Menu Monday

Over the past week I made these recipes. Thoughts on each below.

• Sun Dried Tomato – Zucchini Risotto & Basil Pesto Pizza – I have made both of these before. As I mentioned in my post last week, these are become fast favorites for us. What I especially love about the risotto is how great it is leftover. I had it for lunch for two days last week. The recipe comes from the Weight Watchers All Time Favorites cookbook.
• Spinach Lasagna (vegetarian) – This was spectacular. It takes a long time to bake (an hour and 15 minutes) but the preparation time was not bad. I had never made lasagna before but I thought I managed it well. Despite being a vegetarian recipe, M really enjoyed this.  He usually falls on the “must eat meat” side of dinner but I was able to sneak in THREE vegetarian dishes this week. If you are new to lasagna and wants something pretty healthful, this is a great recipe to try out: not too many recipes and not too complicated to make.  It also provided 3 meals of leftovers. Below is a picture of a piece (please bear with me as I try to learn how to take decent pictures as it is a goal I have for the next couple of weeks):

• Spinach and Potato Frittata – This recipe is also from the Weight Watcher’s cookbook. The main ingredients for this were red potatoes, eggs (obviously!), and spinach.  I had also never made a frittata before so this was a new experience as well.  Again, M and I both liked this recipe, except next time I think we will cut the potato pieces smaller and only use 4 potatoes instead of 6.  This may make an appearance again this week because it was so quick and easy to make.
• Oven Fried Chicken and Sweet Potato Fries. I should disclose that I love sweet potato fries and think that I have pretty much mastered them, so any meal that involves sweet potato fries has the potential to be a hit no matter what the “main” dish tastes like. I followed the directions in the link to a T, including using bone-in chicken. While the chicken turned out very tender and had a nice little kick to it because of the cayenne, the bone just made eating it sloppy. I think next time I will try this with boneless chicken. The recipe also says to use gallon sized bags to coat the chicken with the “breading” but I didn’t have gallon sized bags. This ended up being quite a messy project because I had to use smaller sandwich bags. I would recommend definitely investing in the larger gallon sized bags
• Curried Chicken with couscous – I actually just made this tonight. I inaccurately reported last week that this was from the WW cookbook but it was actually from my Pampered Chef cookbook. I altered the recipe a bit by leaving out the carrots (because I bought them last week and they were not up to par anymore) and using low fat coconut milk instead of the regular stuff. Frankly, the recipe was a little bland. I am not sure why it turned out this way. Maybe the lack of coconut milk fat? maybe I bought a weak curry? Who knows. Might give it another shot at another point.

Fortunately, most of my new meals this week went really well. We enjoyed all of the dinners except the chicken curry and would have most of them again. M and I are really trying to save money and lose weight and for us the single best way to do this is to eat dinner at home. I think in the past we too easily ate out out of boredom and lack of planning. I am quickly becoming sold on menu planning and really looking forward to future experiments.

Here are the recipes you can look forward to next Monday:

• Matt’s (from No Meat Athlete) Butternut Squash Rissotto
• Quick Avocado Quesadilla with pre-cooked chicken from Roni’s fabulous GreenLiteBites
• Baked Rigatoni & Zucchini also from GreenLiteBites

Eat: Okay today. Had a planned lunch out. I ate a wrap (I’m so predictable). Unfortunately lunches out are somewhat unavoidable in the industry.

Run: Ran 4 miles in 38 minutes! Also warmed-up and cooled-down for a total of 55 minutes on the dreadmill (which, btw, I am hating more and more now that I started running outside. Ironic how I didn’t mind it when it was the only thing I did but now that I know that I can run outside without being miserable I hate running on the treadmill. I think it’s good for intervals/tempo runs but it does get terribly boring.) I was supposed to do 45 minutes at that pace but my legs were surprisingly much more sore from NROLW yesterday than I expected! I liked the workout yesterday but I didn’t think I’d be too sore today and boy was I sadly mistaken. This is not only a good thing, it’s a great thing! I’m so ready for this challenge. Tomorrow is Workout B from Stage 1 so hopefully that is just as good as Workout A.