Cook Once, Eat All Week—Weeks 6-8
Week 6
This week was pretty divisive in my household, with Bren giving some of the highest scores he’s given while I was meh at best.
I had trouble finding ground chicken—well, I did find some, but it was crazy expensive—so I did this week with ground turkey.
Curried Chicken (Turkey) Lettuce—this was 5/5 for Bren and in his top 5. Just 3/5 for me, but I don’t like curry as much as he does. The trick with lettuce cups is the butter lettuce. Don’t try to get smart and replace it with other lettuce. Only butter lettuce.
Firecracker meatballs—4/5 for Bren, 2/5 for me. I just…didn’t like them. They almost “firecracked” up our marriage (bad joke courtesy of Bren). I just didn’t care for the flavor, and I don’t love the rice + meatball concept. I wanted a veg.
Burrito bowl. 3/5, pretty standard.
Week 7
This week I had the opposite protein problem: I couldn’t find turkey breast (that wasn’t hella expensive) so I used chicken breast. This was a decent week.
I DID take a pic of the grilled chicken & cheese sandwiches + tomato soup, but I guess I must have accidentally deleted it. Which is a bummer because it was really good. I liked the soup a lot—entirely from scratch, you roast the tomatoes yourself and everything. I’m giving it a 4/5.
Buffalo Turkey—I mean, chicken—casserole. This was good, but is cubed meat layered on top of cubed potatoes really a “casserole”? There’s nothing holding it together.
Also, my method of uncritically buying everything on the shopping list punished me again: if I had known the dressing was for a buffalo chicken situation, I would have gotten blue cheese, NOT ranch. 🙂
3/5
Turkey—or chicken—Pizza Sheet Pan Dinner. I called this “pizza dump” because it’s basically all the stuff you’d put on a pizza dumped into a pan with no crust. 3/5, we concluded this was conceptually wrong.
Week 8
This was another Beef Week, so I was able to get back on track in terms of buying the right protein. Overall, one of my least favorite weeks so far.
BBQ Mini Meatloaves with Carrot Fries—calling them “mini meatloaves” is a little generous…they’re just piles of ground beef? Bren thought these could be good if you made them like actual meatloaves (with breadcrumbs). I’m not a big fan of meatloaf, no matter the format. The carrot fries, however, were great. 3/5
Taco Casserole—Why no cheese? Would have been better with cheese. Also, an entire red onion? That is too much onion. 3/5
Korean Beef Bowls—2/5. I just felt like the flavors were off. The pickled carrots were VERY acidic. The “Korean beef bowl sauce” itself just seemed…salty.
At any rate, there is a Bulgogi bowl recipe in one of my Primal Blueprint cookbooks that is vastly superior to this.
(The pickled onions were not part of the recipe, but I had extra from the taco casserole so I made them. I notice that the photo of the bowl in the cookbook also has pickled red onion, even though they are not in the recipe list. HMMM. 🙂 )