8 ounces of pasta and getting four servings (one for lunch and three leftover servings for the freezer).  And I have no beef with anything else because this was delicious and my beloved spinach artichoke pasta recipe is feeling threatened by the new kid in town.

Sunday: skipped, late breakfast/early dinner

Dinners
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday: nothing to see here folks.  Very late nights at work and a lot of office snacks went down.  #accountingthuglife

Thursday (date night): yay I do have a home after all and sometimes I eat meals there.  Grilled cheese and tomato soup.

Friday (single girl night): I have a home but my family was off at boy scout camp.  Veggie burrito.

Saturday: the annual Boy Scout Camp Christmas Family Dinner.  Ham, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and gravy.  The food is basically school cafeteria quality, but I had run a 10k that morning and cafeteria food never tasted so good.  I inhaled my plate.  The boys were greatly amused because adults were limited to one cookie for dessert but kids got two.

Sunday (family meal): oh guys we have a family dinner winner here.  It's Copycat Panda Express Bejing Beef, which I'd made once before and it went over well with the adults and Ok with the kids.  But this time the kids were crazy about it.  Maybe because they'd just come home from a weekend of cafeteria food at scout camp but whatever the magic was I will take it.

This time I skipped the corn starch/egg marinade, which I found to be very cumbersome and didn't add anything to the recipe.  In it's place I just stir fried the beef which was so much faster, easier, and better tasting (IMO).  I added in broccoli to bulk things out.

I couldn't remember if the recipe made enough sauce so I doubled the sauce recipe, only to find that yes it has enough sauce so I had a ton extra on my hands, which went toward meal prep.

Meal Prep
In spite off all of the chaos of a busy work week and the holiday last week, I am finally caught up on meal prep (for myself, still working on what the heck the family wants to eat and figuring out how crazy our holiday schedule is about to get).

• Wednesday before Thanksgiving: made a batch of veggie burritos.  That was the most time consuming project but also the one with the biggest payoff since the recipe makes so many.

• Also on Thanksgiving weekend, another batch of breakfast burritos. 

• The pasta on Saturday that I talked about above

• Tofu stir fry with red pepper, carrots, udon noodles and Pinch of Yum's Korean BBQ sauce. 

• I had planned to make a double batch of the Korean BBQ sauce stir fry, but I also needed to do something with the leftover sauce from Sunday's dinner.  The stepsons both like tofu (hubs doesn't mind it, it's just that given a choice he'd rather have meat) and that was what I had so I baked the tofu and mixed it with a bunch of veggies in the leftover sauce.  The plan for next week is that hubs will have the leftover beef and the kids and I will have the tofu. 

• And last but not least: Christmas will be here soon so I kicked off the Christmas baking season with a batch of eggnog fudge.

Watching
Hubs and I finished Stan Against Evil.  On the treadmill I'm almost done with season 2 of Suits.  I realized that I'm overstocked for treadmill TV shows right now.  I'm alternating each season of Suits with a season of something else, and I have Line of Duty, another season of Call the Midwives, and Outlander will be back next spring, so I have more TV stocked up than treadmill time.  So I treated myself to season 3 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on the couch.  It really feels like I should be on the treadmill running instead of sitting on my behind but I'm glad the show is back.

Reading
I reread an old favorite, A Meddler and Her Murder by Joyce Porter, and had forgotten how good it was.  Currently deep in a new good one, Force of Nature by Jane Harper.