Here’s your weekly peek at the Happy Healthy Mama family dinner table.
Sunday
Vegetable lasagna. I don’t have a recipe as I never use one when making veggie lasagna. (If you need one let me know and next time I make it I’ll write down what I do and post it for ya!)
A friend of mine recently had a baby, and I was scheduled to bring her a dinner on Monday. So I made a double batch of the lasagna. Then I realized I wasn’t actually scheduled to bring her dinner until the following Monday (tomorrow). How’s that for mommy brain? The extra batch went into the freezer for us to have at some point. She recently found out her baby is dairy sensitive, so she’ll be getting something different now anyhow.
Monday
Leftover vegetable lasagna. Don’t you just love leftover nights? Some people hate leftovers, but I love having a night off from the kitchen. Even though I enjoy cooking a lot, a break is always good.
Tuesday
For Valentine’s Day, Tim and I did non-traditional gifts to each other. My gift to him? Beef for dinner and “real dessert”. His gift to me? He cooked and cleaned. Our menu included filets and Alton Brown’s Chipotle Smashed Sweet Potatoes. First, these sweet potatoes were fabulous. It was our first time trying this recipe and I can’t wait to have it again. They’re probably too spicy for most kids, but for Tim and me they were excellent. (Usually Meghan eats the same things we are, or we at least offer it to her, but this night we didn’t.) Tim cooked the filets on the grill to a perfect medium rare and they were divine.
Now a word about beef. So many people I know are shocked when they hear I eat beef because they most often see me eating vegetarian, but I do eat meat. I just eat it a lot less than the average American. Beef is a good source of easily absorbed iron, (important for pregnant and nursing mothers!) and it is also high in zinc, selenium, and vitamin B12. So beef can be healthful to eat, I just think it’s important to keep in mind two things when buying it: kind and clean. Kind: I refuse to buy factory farmed meat. Look for meat from small, local farms or ones that are certified humane. Clean: Organic, grass-fed beef is best. At a minimum you want the beef to come from farms that don’t administer hormones or antibiotics.
For dessert we used this recipe for chocolate lava cakes. We went all out sugar, white flour, the whole nine yards. Oh my chocolate. They were incredible. Super easy, too! If you are looking for a splurge dessert that you don’t have to be a pastry chef to make, this is it.
Wednesday
Italian style lentil soup with a salad. I make this soup so much in the winter; we love it.
Thursday
One of my favorite recipes from Vegan Yum Yum
is the Creamy Tomato Barley Risotto. It’s a side dish, though, and I wanted to make it a main dish, so I tweaked it and added broccoli, mushrooms, and white beans to make it more hearty. I loved it. Tim loved it, too, but still thought it was more of a side dish than a main. I disagreed.
Friday
Tortellini Soup from Weekly Bite. I made this last month when I was looking for quick recipes and Tim loved it so much that he requested I make it again. I followed Estella’s recipe except instead of the turkey sausage I used organic chicken sausage links that I sliced. (Yep, meat twice this week.) This could easily be made with something like Field Roast sausages if you want to make it meatless; I may actually try that next time!
Saturday
Smoky grilled tempeh and cheater baked beans from Veganomicon
along with roasted brussels sprouts. The tempeh and baked beans satisfied a craving for summer flavors in the middle of winter. Both were very good; Veganomicon rarely disappoints.
Need some more meal inspiration? Here are meal plans from previous weeks:
What’s the best thing you had for dinner last week? How much meat do you typically eat in a week?
sounds like a great menu 😀
I actually don’t eat that much meat in a week…usually some chicken here or there!
i have that cookbook!! its so good to. Hearty vegan meals make it easier to have a meatless week, ya know?
Your menu sounds great! We have our freezer stocked with venison since hunting season just ended so the hubster is happy to have good meat nightly. I can easily do a vegetarian diet, but he thinks it is horrible to have no meat with dinner. At least I know that is is good, healthy meat. I too do not buy meat from commercial groceries unless I have no other option available.
My husband used to think it wasn’t a meal without meat, but he’s come around. My dad and brothers are hunters so I know what it’s like to have venison in the freezer at all times. I grew up with it!
I aim to eat mostly vegetarian, but I do eat meat sometimes. I’m with you on your meat-eating guidelines.
In fact, the best thing I ate last week was probably homemade baked chicken parmesan and roasted parmesan green beans. I got the chicken from a local organic farmer, and it was fantastic!
Organic meats taste so much better than conventional, don’t they?
They sure do!
Those sweet potatoes sound awesome! My hubby hates sweet potatoes, but loves chipotle. Wonder if he would eat those…hmmm. Worth a shot!
My husband is not a huge fan of sweet potatoes either–I had to really convince him to include those on the menu. Guess what? He LOVED these ones. Seriously. They are so so good.
When my husband is home, we eat meat maybe four times a week. Usually chicken or beef, and he likes fish (me not so much). Being that we live in Alaska, we usually make salmon once a week and he’s the only one who eats it. However, when he’s away, I rarely eat meat at all. In fact, I bought a chicken last week, ate half of it over 3 or 4 days and that was it. I’ve had my fill for the next few weeks.
Oh man–I’ll bet you get wild salmon for so cheap! Lucky! It’s like $35 bucks a pound around here. It’s crazy. So we don’t get fish too often, even though I like it and it’s got so many great health benefits. Oh well.
Oh, we don’t buy it, he catches it. It’s still expensive to buy here, as silly as that seems!
I know what you mean about leftover nights. I love cooking, but man sometimes, it is such a relief to know that all that has to be done for dinner is a reheat.
Although I don’t eat any meat at all, I am always glad to hear when people who do choose eat it, do so only on occasion, and do it responsibly–clean and kind. Factory farming is really bad stuff.
I think if more people just knew about factory farming they’d go out of business! I think the majority of people are just unaware what happens to get that meat on their table. It’s so sad.
I love leftovers!
Your v-day sounds super sweet! I hardly eat beef too, so when I do people always say things like, “I thought you were a vegetarian?!”, which is funny to me!
Even people who know me in real life are surprised to see me eat meat. It’s pretty funny.
I’m with Lee, I don’t eat any beef, chicken, or pork, but, I don’t mind fish. I only cook meat now about twice a month. I just mostly prefer not to have it. Our favorite vegetable lasagna recipe is from dailygarnish.com and it’s the summer vegetable vegan lasagna. It is so delicious that my kids now request it for their birthday dinners.
I love Emily´s recipe, too!!! People just can´t get around the fact its vegan- as if all vegan dishes would taste horrible 😉
I just checked out her recipe. I have tried something similar. For some reason I can’t get myself to love tofu as a stand-in for cheese. I may have to try to develop a tofu-less vegan lasagna!
I don’t eat any beef, chicken or pork, but I eat fish/seafood maybe once a week, I think.
Looks like a great week of dinners! I enjoy a night off from cooking too.
And this is way too uncanny – buuut I have a list of things I want to make/develop recipes for this week and one of them is chipotle mashed sweet potatoes. Weird.
Oh do it–they were fantastic and very husband-friendly.
We do the same with meat. Only organic. It’s easy to find chicken here that is organic but not so much on the beef. It’s a treat anyways so I’m kind of glad it isn’t readily available to us. The lasagna sounds so good. I’m going to start researching recipes now 🙂
Organic beef is hard to come by in regular grocery stores here, too. We have a specialty grocer that sells local and organic meats, so we’re lucky in that way. We also have a number of farms nearby that sell it.