Saturday dinner, after all

Seven in a series of (just over) a week of dinners.

Since this is the dinner I was planning for Thursday, and then for Friday, I thought it only fair to give it to you as well, though it brings my total number of nights to eight. To be honest, I've quite enjoyed doing this, and it makes thinking up blog posts really easy, so in a way I'm sad to see it end. But it would stop being interesting quite soon once I started to recycle dinners you'd already seen, so I'll just have to make my children say funny things and go back to my old ways.

This is one of my emergency dinners, which I end up making about once every two weeks or so. Everything comes from the freezer, so it's always there. Yesterday afternoon I had an uncontrollable urge to make a chocolate cake, so dinner was a bit of an afterthought. I added broccoli because it basically functions as anti-cake and lets us have more. (Then I forgot the broccoli and produced it when our plates were almost empty, but let's not quibble.)

Without more ado: vegeburgers and oven fries.

The cake came out of the oven and I turned it up to 400F. Mysteriously, and a little worryingly, it told me that it was immediately at 400, even though it had been at 300 just a moment before. I took it at its word and put the chips (that's Irish for fries) in straight away. Waiting for the oven to get to 400 is usually the longest part of making this dinner, so it was nice to skip it.

I cooked the vegeburgers, which are Morning Star spicy black-bean burgers, and no doubt full of things we shouldn't eat, but I don't care, on the Foreman grill, because they only take about seven minutes that way. Back in the long ago, pre-children, I used to make my own black-bean burgers (they were closer to black-bean sloppy joes really), but doing that would make this much less of a no-effort meal.

I scavenged the last two slices of swiss cheese from the fridge and melted them on top for a couple of minutes. Meanwhile, I split and lightly toasted two sesame seed buns in our handy four-slice toaster.

On a good day, I have half a red pepper that I can grill with the burgers, which really adds to the finished article, but this was just a regular day. I did manage to put a few leaves of baby spinach on top, though.

And served with HFCS-free ketchup, which I was very pleased to find on the shelves. We don't go through a lot of ketchup, because this is basically the only meal we eat it with (I just didn't come from a ketchup-centric household), but Mabel loves it so I'm happy to give her the better stuff.

... And then I remembered the broccoli.

 

Mabel ate a lot of ketchup, conveyed to her mouth with a number of chips, supplemented by a further number of my chips. She also had at least one piece of broccoli, so I was happy.

And then we all had some cake.

Looking at the food we've eaten over the past eight nights, I can sum it up thus:

Protein:  sausage, meat-free, meat-free, chicken, fish, meat-free, meat-free, meat-free
Carb: potato, pasta, pasta, rice, quinoa/breadcrumbs, couscous, rice, potato (fries)

As far as I'm concerned, that's a pretty good spread - I'd say we usually have between two and four meat-free nights a week; I try to eat fish once a week, but it's more like every two weeks; we had leftovers only one night, we ate out once, I ate from the freezer once, and I put a dinner in the freezer for a future date. I went food shopping twice, though I won't try to claim that I didn't replenish milk supplies or pick up other things in Target or the local co-op in between.

I'm sure there are many other scales according to which my week's cooking has failed miserably: you'll note that after the first day I didn't even bother to mention how much of any of this the children ate, and I'm clearly negligent in the area of side salads. We don't really do dessert, but there were some strawberries and there are always cookies with my coffee after the children are in bed.