Weekly Meal Plan 1/30/23 – 2/5/23

This week’s meal plan has a few creative meal ideas; eggs you can prep early in the week and eat for lunch, a quick meatless-Monday dinner and a 5 ingredient dinner the whole family is going to love!

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Notes from this week’s meal plan:

Chocolate chip waffles with strawberry cream cheese sauce

• I make this recipe with eggless waffles, but you can, of course, use whatever your favorite waffle recipe is and just add chocolate chips!
• When making the waffles, you can either use buttermilk or make your own!  Tvo make your own, you simply combine milk and lemon juice and let it sit for 5 minutes.
• The recipe calls for using frozen strawberries.  The water content in the frozen berries will help the sauce be more liquid.  If you want to use fresh strawberries, the sauce will just be thicker.
• The strawberry cream cheese sauce was originally inspired by one that Ben picked out of the Let’s Cook: Elmo Cookbook (a cute kids’ cookbook). It was a recipe for strawberry cream cheese stuffed French toast, but we didn’t have 1/2 the ingredients, so we made a sauce and waffles instead.

Quick pickled eggs

• Quick pickling is refrigerator pickling
• This recipe is very vinegar forward
• Marinate for 1-2 days or eat them as soon as one hour after putting them in the refrigerator

Instant Pot Chili con Carne

• Adding great toppings to chili is one of my favorite things to do.  For chili con carne, I like to add any mixture of the below items:
  • Avocados
  • Onions
  • Cheese
  • Sour Cream
  • Lime wedges
• Once you’ve got your toppings figured out, I love to enjoy chili alongside easy sweet potato cornbread muffins or slightly sweet skillet cornbread.
• I use a jar of chipotle salsa for an extra shortcut/time savor, but I’ll share in the recipe how you can use the same ingredients (minced canned chipotle chile in adobo sauce, diced tomatoes, jalapeño and garlic cloves if you don’t have the salsa).
• To give this recipe the final perfect touch, you add a little bit of cornmeal into the soup to thicken it up.

Anything Goes Big Batch Granola

• Pepita coconut (adjust amounts) –  1/2 cup pepitas – pumpkin seeds, ½ cup raisins, 1 cup unsweetened coconut flakes, 1 cup chopped pecans
• Chocolate cherry – 1 cup dried cherries, 1 cup chocolate chunks, 1 cup unsweetened coconut flakesMy two favorite toppings combinations:
• *if using chocolate, add at the end with 5 minutes left of baking time.

Instant Pot Lemon Chicken Risotto

• You can absolutely make this a vegetarian-friendly dish by simply skipping the chicken and opting for vegetable stock instead of chicken stock.

5 Ingredient Skillet Pizza Pot Pie Recipe

• You can use pre-made pizza crust or you can make a homemade pizza crust.
• The oven-safe skillet I use is a LeCreuset, but you can find a more cost-effective option that works great as well!
• I use diced tomatoes with garlic and onion, but you can certainly use plain diced tomatoes and add some garlic.

5 Ingredient Shortcut Danish Pastry (Breakfast Cheesecake)

• This recipe makes 16 servings (you’re making a whole pan) so you can keep it refrigerated and eat it throughout the week (or give some to friends/family.)

Air Fryer Fish Sandwich

• This recipe is a fast food copycat recipe, made healthier.
• Adapted from the amazing Skinnytaste Air Fryer Dinners cookbook