Day 1: Baked lemon chicken with mushroom sauce, Sauteed asparagus
Day 2: Carrot soup, Banana bran muffins
Day 3: Homemade pizza, Tossed salad with carrots and olives
Day 4: Adobo pork chops, Coleslaw, Fruit salad
Day 5: Pancakes with berries and yogurt, Scrambled eggs with arugula and mushrooms (Be sure to market this as breakfast for dinner!)
Day 6: Emergency meatballs with tomato sauce, Steamed broccoli
Day 7: Honey mustard salmon, Sauteed kale, Mashed sweet potatoes
Notes: We are on the brink of summer and some veggies are starting to become available in the Midwest. Think arugula, mushrooms, asparagus, ramps, green garlic, spring onions, radishes and other various greens in May. Search out these veggies at your farmer’s market or forage for them yourself and add to your egg scrambles, salads, and sautes. Delicious!
Fresh meals are wonderful, but with a little bit of planning, you can have a whole extra week of meals prepared and in the freezer in no time. Double or triple the meatball recipe, cook them up, and freeze in a ziplock bag. They will keep for months and are easy to heat straight from the freezer and add to soup, scrambled eggs, tomato sauce, or just on their own for a snack. Double the carrot soup recipe and freeze half. Double or triple the pancakes and you can freeze the extra cooked ones for a quick breakfast, lunch, or supper. My homemade pizza dough will also keep for a long time in the freezer, you just have to remember to remove it a few hours before you want to work with it or it will be awfully hard to roll out! Dinner is done.
Green Tip of the Week: The days are getting longer in the US which means we naturally will use less electricity for lighting our homes. But there are a lot of other energy suckers that you don’t normally think about. Even if you have most appliances off, they are using “standby” electricity. In order to conserve this energy, you have to turn the appliance off at the source, the plug. You can purchase energy saving power strips that will completely shut off the electricity use when the master appliance is off. For example, you can plug in your TV as the master and when it is off, the Roku, Playstation, DVD player, etc will all be completely off as well. A computer is another great place to put one. You can get the same effect by unplugging things when they are not in use, such as chargers and small appliances. Not only will this save energy, but it will save you money. Win-win!
