Meal Plan: Week 39, 2024 – Prepping for hunting season, Girl Scout Leadership, Birthday, and Asian-style Beef

Life moves fast at times – or at least it feels that way. Time flies when we have fun!

One moment, we are celebrating Christmas with my sister and her family at our house, having the best family gathering in years. Next, we prepare the spring garden and enjoy friends gathering on our deck. We are suddenly getting ready for the haunted season, and soon enough, it’ll be Christmas again. A year flew by!

It also means that we are celebrating my wife’s birthday again. We are not getting any younger, but my missus gets better with age in looks and love.

In our household, birthdays are celebrated the usual way: the birthday person gets to choose their favorite food and select movies for the family movie night.

My wife loves seafood and cheese, so I grilled a selection of seafood and prepared a lovely cheese platter with some salami.

I’m also getting ready for the upcoming hunting season. I firmly believe I will finally harvest a deer (or two) this time, although I’m apprehensive about the field dressing once I take down a deer. It looks somewhat easy on YouTube but can be messy and time-consuming.

When I visited my friend in Texas a couple of years ago, we captured and prepared a wild pig on his property. The field dressing was gory, but the flavors of wild game were phenomenal.

A Leader in the Making

Our daughters have been active Girl Scouts for many years. Our oldest daughter completed her silver and gold projects in High School, and now our youngest daughter is wrapping up her silver project.

Keeping the motivation and interest going for scout activities is hard, especially when they are distracted by social media and worried that their reputation might be in jeopardy as it might not be cool to be a Girl Scout.

But she kept doing it and recently submitted the project to the council. We are very proud of her and constantly remind her that the skills she learns during Girl Scouts are valuable throughout her life.

Part of the silver and gold projects involved speaking to potential donors and presenting her project to other troops. This significantly matured her public speaking skills and boosted her confidence.

Week Thirty-nine Meals

I continue to make only three main meals, which helps us save money and, at the same time, consume all the food that we make. We have limited food waste.

Some meals are also used for school lunches, and my wife will eat leftovers for lunch as she works and studies from home.

Part of meal planning involves selecting exciting recipes, and I often “travel” worldwide searching for recipes. The internet is a great source, but so is the large selection of cookbooks I have accumulated over the years.

It’s exciting to try out new recipes, not only from a flavor perspective but also because it often introduces new techniques, which means I, too, learn new skills.

And just a word of caution: you can get injured when you prep food. I dislodged the nail on my thumb this past weekend as I attempted to remove a garlic clove from the bulb. The damn thing was wedged tight to the core, and I tried to rip it off. I succeeded, but my nail came loose – that hurts like an MF!

School Lunches

We have decided to reduce our intake of store-bought bread and instead bake what we need if we need bread. It is much healthier than the bread you buy in supermarkets, and we know what ingredients were used. And it’s more fun to bake bread anyway. However, planning would help, as making bread takes time.

Bread is an easier option for school lunches, and you can make all kinds of sandwich creations.

I made a batch of sourdough buns and designed a few delicious sandwich options.

I’m also using some of the dinner food for lunches.

Dinner Time

This week, we will sample and enjoy beef and chicken. The beef recipes are inspired by Asia, and the chicken sounds like an Italian creation.

I love cooking recipes with many spices. The kitchen and house are infused with the lovely aroma of the herbs, which makes us all hungry.

I fried the beef chunks and vegetables and made the teriyaki sauce.

The same applies to the chicken and the Thai beef rolls. However, to keep the beef rolls fresh, I will only roll them on the day we eat them. I’m worried that making and rolling the rolls will make them hard and unpalatable.

Precooked rice and pasta are boring, so we will make the rice in the rice cooker and boil the egg noodles on the day we eat the dishes.

Meal Plan

	Lunch	Dinner
Monday	Bun with lettuce, salami, cheese, and garlic/chipotle aioli	Beef teriyaki with egg noodles
Tuesday	Creamy pepperoncini chicken with rice	Creamy pepperoncini chicken skillet with rice
Wednesday	Ham and cheese wraps	Thai basil beef rolls with rice
Thursday	Dumpling with sweet chili sauce	Leftovers and cheese platter
Friday	Breakfast bun with pork patty and cheese	Friday night over-the-fire cooking

One day, I might get so organized that I will link the meals below to my recipes. We can only live in hope!

Have a fantastic week, my friends. I hope you enjoy these meal plans. It is much easier to make food in advance, although you must invest several hours preparing meals during the weekend.