I love to cook!

I’ll say it again, I love to cook.  I love to eat, too, so that works out well.  I love trying new foods, I even love grocery shopping.  I love to explore the grocery store (found bottles of clam juice today.)

A few years ago, I subscribed to E-Meals.
I got this awesome Groupon that gave me twelve months of meal plans and grocery lists for like $30 or some equally shocking amount.  I was all gung ho to use them.  They came by email each Thursday.  Sweet!  New food possibilities!  Then I realized that I live with a bunch of guys who choose to have limited flavor pallets. Sad. I looked at the awesome recipes and my running diatribe sounded something like this…

“Nope, Jake totally won’t eat that.”
“Toby’ll go for that, but no one else.”
“Jon and Jake won’t touch that with a ten foot pole!”
“That one’s out, that one’s out, oh look, that one too.”

With a bunch of defeated head-shaking.  Damn it.

Basically, no matter what they sent (unless I chose the meal plan that involved small children (think chicken nuggets and mac ‘n’ cheese) even though I only had one small child and he wasn’t even that small) I let my family’s preferences keep me down.  So we ate the same things all the time.
They were good things, but not the new things I had been itching to try.

Not any more!

Woo hoo!

Toby’s always been more foodie-adventurous than the others, but Jake’s finally accepting that vegetables are an active part of our diet.  And I use “diet” in this manner.

  a :  food and drink regularly provided or consumed
And not
  d :  a regimen of eating and drinking sparingly so as to reduce one’s weight <going on a diet>


And Jon’s doing his cycling racing thing, so he’s accepting more veggies, too.  So I’m going to accommodate the heck out of them!

I got Naomi onto E-Meals so she’s getting the meal plans weekly and I totally stole hers!  She’s not using them just like I wasn’t using them, but for different reasons.

Anyway, I dragged the kids to the store today and bought everything on the list for the 7 day plan!  I’m very excited.  We’re going to try:

• Pineapple and Tomato roasted Salmon with cilantro lime black beans and warm tortillas
• Tuscan Pork Tenderloin with Italian asparagus and mushrooms
• Rosemary Chicken thighs with Green beans with almond slivers and mashed sweet potatoes
• Quick chicken tostadas with yellow rice and refried beans
• Seared skirt steak with creamy horseradish sauce and sauteed zucchini and mashed potatoes
• Shrimp and tomatoes with feta over linguine and a simple salad and
• Mini Roast beef and cheddar melts with a crunchy cucumber salad

Also, Toby’s in cooking class this year and got a cookbook for Christmas, so he’s started making dinner for us on Monday nights.  He’s picked a recipe for homemade oyster and corn chowder for this week.  I’m so excited.


According to E-Meals, all of the bulleted meals should be able to be made in 30 minutes or less.  Yeah, we’ll see how that goes.  To do them in 30 minutes, you probably need to have all the ingredients portioned out and ready, the oven pre-heated, six acres of counter space and a willing sous chef (or extra set of hands that can move independently of your own and in their own space, not in yours – kinda like a sous chef!)

Wish us luck!!!

Originally posted here.