Weekly Eats: Christmas Decorations

A weekly round up: eats, watches, and reads.  In this week's edition I made beef brisket, had a mac n'cheese mishap, and found a dreamy s'mores pie.   In other news our Christmas decorations are up.

 

Breakfasts

Still keeping it fancy with the smoked salmon bagels after my workouts.

There's no better way to start the weekend than with air fryer French Toast

Lunches

Huh, this doesn't look like lunch does it?  But it is!  I've been on a noon omlette and air fryer hashbrown spree. The omlette is stuffed with Trader Joe's mushroom medley and fire roasted onions and peppers mix.

 

Dinners

Monday: we had leftover fried rice from Sunday, but only enough for three servings.  I let the guys have it while I tore into my freezer stash of spinach artichoke pasta.

Tuesday: I was fresh out of ideas, so I went the mac n'cheese route.  Hubs dispatched stepson #1 to make mac n'cheese.  He told me that he didn't remember how to make it, and I said no problem.  It wasn't a problem until the water boiled and he put the pasta in.  He asked what to do with the cheese packet and I said "just set it aside"...which got to his ears as "just put it inside" so yes he dumped the cheese powder into the pasta water.

So hey mistakes do happen and learning to fix them is part of the cooking process.  We did a save with the cheese packet from another box (saving that pasta for a future chili mac night).  Hubs said that once upon a time when he was at boy scout camp one of his best friends did the same thing, but they were out in the woods with no spare cheese powder so their fix was to have "mac n'cheese soup".
 

Wednesday: just felt like a Chipotle night.

 Thursday: grilled cheese and tomato soup.

Friday: mandatory pizza night and a huge step up for our family.  Two pizzas are no longer adequate to feed us so we went wild and ordered three.  Hubs and stepson #2 split a large pepperoni, stepson #1 had a white pizza with spinach, and I had an "everything" pizza with a thin crust.  Thanks for asking, but stepson #1 and I did not eat an entire pizza each (though just sayin' we both could if we set our minds to it).  We had a nice dinner and finished our pies off for weekend lunches.

Saturday: mandatory burger night.

Dessert was The Girl Who Ate Everything's S'mores Pie and I am going to support you in making your own to judge for yourself.  Just FYI "1 cup of marshmallow creme" is approximately equal to a 7 oz container so the next time I'll just use the entire container.  I used chocolate chips on the inside of the pie and saved the Hersey's for the top, and needed some extra marshmallows to fill up the pie.  And oh, it's also not necessary to grease the pan...I don't know this because I was on a mission to save us one spray of oil, I know this because I don't read directions and missed that step.

My family definitely has favorite formats for our treats.  Banana bread = muffins>loaves.  Cake = cupcakes>layer cake.  But chocolate chips cookies and s'mores are definitely preferred in pie format.  We will definitely be making this one again and again.

Sunday: mandatory "ooh let's have a good old fashioned Sunday dinner" night.  For the first time ever, and with a little help from the ol'Instant Pot, we had beef brisket.

My only "beef" with the recipe is that a 2.5 pound roast cooked down to nothing, so we didn't have as many leftovers as I had hoped for.

Meal Prep and the Plan for Next Week

Lol, totally winging it.

Watching

We saw Paul for family movie night.  Going in I was a little skeptical of a Simon Pegg/Nick Frost movie that I had never heard of.  I mean, you have to figure there's a reason I'd never heard of this movie.  Well, not true.  We loved everything about this movie, not least of all every single actor in it.

For adult viewing, hubs and I saw a few more episodes of our favorite vampire mockumentary What We Do in The Shadows.

On my own I'm slowly but surely chewing my way through season 2 of the Crown.  I hate to say it, but the pace is deadly and the only way I'm getting through it is that  I'm working on a jigsaw puzzle at the same time.  But yet there is something about the show and I'm kinda hooked (in a "doing a jigsaw puzzle at the same time" kind of way).

Reading

Finished Alive, highly recommend for your winter pandemic reading.