Menu Planning Monday

Yesterday I made a delicious roasted chicken in the crock pot. It was easy and quite nice to have the smell of herbed chicken wafting through the house all day. It also left me free to play with Hanna, read a book while she was napping, and not have to worry about making dinner other than cutting it and heating up some veggies. I love that.

This never used to happen here. I never planned far enough to have everything I need to hook up a crockpot dish in the morning. But all that has changed.

I’ve started MEAL PLANNING!! Yet another adventure in consistency. I thought I’d start sharing some of the meal planning techniques (ha ha) that I use and some things that help me get dinner on the table and us out of the Mexican restaurant eating 1500 calorie dinners. 🙂

I mentioned meal planning on twitter one day and someone asked if I was planning from the circular. I have to say I am not ~ and probably should be. I did try it once and we saved a lot of money but there’s a bit of a learning curve for me.

With trying to switch to healthy eating and having a super picky eater husband I am just trying to make food fit into the plan right now, I just don’t have the energy to worry if the grocery store is sticking with the plan yet ~ but maybe soon.

I recently read You on A Diet by Dr Oz (you know Oprah’s guy) and he mentioned it helps to decrease your calories if you just have the same lunch (or one meal) every day. That way it becomes routine, you don’t have to think about it, and you don’t have a big chance of making a bad choice.

I have to say this is working VERY well for me. In fact, I’ve done it with both breakfast and lunch. I will be switching them out each week so I don’t get super bored, but it’s working now. I no longer scramble around trying to figure out what to have for lunch and just end up with chips because I can’t think of anything good, or it just gets too late.

We were completely out of groceries so I did our meal plan and shopping on Friday, so far so good. I am going to try to move some of this extra stuff to the weekends ~ which I have decided to take off from working to spend more time with my family, and a little time on the house.

So here’s our plan for the week.  I’ll include some of the recipes ~ if there’s one you want let me know.

Breakfast ~ cheerios with milk and fruit or scrambled eggs with veggies ~ V8

Lunch ~ Bowl of soup and half a sandwich or one whole sandwich I cooked a big pot of vegetable lentil soup over the weekend to have for lunches this week.

Dinner:

Friday: Hawaain Burgers and salad

Sat: Chili and cornbread (we generally use venison for these types of dishes)

Sun: Crockpot Roasted Chicken (recipe below) with Roasted sweet potatoes and green beans

Monday: Mexican Chicken and salad (here’s this easy chicken recipe)

Tues: Leftover Chili

Wed: Mushroom Swiss Chicken and Salad

Thurs: Grilled Salmon pasta side for hubby, cous cous for me and hanna and brocolli (with cheese for hubby) lemon for the girls.

Which brings us back to next week.  We’re on the right track so far, I didn’t make the sweet potatoes last night, hubby was running late, so we just had green beans.

Roasted Crockpot Chicken Recipe

What you need:

3-4 lb whole chicken
1 tsp thyme
1 tsp rosemary
salt and pepper
4-5 cloves garlic
1 c chicken stock
1 tbsp worcestershire sauce
1 small onion
1 stalk of celery

What you do:

Rinse off your chicken inside and out.

quarter the onion and cut the celery into 3 or 4 smaller pieces. Go ahead and use the leaves too.

Put the onion and celery inside the cavity of the chicken (make sure you took out the giblets if there were any)

Cut the garlic cloves in half

Make a little space between the skin and the chicken and insert the garlic in the pocket.

Place chicken in the crock pot. You can tie the chicken together with kitchen twine ~ I didn’t, and it still worked out fine.

sprinkle thyme and rosemary over the top of the chicken

Add chicken stock and worcestershire sauce around the chicken

Cook on low for 6-8 hours ~ cooking time will depend on the size of your bird and the size of your crockpot.

Make sure the internal temperature of the bird is at least 180 degrees before serving.

TIP: Don’t open the crockpot to check on the chicken. Each time you open your crockpot you let out the heat, and increase the cooking time by about 30 minutes. 🙂 It’ll be fine. I promise.

If you need more chicken ideas check out my Easy Chicken Recipes blog and look out for my soon to be chicken crockpot recipes site as well. You can also get recipes sent to your computer daily and help meal planning with Send Me Recipes.