Weekly meals + recipe recap

As I began meal planning this week I realized I was less concerned about our actual meals and more concerned about what we would have to snack on...I never buy snacks at the store. We don't have chips, pretzels, cookies, granola bars, or popcorn in our pantry. I tend avoid the snack isle because 1) our food/lifestyle preferences don't really include many of the things offered and 2) when we do get snacks (spicy nacho doritos) we usually end up killing the entire bag in one seating. I generally keep mixed nuts and dried / fresh fruit around for when we get hungry in between meals but lately that hasn't been cutting it. So, while I did plan out some meals for us to eat this week, I also though up a few things for us to have on hand to snack on

Here's what we have on the menu for this week

• Chicken crust pizza with salad
• Breakfast for dinner - Paleo pancakes, eggs, and sausage
• Meatloaf  with beet "chips" & salad
• Valentines day dinner: Steak, crash hot potatoes, buttermilk biscuits, roasted veggies, and fondue for dessert
• Fish with roasted veggies, salad, and squash
• Chili Colorado

Snacks:

• bacon wrapped egg muffins
• Raw cookie dough bites (with honey instead of agave)
• Fruit and nut bars

Some notes on last week's meals:

Last week I spend about 20-30 minutes doing some minor food prep for the week and I could not believe how much time and mental energy it saved me in the end. After grocery shopping last week I washed 3 Romaine hearts and tossed them in a giant bowl with a bag of spinach and some baby kale and swiss chard. In another bowl I cut up a bell pepper and one cucumber and threw in some broccoli slaw as well. Both bowls went into the fridge and we had ready prepped salad stuff for the whole week. Jeff takes a salad for lunch almost every day so having everything ready to go with no additional work before bed each night was AWESOME. This week I plan to do the same as well as make the egg muffins, cookie dough bites, and fruit and nut bars so we can have those made and ready to go for the week as well. 

Now back to the food - 

Last weeks meals were good but the best were the asian meatballs with cauliflower rice and the beef and sweet potato stew

• My cauliflower rice turned out so much better this time because I cut as much of the stalk off as I could before processing the cauliflower. If you leave too much of the stalk on it gets mushy and gross when you cook it. We also made some pot sticker sauce to drizzle over the meatballs and cauliflower this time.SO so good. Just mix a few tablespoons of soy sauce, a couple of teaspoons of garlic chili paste, and a teaspoon or so of white wine vinegar together for a delicious sauce
• I was originally going to make this beef and butternut squash stew but I didn't like how the butternut squash turned out last time I put it in this stew so I switched up the recipe a bit. I used 2lbs stew meat, browned it in my dutch oven, threw in the onion and garlic, then added the beef broth + spices and brought it to a boil. Then I added in 2 potatoes, a parsnip, a sweet potato, and the mushrooms. Covered and let it all simmer for 4 hours or so. It was super yummy