New Year, New Menu Plan - Jan 7, 2013

Eila Bean and her birthday cake for Jesus!

Hello everyone! I’m finally back!! I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year. My little family spent the entire month of December having a blast completing all of the items on our Advent activity calendar. We saw Christmas lights in our jammies, we made a birthday cake for Jesus, we watched Christmas movies and drank a LOT of hot chocolate!

My girls decided to leave Santa chips and cheesy salsa - he gets too many cookies!

I was lucky enough to be off work for almost the entire two weeks the kids were off of school. Miss A’s class put on an adorable Christmas concert (though all the songs were about winter, none actually about Christmas), Miss E’s class had a classroom party and I got to hang out and see her play with her little friends and eat snowman cupcakes.

Have you taken down your Christmas decorations yet? After putting ours up mid-November, and having a ton of presents and toys filling the living room, it was such a great feeling deconstructing Christmas. I was really conscious of only putting up the decorations that I truly loved and that had a place in our home this Christmas, so putting Christmas away was really easy!

Sorry for the iPhone pics in this post, I haven't downloaded all of my photos from the real camera!!

Over the weekend, when trying to plan out the menu for this week I decided to clean out and organize our freezers. Mostly this was because I bought groceries and when I opened my mini-deep freeze there was no room for the newly purchased pizzas!

I used the trunk of hubs’ car as my sorting table and pulling e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g out of the deep freeze. As I was going along, I took an inventory on my iPhone of what kinds of food in the freezer. I was surprised to learn that I had four bags of perogies, ELEVEN bags of French fries (I stock up when they go on sale for $1 a bag!) and a few bags of chicken breasts (I thought I was completely out!).

The next thing on the list was menu planning! I printed out a blank January calendar, and started plugging in recipes using ingredients from the freezer inventory! I now have an entire month of dinners planned out and will hopefully be spending very little on groceries this month! I’m also hoping to maybe squeeze in a freezer cooking day at some point this month, but that would be a bonus!!

Recipe for this amazing dish

On the menu this week:

Monday: Perogies and sausage
Tuesday: Teriyaki Chicken Stirfry with Noodles
Wednesday: Lasagne Wednesday
Thursday: BBQ chicken breasts, potatoes and corn
Friday: Butter chicken and steamed rice
Saturday: Dinner out!
Sunday: Tortellini with prawns in boursin sauce

I will be linking my menu up with Org Junkie’s Menu Plan Monday. Come check it out for hundreds of recipes and meal ideas!