Weekly Menu - week of April 20

Time to plan next week's menu! As I've mentioned many times before, we have really been striving to eat a vegetarian diet at home. I shoot to also avoid dairy products when I can, but to be honest, they're just not something I'm willing to give up completely. ; ) Sometimes we'll have seafood at home, like tuna sandwiches, but I think there have only been 3 or 4 times in the last 4 months that I've cooked with chicken, beef or pork. We eat whatever we want when we're at restaurants or someone's house, so it's not like we're depriving ourselves or anything, but I do sometimes miss cooking meat at home. All that being said, tonight we decided to start having one carnivorous night at home per week. And this week that'll be pork chops, something Brad has really been craving lately.

The rest of the week, though, is decidedly vegetarian, with just a little dairy here and there, like the cheese sandwiches tomorrow, blue cheese in the grits on Monday, and cream in the korma on Thursday. It's all about balance, right? ; )

After planning out this menu, I noticed that it's going to be a fairly noodle-heavy week. I didn't intend that; those are just recipes that sounded good, and hey, that's a good thing because noodles are cheap! We just adopted the most adorable dog on Monday, which was a significant financial outlay by the time we paid for food, supplies, a crate, toys, and so forth, so a cheap menu this week will be a good thing.

And as long as I'm on the subject, here's a picture of our sweet dog, Gretel. Isn't she cute??? She's 5 months old, a nice medium-sized dog at about 25 lbs, and she's so well behaved and sweet. We are so smitten! We ran into some people from her animal shelter at Petco today, and they were so excited to see her. We didn't know this when we adopted her Monday, but she was scheduled to be euthanized this past Thursday, so if we hadn't adopted her, odds are she wouldn't be alive right now. I'm so glad it worked out for all of us!



Ok, now for next week's menu:

Sunday - Grilled cheese sandwiches, extreme tots, rainbow jello

Monday - Chinese five spice pork chops, blue cheese grits, applesauce

Tuesday - Asian Noodle Salad

Wednesday - Peanut noodles Domino's Pizza, 3 for $12 instead. We can't afford NOT to for that price! And we'll have the peanut noodles another time instead.

Thursday - Vegetarian korma and flat bread

Friday - Pad Thai We ate out at Corky's BBQ because we were out running errands until late.

Saturday - leftovers Jambalaya and French bread