Pizza Salad and a Menu

There will be a recipe in this post; I promise. First, I have to digress…

Talk about glitchy. I accidentally posted this draft last night when I went to save it. Ha! So today, you have the udpated version and an idea of how long it really takes a post to make it to viability around here. I started this one over a year ago and have come back in and butchered it and wrote over parts… and now you have the finished product (after an embarrassing display of my draft work). Such is the life of a very busy homeschool mama.

I was glad to have found a menu draft while I was doing some clean up on the blog in my spare time. I’ve been in kitchen mode around here lately. We are doing a scorched earth Dave Ramsey you-don’t-deserve-to-eat-out until you are out of debt thing around here. It’s been over a week since I went anywhere. That sounds like a first world problem, I know. Cue the eye rolls.

Seriously… tho. We are trying to use every single kitchen ingredient we have and go through the freezer to get rid of every single thing before we move. This saves a lot of money, of course, too… and seeing as how we’ve got bills spreading out across Texas right now, that’s alright with me.

I am so glad that deer meat is something the Maker’s Diet allows, y’all. Because my hunter man keeps us well-stocked, and although I have left my 90’s hair behind, I’m glad I got to bring him with me into the future. He’s handy at filling the freezer. He sticks around for the cooking, mostly. I told him I would cook it, but I won’t shoot it.

Just in case you didn’t know, deer is the other grass fed, low fat red meat. Raised free roaming and humanely treated. Butchered by hand and almost indistinguishable next to beef (aside from needing more fat to cook it with). We often use it in all sorts of recipes that require beef or pork (we don’t eat any pork anymore).

My sweetheart’s favorite meal is stuffed bell peppers… and we use mostly deer “breakfast sausage” for most of our ground meat meals (which is cut with beef fat, not pork). Once you get the other spices in the dish, you can’t tell it is deer, and you can’t tell it was spiced out for breakfast sausage.

Here’s our menu for this week… and of course, as with all my menus, I sometimes change the dates to better fit our cravings and use up the produce before it goes bad, but everything past Tuesday lunch is the “goal menu” or “menu draft” for the week. This week’s is made up of about 60% saved magazine recipes from my fat folder of favorites that I’ve torn out of magazines for the past 20 years… about 25% Maker’s Diet recipes from the book… about 10% family faves… and about 5% Pinterest finds. This is not a typical week, though. I’m more creative when we are cutting cost corners!

Monday:

Breakfast — Boys: Cereal with honey / Me: Yogurt, honey, mulberries from the tree out back, plantain chips, REBBL Matcha drink
Lunch — Miso Ramen (made with rice noodles – packets from Natural Grocers) with added veggies, chicken broth, and ginger
Snack — Boys: Apples / Me: spoonful of cashew butter with chia and cardamom
Dinner — Buckwheat pancakes, Applegate cracked pepper breakfast sausages, maple syrup, blueberries

Tuesday:

Breakfast — Quick Migas with crumbled Nacho flavored Beanitos, Fried potatoes
Lunch — Snacks: Berries from the mulberry tree, raw goat cheese, buckwheat bread crisps, apple, spoon of nut butter
Dinner — (image above)… Barley Risotto w/ Spinach and Mascarpone, Roasted Asparagus with Garlic, Baked Salmon

Wednesday:

Breakfast — Oatmeal (from packets I’m trying to get rid of), honey, Dandy Blend coffee substitute
Lunch — Cranberry Turkey Cabbage Wraps, Kombucha
Dinner — Mediterranean Lentil Salad, Creamy Brussel Sprouts, Roasted Spatchcocked Chicken

Dessert — Chipotle Apple Pecan Cake

Thursday:

Breakfast — Mexican Breakfast Scramble, hot tea
Lunch — Simple Lentils, Chicken Salad on Salad, Fizzy Peach Tea
Dinner — Curried Sweet Potato Soup, Sautéed Greens, Indian Cauliflower

Friday:

Breakfast — Cauliflower, Leek Quiche (the boys will most likely eat cereal, so if you want to come share it with me, holler!)
Lunch — Thai Noodles (another version of Pad Thai), Thai Tea (with monk fruit instead of sugar), and Flying Fish Salad (there’s no fish on this salad – it’s just a recipe name from a fancy book and I think she got it from a restaurant)
Dinner — Roasted Corn Tostadas, Cilantro Lime Chicken

Dessert — Peanut Butter Cookies (most likely with almond butter or cashew butter)

Saturday:

Breakfast — Blueberry Sunrise Smoothie
Lunch — Chopped Holiday Salad (purple cabbage base), Chili and Southwest Cornbread (still not sure if I’m doing mole or Texan style chili…)
Dinner — Leftovers (“Must-go”) + clean out the refrigerator and make grocery lists

Sunday:

