The First Bite: Sunday Recipe Dump

I knew this would happen...I could see it coming from a mile away...I knew I would get busy and the first thing to fall to the wayside would be this blog. I'd be one of those bloggers who have all the gusto and intentions of being diligent about this project and then after a couple months become one of the hundreds of thousands of people who suck up domain names and space on the internet with their abandoned blogs. However, all excuses for my hiatus aside, I'm happy to say I'm busy because I got a full-time job again and now I'm getting back into my Sunday meal-planning routine. When I'm working, I know that there is no task I hate more than the after-work grocery stop because I know don't have what I need to pull something together for dinner. So the best defensive against this is an offensive Sunday dinner plan. I take a few hours on Sunday mornings to plow through my latest recipe magazines, favorite cookbooks and old favorites and pull out 3-4 recipes to make that week, make a list and head to the grocery store. For our little family of two, 3-4 dinner recipes will feed us for a whole week with leftovers for a couple other dinner nights and lunches. Getting into this habit has been monumental for us because without it, I'm usually a cranky person when I feel like I'm constantly scrambling on what to make and making more than couple trips to a grocery store in a week. Jon is also tasked with making dinner one night a week and I let him know that if he doesn't get his request in by the Sunday list, he's on his own for getting supplies!

Anyways, why am I telling you all of this? Because this blog entry is my recipe dump on what I made and planned for last week and I'm considering adding blog-writing to the usual Sunday meal-planning commitment. So, ta-da!! Welcome to my Sunday. The recipes I'm sharing come from my Cooking Light, Clean Eating subscriptions and one from a random SELF magazine that I received in the mail. All the recipes were fairly easy and quick to pull together on a weeknight. The "Thai Turkey Lettuce Wraps", from SELF, were spicy and deliciously messy. My recommendation for the "Thai Chicken Soup", Cooking Light, (yeah, it was a Thai kind of week) is get the pre-cooked rotisserie chicken; the soup was good but needed that extra flavor from the roasted chicken. The "Chicken in Parchment", Cleaning Eating was very simple and if you can find the parchment packets, opt for that, but I loved how pretty it all looked. The "Crispy Salmon with Carrot-Ginger Vinaigrette", Cooking Light, is going to be a new standard! I loved the carrot-ginger dressing and we had it on shrimp later in the week. Alright, so now I'm off to plan our meals for this week!