Wednesday night - March 2, 2011

I had a really busy day yesterday and the afternoon flew past me. So the kids and I decided together to just have pitot topped with olives and tomatoes, with cheese melted on top. I steamed some broccoli to get everyone to eat something green.

So for Wednesday, I'm planning a little better (I'm ok with my fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants dinner, after all, everyone needs to just take care of other things sometimes!)...

Minestrone Soup - since I use such a variety of veggies in my minestrone soup, I think I can sneak some of that cabbage into it without being noticed. And to my son who reads this blog - please don't tell your brother and sisters!

Broccoli Puff - this is a simple mixture of chopped broccoli, cottage cheese, shredded cheese, eggs, a little flour, salt and pepper, baked up till it's golden brown on top. Yummy, a favorite in this house!

Tomato & Mozzarella Salad - my kids love mozzarella cheese, so I just slice up tomatoes, drizzle with olive oil, and add some chunks of mozzarella and some fresh (or dried) basil. You can keep this frugal by using small chunks of cheese, and not so much. Really tomatoes are the star of this salad!

Spicy Roasted Potatoes - Mix olive oil with mustard, garlic powder, and ground black pepper. Cut potatoes into wedges and coat with olive oil/mustard mixture. Roast in a 400 F oven till crispy, golden brown. The kids like to dip them in ketchup....

Monday Night

Aside from the frugal aspect, I'm looking for easy meals. We usually have busy days, and since I homeschool my 4 kids, I really don't have much downtime...ever.

For Monday evening, I'm looking to incorporate leftovers into the plan (I've been trying harder not to have to throw those out. If you have tips to make sure that leftovers get used up, please share! My kids sometimes groan when they see a food served "AGAIN".).

I just took stock of the fridge, and while most of our Shabbat food actually got eaten (and the leftover barley went into the freezer), we have plenty of vegetable noodle soup left!

(By the way, I'm really big on soup right now. It's winter, and we live in a "warm" location in Israel, which means we have a poorly insulated house and not-so-efficient heaters. And it's raining - a good thing! In other words, sometimes it's colder inside our house than out, and I'm too frugal to heat the place all the time!)

So here's what we'll be eating (it's a vegan menu!):

Vegetable-Noodle Soup
Sloppy "Sams" in pitot
Steamed Cauliflower and Broccoli
Oven-crisp Roasted Potato Wedges
I rarely do dessert during the week, but maybe I'll even bake muffins! I have a few wrinkly apples to use up.

Some notes about these foods:

The soup is the same one from Friday night. I keep all my Shabbat soups pareve, so I can use them again during the beginning of the week.

Sloppy Sams are Vegetarian Sloppy Joes. I'm making these with drained and crumbled tofu (I buy these at Kimat Chinam; if you buy 3 tofu cubes at a time, they are 3/23.99 NIS. Does anyone have a better deal to share?), browned in olive oil with diced onion and peppers, cooked with tomato paste, water, and spices. We still haven't worked out the perfect combination of Sloppy Sam spices, so if you have any TNT recipes, please share!

Cauliflower and Broccoli - the cauliflower was on sale for 1 NIS/kilo, so we'll be going heavy on the cauliflower, light on the brocolli. The best price I found for broccoli was 8 NIS/kilo at Yesh. Kimat Chinam was 14 NIS/kilo and Rami Levy something like 17 NIS/kilo. My kids love broccoli, so I figured I would have to continue to buy it and stretch it with the cauliflower...

For the Potato Wedges, I usually combine olive oil, mustard, garlic, salt, and pepper. Mix well with potato wedges (just scrub and cut - leave those peels on so you get the vitamins and trace minerals!), and bake in the oven at 400 F till crispy and turning brown. The kids like to eat them with ketchup...