Meal Planning Monday - 28 May 2012

Urgh! 2 weeks without a proper meal plan and boy, do I feel it! I got suckered into the nasty cycle of too busy to plan, too busy to cook. I know that the time I spend planning repays me multiple times over during the week, so why do I have weeks where I think it's not worth the effort? As a result of the hot weather and my lack of planning, we have been eating far too many processed foods and I feel rubbish as a result. 

Today I found a great blog called Health Bent.It has a lot of delicious sounding recipes that look tasty and healthy. Since I feel the need for a week of proper, healthy meals packed with goodness and flavour, I am using quite a few recipes from there (and because I am being lazy and don't wan to trawl the net searching for inspiration this week). I don't follow a Paleo diet but that is not going to stop me from enjoying these meals.

Pizza Stuffed Sweet Potatoes

Hawaiian Bacon Barbecue Burgers

Chicken fajitas with grilled pineapple salsa

Paleo meatloaf (served with wilted spinach)

Maple Mustard Chicken

Spinach and Ricotta stuffed mushrooms

Coffee and Molasses Pulled Pork

Cinnamon Roll Cookie Bars using Homemade Yellow Cake Mix

Chocolate chip biscuits

So there we are. Hopefully I will finish this week feeling a lot better than I am starting it. Not sure how the kids will go with the menu so I may tweak their meals a little.

Enjoy your week everyone. Remember to check out Mrs M's linky for more Meal Planning Monday posts.

Meal Planning Monday - 14 May 2012

Despite my best laid plans, last week's meals were a bit hit-and-miss (and may have included Domino's pizza). I made the chicken and wild rice casserole, which was lovely and comforting on a miserable weeknight. Instead of doing the gammon with grilled peaches, I improvised and made a sauce with peaches, cranberry sauce, red onion and Dijon mustard. It was really nice! I served it with roasted new potatoes (chopped up with skins on, olive oil, and salt). The enchilada casserole ended up being just enchilada's.

This week, I am aiming to cook:

Slow cooker Dijon chicken with spinach 

(this will get eaten as it is in the slow cooker now)
Slow Cooker Honey Sesame Chicken
Quick and delicious weekday chicken
Sausages, brown onion gravy, peas, carrots, and Yorkshire pudding
Courgette, basil and goat's cheese frittata
Meatloaf (beef), mashed potatoes and veg

I have a glut of apples, some shortcrust pastry, and a tin of condensed milk, so I think I may experiment with some sort of caramel apple flan type thing. Even if it looks atrocious, it's bound to taste delicious with those ingredients.

I think I will also bake these no butter sugar biscuits for lunchboxes

As usual, check out Mrs M's Linky for more meal planning posts. I have taken a lot of inspiration from Pinterest this week, and you can see more recipes I have pinned on my Temptingly Tasty Family Food board over there.

Lego Storage Solution

I realised after all my planning and agonising over Lego storage before Christmas, I didn't actually report back with what I had done. It wasn't as grand a solution as I had envisaged, but it is very effective and has stood the test the time. It works really well and has eradicated the random piles of Lego everywhere.

Both my boys are into Lego in a big way, particularly my 9 year old. He needed space to store Lego and more building space as his city was expanding at a rapid rate. It is basically 3 x plastic wheely drawer things, with some clear plastic boxes for smaller things like heads and weapons; with some MDF on top as a building platform. I think it cost about £30 in total. Where the love came in was me sorting boxes (5 x storage tubs) into sizes and pieces. Hours... and ... hours... of.... bloody.... Lego..... sorting. It was worth it though as it is much faster to build things, and I my belief that colour sorting is more for parents-who-like-things-to-look-tidy, rather than for the children who actually use the stuff.

The bottom picture is my 4 year old's room. He has recently been moved into his own room, so just has a generic Lego box, with some shelves. Actually, I love these shelves. They need painting, but they were only £5.50 from eBay. They were from a school and have castors, so can swing around so he can access all 6 shelves, instead of needing someone to reach things down from top shelves for him. His room is quite small and it's handy that they are mobile.

So, there we have it - our Lego storage solution. It's not as glamorous or pretty as some other blogs I have seen, but it's incredibly practical and suits their needs perfectly.

Meal Planning Monday - 7 May 2012

Hello! Sorry, I think  have missed two weeks and I have really felt it. Life has been a lot more disorganised at home and we haven't been eating nearly as well. I kind of lost my cooking mojo when we went on holiday, which is nuts as I know full well that meal planning is the way to go for me. If I don't have to make a decision about what to cook every, then it's all hunky-dory and I enjoy the actual cooking bit.

I have also slightly lost my blogging mojo. I've been doing lots of writing for other people that it has left me with little time and energy to write for myself, but I am determined to make the effort as I do miss at least having a regular meal plan; plus there is so much other SUPER IMPORTANT stuff (ok, triva and pictures... ) in my head that the world needs to know.

Anyway, I've gone back to Pinterest for inspiration, and this week looks like:

Chicken and wild rice casserole

Slow cooker chicken enchilada casserole

vegetable tart tartin

shepherd's pie with some sort of mashed veg topping

Gammon and grilled peaches with new potato and veg

Kung Pao chicken

Left overs

The big news this week is that I have a new cooker (Hooray!) but I am frozen with baking apathy and can't decide what to bake this week (boo!). I would love some suggestions to inspire me please.

That seems to be an awful lot of food there, so some of it may get frozen for other weeks.

Remember to check out Mrs M's Linky for more meal planning ideas