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Last week I didn’t really put a menu plan together. Not putting a menu plan together actually worked pretty well. BUT not well enough that I’m comfortable winging it this also! So I’m putting together a loose menu plan for main dishes. We should have a few things ripen in the garden this week to add to the plan plus whatever produce we find at the farmers market this week.
We got our beef CSA this past week so we have several packages of beef now. One nice big package of tip steak will become two meals this week. We’ll also do a batch of Stretchy Black Beans (three meals). I have several chicken carcasses in the freezer. We cut the meat off (see in this post) and then save the carcass for broth. There is still a good amount of meat on and I’ll use that for a casserole on Thursday. And hanging out in the freezer is an elk heart given to Joe last hunting season that we’ll chicken fry.
Sunday- I made a yummy custard for brunch. Supper beef tips over egg noodles, corn, tomatoes in cream sauce.
Monday- Crock pot dish made out of rest of beef tips, sauteed squash.
Tuesday- Black Beans & rice (see this post for how we do Stretchy Black Beans)
Wednesday- Stuffed Burritos
Thursday- Some kind of chicken casserole
Friday- Taco Soup
Saturday- Chicken fried elk heart
No Grocery Store Challenge Update
For the month of August we are avoiding the grocery store instead choosing to eat from our garden, farmers market, roadside local produce stands (we don’t have many around here), local farmers/ranches, our well stocked pantry and rapidly emptying freezer. You can read the ‘rules’ here. So far it is going pretty well. Joe mentioned a few days ago how much he liked not having to stop by the store. I’m enjoying that also!
This past week we stopped at a little roadside produce stand. We don’t have many of those around here. I was amazed when I was back on the west coast in July how abundant produce stands are in comparison to here. But this one I had found on my way to pick up our milk a couple of weeks ago. We bought zucchini and non-gmo sweet corn. Funny thing, this roadside stand is operated by the same people we bought stuff from at the farmers market.
In addition to the produce we also got our monthly beef CSA. We get 10 pounds of grass fed beef in our CSA. We make that 10 pounds last for the entire month. It had actually been a couple of months since we had our CSA and we would have been completely out of beef if my friend wouldn’t have given us some last week (she gave us the ‘weird’ cuts from her whole beef plus a few extra things). I did also find an old package of beef stew meat lurking in the bottom of the freezer that we got sometime over the winter.
I did a very poor job of keeping track what we ate last week. I know we had some antelope strips in a cream sauce with noodles one night. We also had a very delicious stewed duck. We have Khaki Campbell ducks for eggs. The extra boy ducks go in our freezer. There is not much meat on them and I often just use them for stew and broth. This week I tried something new and stewed a duck all day in the crock pot and then found a recipe for Chinese Stewed Duck and did something like that to finish the duck. It was wonderful! I took a picture (which doesn’t look like much) of our supper that night. I’ll share the recipe in the near future. It is definitely a keeper!
I’ll try to do a better job keeping track this week of our meals. School starts on Monday so we’ll be back to our ‘winter time’ schedule. Lulu is the only child still in school. She is a junior this year. She’ll get on the bus around 6:20 AM. Joe will be back to his school work schedule starting at 10:30 and ending at 7PM. Hunting season started this past week so he’ll be spending his spare time doing that. The first season is archery antelope which he loves. I’m hoping to do more preschool type stuff with our little boy this year. He’ll be five in December (where does the time go?) so I’ll still be keeping it casual. My home based business endeavors are keeping me busy so I’ll be reworking my schedule slightly to accommodate for the preschool stuff. Oh and I added a new endeavor to my work from home stuff so I’ll be fitting that in also! 🙂 It keeps things interesting.
