I'M TRYING

Yup - we live here and when it's nice out, we're out!

So, I'm trying to do the menu planning that I talked about here. The plan was to do any remaining grocery shopping on Saturday - I bought most of the stuff at Costco on Friday, but they don't have a great organic/free range selection and often times for the non-frozen stuff the amounts are way too big for us so I need to hit other stores. It was also my MIL's 60th birthday this weekend and the weather was gorgeous, so I didn't shop and I didn't spend all day cooking. We ate, drank, walked, played with the kids and enjoyed ourselves. Oh well, the summers are very short in Vermont and I try to not feel guilty if we spend time enjoying the outdoors while letting other chores go undone.

I did set aside a couple of hourse between outdoor activities and birthday festivities to make some of the OAMM meals and take a shower. I settled on the whole foods menu for august. I was able to make the quinoa salad, tilapia and the flank steak and set that aside - it claims to be 6 meals but the quinoa salad is more of a side dish for our family. I brought half of the salad to the birthday party last night and froze the rest to serve probably with the tilapia another night. It was very easy and it's nice to know that I have the main part of 4 meals in the freezer. I'll just prepare some veggies or salad to serve along side and done.

My plan is to make the rest of the meals over the next couple of evenings and let my husband take care of the kids after dinner while I cook. The quinoa salad called for red peppers, but we have a TON of cherry tomatoes from our CSA so I used those instead and there is a chicken salad that I'm making today that calls for strawberries and I'll use grapes instead since the kids ate all of the strawberries that I bought this morning. What I'm trying to say is - you can swap out ingredients if you need to, don't stress about it.  Also, there isn't a snowballs chance in hell that I'm making tortillas or whole wheat buns. Whatevs.