The evolution of a meal - or two

The weather has been so nice and I have been so busy that I have been neglecting this poor blog for a few days. Let me catch you up on dinner.

Using up leftovers and produce before it goes bad is the name of the game around here. Here is a glimpse of the craziness that goes on in my head when I am planning what to do - Wednesday evening the boys have a commitment until 8, so Wednesday morning I put some spaghetti sauce in the crockpot, with the intention if making spaghetti for dinner. Halfway through the day I noticed that we had 5 green peppers that needed to be used, so spaghetti became green peppers. Traditionally, I stuff peppers the way my mom does - raw ground meat, rice and seasonings packed into the pepper, baked and topped with tomato sauce. Because I follow the Simply Filling technique on Weight Watchers, I can eat potatoes, rice or pasta once a day without counting points for it. Since I am 1 freaking pound away from losing 50 lbs and I'll be damned if I don't make it this week, I am not using any of my weekly points unless I have to. We had potatoes for lunch, so rice was out. I also only had frozen ground turkey that I could brown from frozen, so the stuffing had to either use cooked ground turkey or no meat at all. I tossed around the idea of quinoa, lentils and beans (I have used all to stuff peppers before) but decided to brown the turkey with some onions and minced garlic. When I got home at 8:15, I blanched the peppers, mixed some ground meat with some spaghetti sauce and Italian seasoning and stuffed the peppers. Topped with provolone cheese and baked until the corn on the cob I made for a side dish was done. (The filling, peppers and sauce was already hot, so we were just basically melting and browning the cheese.)

Whew! Sounds like a lot, but the "thinking" part only took about 2 minutes.

Here is another, much less crazy sounding way to evolve dinner.

Yesterday the weather was gorgeous. 75 degrees, sunny and niiiiice. Marty was off, so we watched some movies, they played some video games and then we headed to the library and park. I didn't want to have to come home and make dinner, so it was the perfect time for crockpot soup. In the morning I made some beef broth (water and better than bouillon) and cleaned out the refrigerator. There was a bit of cooked ground turkey from the night before, and some celery and carrots that were on their last legs. Add some onion and garlic and you have a pretty good soup base. There was a container of cooked brown rice from a few days before, so in it went. I raided my stash of freezer beans and added 1 cans worth of both kidney and cannellini beans. While in the freezer I noticed an almost empty bag of frozen corn and grabbed a few handfuls of frozen green beans, for good measure. At this point the soup just screamed for some tomatoes, so I added a 28oz can of whole tomatoes with basil. I cranked the crockpot to high and let it cook all day. When we were ready to eat, we checked for seasonings and served it with some cheese toast.

Whenever I make something that I think will be met with less than excited faces, I try to make something fun to go with it. Toasted gluten free bread with cheese on top did the trick. As an added bonus, I made the apple crisp like stuff that they love.

Both dinners used the crockpot, but that is only because I still have not found the right stockpot. You do not need a crockpot to use leftovers, but it really does help.

Oh! Tomatoes! The tomatoes that I used in the soup I got for 50¢ a can at the dollar store - so of course I bought 2 flats. It doesn't look like they sell them anymore - at least at my grocery store - but a 28 oz can of whole tomatoes of the same brand was $1.60. Not a bad deal!