What We've Eaten - A Meal Plan in Reverse [No. 1]

I love meal planning posts. 
I love seeing what other people are going to make, I love seeing what other kinds of foods I can make, and I love feeling better about planning for quick meals that come from a box or can (because, I've noticed, a lot of meal plans involve some sort of quick meal or a "fin' for yourself" evening).

And while I'm not quite awesome enough to be able to plan our meals for the whole week by day at this point (I plan for the week, and choose as the week goes along), I do want to share what we have eaten. So, I decided on a meal plan post, but in reverse!

I've been trying to find new recipes to try out, trying to make sure that there are more than enough things to choose from each week that we have no good excuse to go and get Taco Bell or hamburgers or something like that (from a lack of planning or a lack of easy things to eat, that is).
Which means that, yes, most weeks, there is at least one "cheat" meal - which means something that is super easy and not much effort. Leftovers also count as cheat meals in my book - the cooking is already done, you just have to heat it back up!

To be realistic, though, this spurt of "we need to eat out less!" and "we need to eat a more varied diet!" didn't start until halfway through the month. So, I won't be including the beginning of January. More than few of those first two weeks involved us having snacks or chips for dinner. While we enjoy it, sure, it is certainly not a real meal!

So, for the second half of the month, here's the things I managed to cook:

Tuna Melts - which, sadly, the Mister did not like. Tuna was on sale, 50 cents a can (which is an amazing deal in these parts), but it's the cheap stuff so it's pretty watery. He is particular about his seafood (and somehow tunafish counts as seafood!) and he didn't enjoy it. If I were to make this again for dinner, I would have to find a way to get more of the water out of the tuna. I enjoyed it though!
Spaghetti - nothing special, just a double batch so we could half leftovers the next day. I'm fond of using ground sausage instead of ground beef, though. It's actually cheaper to buy ground sausage than ground beef, when it goes on sale! I use in between 1/2 and 1/3 pound of meat per batch of spaghetti and it makes the correct amount for two meals - my problem is always measuring how many noodles we need!
Meatloaf - I finally found out the secret to meatloaf...no sausage! Also, when it's about ten minutes from being done, try to scrape off as much of the fat from the top. Since I'm buying cheaper meat, it has a higher fat content, and it has never helped make a meatloaf, well, loaf! But this one turned out great! We also had mashed potatoes and green beans along with it.
Nacho Soup - still love this stuff. Still lasts us two days. And I got to use my crockpot!
Pancakes - sometimes, I can cook pancakes quickly. Sometimes it takes forever. This was one of those "takes forever" times. But, I managed to make enough so that I could have pancakes again for breakfast the next morning, so that's a win! I make mine from scratch, not with Bisquick or anything. It's for no other reason than I don't want to buy Bisquick (and it's easy enough to make from scratch).
Burritos - but new to us! We normally have the refried beans and ground beef variety. This time, however, I tried making up some Mexican rise using this recipe, then cooking up some ground turkey and adding enchilada sauce to make burritos. Or would that count as enchiladas. I have no idea.
EnchaMac - this was simple. Macaroni and cheese, which we love. Plus leftover enchilada sauce and ground turkey added in (from our burritos). I got the idea from this recipe, but decided to go the cheater/easy route, and it turned out great using just regular Kraft macaroni and cheese.
Grilled cheese & Tomato soup - I make grilled cheese with both regular cheese and cream cheese inside. If you have not tried this, please do!
Chili/Cheese/Tator Tot Bake  - I didn't want to cook, and it's as easy as throwing stuff in a pan and putting in the oven. You can find more instructions here about this one.
Taco Bell - because I couldn't hold out any longer!
Fred Meyer snacks - because we had to buy a lamp, so we picked up some stuff to eat from the produce/ready to eat section and called it good.
Meatballs and Pasta - I tried this recipe, and hoped for the best. I've only just perfected meatloaf, so meatballs were a bit intimidating. It was frustrating, dealing with the amount of fat that the ground beef leaked out, but in the end it was alright. They actually turned out quite well, though they did lose quite a bit of cheese  in the cooking process (which was pepperjack, not string cheese).

Hopefully, for February, I can have closer to a full month of meals that aren't chips and snacks, and maybe no more than one Taco Bell dinner (though, really, we only had two in January, so that's pretty good!

Have you been trying to try out new meals? Have you found anything that you would recommend? Let me know in the comments!

~Havok

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