A Spring Break To Remember

Thoughts on Spring Break Cooking And Life In General:

1. I am not sure if I will survive the bumps and bruises of toddlerhood:  Our Spring Break staycation-of-sorts started out with Anderson falling flat on his face on the sidewalk and roughing up his nose.  Tonight it ended with him running smack into the door frame of his room and having a goose-egg on his forehead.  Sigh.  
2. If you do not flatten hamburger patties to the size of very thin dinner plates, they curl up into little hamburger balls.  I was a virgin hamburger griller - I didn't know! 
3. Good friendships are the best thing in the whole, wide world.  Enough Said. 
4. I really liked having a theme for the week's dinner menu.  Which means I've chosen another one for this week.

Besides road rash on Anderson's face, Monday included a steak and asparagus salad that I found by Googling "spring break recipe" for inspiration.  It was really, really good.  And pretty!  A nice, green way to start off our Spring Break Week:

Tuesday we had teriyaki chicken kabobs with brown rice and corn.  I guess I have to do more grilling to find my sweet spot, because these didn't turn out so well.  A little more crispy than kabob, but we ate them anyway.

Wednesday my friend Brett and I got together to make grilled fish tacos for her family, my family, and the family of a friend who just had her first baby.  Brett's daughter Francesca helped out too, while Anderson missed all of the action and napped instead.  We made everything at my house, packed up the food, and delivered it...and I couldn't wait to get back to my house to try it!  It turned out REALLY good.  I'm sorry to say I don't have a picture of the finished product.  I was too hungry.  These will go in my "saved" list of recipes for sure.

Thursday I felt like a genius.  I used the leftover cabbage to make Brett's Granny's Fruit Slaw, and a lot of the ingredients I used for the taco marinade and sauce were in the spicy turkey burgers (now known at our house as  Spicy Turkey Burger Balls).  Being able to use ingredients two nights in a row to make two totally different meals was very satisfying. 

We also tested out some baby baker potatoes given to me by my friend who works at a local, well-known potato corporation.  I'm not sure if I can officially review their potatoes on my blog, so I will leave it to you to google, "What Idaho company supplies McDonalds with all of their potatoes?" and there you will have it.   Either way, the baby bakers were really good.  Seasoned, but not overwhelmingly so.  They also took only 20 minutes to cook from frozen, and they had that good potato quality where the skin kind of pulls away from the inside of the potato.  Yum.  This was a good meal.

I will post the recipe for the Fruit Slaw in separate post, since this one is already getting pretty long. 

Friday we made buffalo chicken pitas and had leftover Fruit Slaw.   I also helped myself to a nice half-bottle of Chardonnay, yes I sure did.  I told you things would get crazy on Spring Break.

We also got out in the sunshine and played at the park on Friday with Anderson's Aunt Tausha and cousin Benjamin!

This week's theme:

Clean Eating

I will write more about Clean Eating (or Eating Clean...haven't decided which name I prefer to use, but there are several variations out there on the internets) next week, but I have been hearing about this a lot and wanted to explore the diet choices and recipes.  So here is the menu and I'll see you all here next week with the low-down:

• Monday:   Leftover spaghetti from the weekend (I'm behind on my grocery run!)
• Tuesday:  Flank Steak Roll with spinach and garlic, fingerling potatoes, and cucumber tomato salad
• Wednesday:  Tilapia Fish Sticks with cucumber yogurt sauce, and sexy summer quinoa salad
• Thursday:  Clean Eating Chicken Picatta
• Friday:  Leftovers

PS - Can you believe it's April?!