Breakfast — Cereal
Lunch — Chipotle Tomato Soup with cheese melt “toasts” (still up in the air on what the bread substitute will be), Green Beans with Feta
Dinner — OUT (payday treat) + grocery shopping for next week

Next Monday:

Breakfast — Sweet Potato Hash with Hollandaise and Fried Eggs (boys: definitely cereal! I’m so up for some mom-breakfast company!)
Lunch — Lemon Chicken Soup, Parmesan Orzo Primavera (save leftovers to go with dinner for daddy)
Dinner — Pizzas (Daddy makes these with gluten free crusts, Applegate Turkey Pepperonis, pizza sauce, and mozzarella cheese) / Pizza Salad for mama (recipe below)

Dessert — Daddy’s grain free brownies

Next Tuesday:

Breakfast — Cereal and scrambled eggs for boys / Fried Eggs and Ezekiel Toast with sugarless blackberry jelly for me
Lunch — Taco Salad, Lavender Blueberry Lemonade
Dinner — BBQ Baked White Beans with Peppers, Vegetarian Hot-dog Wienies

Dessert — Peaches & Cream Smoothie

At some point during the week I’ll be making chicken broth also… and we most likely will have zesty popcorn on Tuesday next week and a movie night (trying to change our weekly habit to exclude “Taco Tuesday” eating out). Daddy makes popcorn in the popper, so I’ll have to go dig through the storage bin and see if I can find it (we packed a lot of our stuff and took it to storage when we thought our house was going to close and sell).

My eldest will probably wander in to Starbucks during the week, too. I can’t break him of this habit, no matter how hard I try. That Crystal Ball Frapp nearly did him in. Since sister works there, he always gets a discount, which makes it all that much harder to give up the sugar.

Speaking of Starbucks… every once in a rare blue moon, my girlie will make me one of their green tea frapps, but for the most part, I just get hot herbal tea or a big iced water.

My Matcha Frapp order goes like this:
Grande (Medium)
Green Tea
Frappucino
NO BASE, sub 1 pump of skinny base (there is sugar in the base, and less sugar in the skinny base)
1 extra scoop of green tea (to hide the coffee flavor of the skinny base)
NO WHIP (not because of the fat – because of the syrups they use to sweeten the whip)

… Cost is over 5$ without discount, coupon, or a nice person in line in front of you paying for your drink just because. You’ve been warned… but it’s the least sugary frapp they make.

After that mouthful, it is never a guarantee that any drink they make me will be the same as the last one I got… and sometimes they add the two bases together, making it ultra sweet. All the benefits of the matcha seem to be negated by the sugar they cut it with, which makes me very sad indeed. My daughter can make a sugar-free green tea frapp at home that is divine… honey and stevia only. She even makes home made whip! Too bad she doesn’t LIVE AT HOME.

Home made version:

They need to make her the president of Starbucks. Or maybe she just needs to open a healthy alternative to Starbucks and get rich? Hopefully she’ll remember the little people when she gets there.

Before my cancer diagnosis when I did drink coffee, my order was:
Venti (large)
Iced Coffee
With Cream
No syrups or sugars

…Cost was under 3$ and aside from the caffeine and acid in the coffee, this is a much better deal if it is before noon. Otherwise, prepare to stay up reeeeally late with a racing heart. You can also do this same type of sugarless drink with espresso instead of iced coffee, but it contains FOUR shots, so there may be a jitter-bug in your pants if you don’t order it decaf.

So there you have it… if you are trying to avoid sugar, there are options at Starbucks. The Peach Tranquility tea is not at all bad, either. I kind of burned out on the Passion tea. I do the Emperor’s Green sometimes, too… or I get an Earl Grey London Fog with almond milk (but I heard they switched their Almond Milk brand to the sugary kind, too!).

In case you need more reasons to NOT CONSUME SUGAR:  you can watch this sugar-is-evil documentary (“That Sugar Film“)… if fighting cancer is not a good enough reason. It is for me!

Over the holidays last year, we watched the “Caffeinated” documentary on Netflix — which is a real eye opener about all things coffee (my other adult family members are all addicted) and had me in tears thinking of how much the coffee business is helping people survive in other countries where coffee is grown. I was probably just PMSing. I cry during commercials. It’s pathetic.

My favorite Starbucks Mug is this one. They still sell it. I’ve had mine for nearly a year now. We fight over coffee mugs in this house, but I always use them to brew hot tea, thus they are tea mugs for me.

I’m off to make dinner. Wish me luck sticking to this menu plan. There are NO CHIPS or snacks that are easy to eat in my house right now. Today’s desperate snacky lunch was proof that even with no visible packaged food, there is hope that you won’t starve. We had a dental appointment, so lunch was “skipped”. I had better get creative, or they will be begging me for drive-thru Freddy’s burgers for sure.

OH, yeah… here’s the Pizza Salad Recipe, as promised!