MENU: 4/16/15 - 4/22/15

I have another menu up at Frugal Living NW this week. It's completely different from this one, so feel free to check it out. Those ladies want menus from their readers, so I encourage some of you to send one in. You can scroll through some of their past menus to get a feel for the variety of ways they and their readers feed their families.

I didn't have any new recipes on last week's menu, but I did end up making a few new things. One was planned, as it was an ingredient I needed it for an old recipe, but the rest were pretty spontaneous.

* egg & sweet potato scramble - We were out of russets, but did have a sweet potato, so we changed up our usual egg & potato scramble combo for breakfast one day. We added some garlic and onion powders, seasoned salt, and pepper to the mix and it was great!

* hummus - I love hummus and have tried several recipes to make my own, but none of them have been very good. I'd given up a long time ago, but Heidi recently posted something on Facebook about making her own. I tried the recipe she used and loved it. It's good as is, but easy to tweak if the mood strikes.

* Italian sausage mix - I knew I'd be making this because I had to turn the plain sausage in my freezer into Italian sausage for the upside-down pizza I had on the menu. It was tasty and I don't anticipate buying Italian sausage again.

* red lentil & veggie soup - This was a totally spontaneous creation that I came up with when I wanted something warm for lunch one day and raided the kitchen for various ingredients.

Now that the new stuff is out of the way, here is what we have planned for the next seven days.

ADVANCED COOKING (These aren't always planned, so they'll often be things I did the previous week.)
* I made a big batch of garbanzos in the crockpot last week, using two cups for the hummus recipe and freezing the rest in four cup portions in quart-sized freezer bags.
* I'll cook and freeze some bacon for a future meal.
* I'll make peanut butter and crockpot beans, just like I do once or twice every week.

BREAKFASTS
* yogurt/new recipe
* doughnuts at church
* oatmeal with brown sugar, cinnamon, milk, homemade peanut butter, maple almond butter, raisins, dried cranberries, fresh or frozen fruit, huh-koe-pee milk, and/or energy mix as optional toppings x5

DINNERS
* rice, kale, & eggs (chopped garden kale from the freezer)
* sweet potato & chipotle soup (from the freezer)/toast (We skipped this last week because we ate soup and bread at a science fair some little Ws took part in.)
* Jen's chicken (crockpot, raw in in marinade from the freezer/rice/roasted broccoli
* lentils & rice  
* new recipe/broccoli pesto (from the freezer) with pasta
* tacos - seasoned meat from the freezer, crockpot beans, and some other toppings served in a tortilla or bowl, as a salad over a pile of greens, or with mound of rice

* leftovers 

SNACKS & DESSERTS
* lemon bars
* produce
* Crunchy Flax cereal (We've scored a few cases of 12 for $4.99 at a local discount store over the last few months, so we've been using it as a snack. We either eat it with milk as a cold cereal, over yogurt with fruit, or mixed into homemade granola.)

* popcorn with seasoned salt (kernels from the WinCo bulk department that get popped in my Lodge Dutch oven, but you can see my thoughts on both the wonderful Dutch oven and the fantastic West Bend Stir Crazy in this post. )

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