Monday's Menu and Reviews:

With the holiday and my mom coming into town we didn't use all of our meals again so I had to bump some to this week. And it is just inevitable that some things get mixed around and swapped up. So, my lists from now on shall be deemed tentative.

I've decided this will be a regular Monday post for me. I actually make the list on the weekend so that we can get the groceries for it before the week starts. This is good accountability for me even if it is to cyber world. It also forces me to document what we liked and didn't like and my allrecipes.com recipe box is getting streamlined which I love. My next mission to accomplish is to figure out how to make my printer print on 4X6 cards and I'm going to print my recipes out so I can pick back up on THIS system I used for a while last year. The main problem with that was I didn't have all of my recipes on cards and I wasn't using allrecipes.com to the fullest. I will probably hand write my original recipes or family ones b/c I love hand-written things. But I will def. just be printing the ones I get from the web.

Menu:

Enchilada Stack, chips and queso
Billie O'neal's Baked Sandwiches, edamame, Red Hot and Blue potato salad/parmesan baked fries for the girls (I swear I will not bump it again)
Spinach Quiche, sour cream zucchini, fruit
Brown Sugar Chicken, bacon wrapped asparagus, rice
Breaded Italian Chicken, butter beans, steamed broccoli

Reviews from THIS post:

The Brown Sugar Chicken was nothing short of disastrous. I did cut the recipe in half and used fairly thin chicken breast tenders so maybe that would be the reason it shriveled up and died a black gewy death in my crockpot. It was not edible. We ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches instead but in my head I ate at Fuzzy's. I e-mailed my sister's friend that is now my friend by default (love those kinds of friends) who swears by it and gave me some tips. So, I bought some more chicken and I'm giving it another go. Thanks Michawn!

CrockPot Pasta Fagioli. *Sigh* Target's new up & up brand of canned goods are NOT marked well. I have mistakenly bought no-salt added green beans before GAG, and now southwest style diced tomatoes for my Italian soup. Do you see where this is going? Mix the southwest style diced tomatoes and the 1 tablespoon of Tabasco sauce the recipe calls for (sauce that we aren't really great fans of but wanted to give the recipe a whole hearted try despite that) and you get a jacked up knock off soup.

I will make this again when it is about 20 degrees cooler and when I can pay attention to the labels and get the right tomatoes. I will with great confidence ABORT the Tabasco all together. Some tips....don't chop the carrots, buy the bag of skinny baby ones and dump them in. Use dried minced onions instead of fresh chopped (my girls hate onions). Don't add ground beef...add another can of red beans instead and make it vegetarian if your short on cash and time which I always *always* am. And nix the celery all together, but that's just me. I find celery sort of a non-food and pointless and just added a dash of celery salt instead and Levi double hates celery and since he eats just about everything I cook I will cater to his celery hating self.

It is thick like chili and I found that saltines were much much better in this hearty soup than the traditional OG breadstix.

Sort of boring this week. This coming week should be back to normal so I hope we get to try everything. And what's up with all the failed meals? That is just really frustrating. And wasteful. And did I mention, FRUSTRATING? And the soup was for my mom who kindly said it was good and asked for the recipe even though I know it was a strange Southwest-Italian concoction with a weird Tabasco kick.

Since there are no food pictures this week I'll give you a peek into the new color of my kitchen:


And now I LOVE it. Goodbye highlighter lightening-bug-booty-goo green! Hello, Granny Smith Apple-ISH green! It's called asparagus but I have asparagus in my fridge right now and it is not this color. It's hard to tell the difference on the computer screen but it is much much darker than the previous color.