Meal Planning 1

At my work there are a lot of young male engineers who's diet mainly consists of whatever can be removed from the freezer and cooked in a toaster oven or microwave. Heck, in university a healthy meal for me was sitting down to some tostitos, salsa and sour cream (veggies, protein and starch!)!! But after school I started learning how to cook. Initially I dabbled with bottles of butter chicken sauce and just added chicken and veggies and rice but progressively I tried new recipes.

One day a colleague and I were talking and he said he'd love it if someone sat down and told him what to cook every night and what to buy at the grocery store. This got me to thinking about my own erratic meal planning whatever I was doing. So I started making meal plans for my week to guarantee healthy eating and push some prep to the weekend when I had more time. I did this for about a month when the same colleague told me he was still eating at McDonald's. He's pretty fit, he does cross fit thrice per week but wasn't getting all that much fitter! As well, we all know you can't outrun your fork.

I started to electronify my meal plans and put them on google docs so he could use the same meal plans I did and hopefully stop eating at McDonalds *puke*. Not that I'm full on against McDs, they have great coffee and it's hard to make an egg mcmuffin all that bad for you. But not every meal of every day....

So here are the five meals and below that is your materials required, or what some might call a grocery list:

Monday: Salmon & Asparagus foil wrap BBQ/Oven

Tuesday: Cauliflower sauce & brown rice pasta

Wednesday: Meatloaf

Thursday: Paleo Spaghetti, can replace tomato sauce w/ pesto when on sale

Friday: Slow cooker roast beef (I'll post the recipe for this shortly)

Groceries

Monday:

Salmon

Dijon

Honey

Horseradish

Asparagus

Olive Oil

Tuesday:

Cauliflower

Brown Rice Pasta

Garlic Cloves

Vegetable Broth

Butter

Milk

Wednesday:

Ground Beef

Potato

Carrot

Cheese

Ketchup

Egg

Spices

Thursday:

Spaghetti Squash

Salt & Pepper

Olive Oil

Spaghetti Sauce or Pesto

Ground Beef

Vegetables for sauce like mushrooms, bell peppers, onions

Friday:

Roasting Beef

Potato

Veggies

Beef Broth

Cornstarch

Garlic Cloves

Salt & Pepper

Ice Cream (kidding.)

18 Weeks of Crop Share - Week 3

Hey everybody!

So rather than just sharing what we got in our food box each week I've decided instead to share what we did with some of the items in our food box :)

The first and least complicated was lunch on Tuesday:

We had a somewhat traditional European meal of smoked havarti, spicy cherico and spelt bread (and some butter for the bread). The bread was from our food box but it was all delicious!!

Next I whipped up a Strawberry Mint Salad:

Check out the hyperlink above for ingredients and directions!

The next one was made by Alexandre, he put together a Kale soup of sorts. I'll do my best to describe each picture but to be honest my largest participation in this was chopping ingredients as they came and consuming the end product :D 

Fry the garlic and either oil or butter!

Add the onions to fry!

Cut the stem out of the kale and chop it up, toss it in the pot with the garlic, onion and butter.

Chop the tomatoes, garlic scales and green onion, while the kale cooks

Add the broth to the pot!

Add the tomatoes, garlic scapes and onion to the pot :) 

Not sure what was put in the blender... more to follow on this one! I'm certain there were white navy beans in there and some other kind of white beans... and their juices from the cans, maybe that's it? 

Pour the contents of the blender into the pot, mmmm needed a bigger pot since he doubled the recipe!

Last step: ENJOY! I think this is the recipe he used :) 

How do you try new things and incorporate them into your meals? What's your favourite recent new find? 

KitKat I Am Unimpressed.

A few days ago my Samsung Galaxy SIII Android phone informed it was going to update to 4.4.2, YAY! normally. But this time not so much... I'm not going to go through every change I noticed because I didn't honestly see many, just a few glaring ones:

1. The GPS icon in my pull down menu has been replaced with a "location" marker. This seems to be tied to my GPS which means that I can have both on or both off... my weather app seems to lag but eventually catch up and figure out where I am.

2. The battery gets murdered after turning on my camera. I did some digging and it looks like there's a bug generated when the camera is turned on. I did an experiment where I turned on the camera then shut down the program by holding the home button and swiping it away, the battery still died fast. So next I'm going to try rebooting after I use the camera.

Have you recently updated to 4.4.2? How are you liking it?