Ahh, the pressure, the pressure!!

First off, my apologies for not posting last night.  After dinner, we tidied up the house a little, then sat down on the couch to unwind for a bit...and the next thing I knew it was one in the morning. We had both fallen asleep in pretty much the same positions we had sat down to relax in.

So, I have to admit, since starting this blog, I have kind of felt pressure to make something awesome for every single meal...because I think to myself a.) if I don't make something great, I'm not going to stick to this.  b.) I actually have gotten a lot of emails from people saying that they like my blog, my recipes look great, etc, and I don't want to disappoint them with sandwiches all the time.  c.) I've always made things WAY harder than they need to be.

Whew, okay.  Glad that's off my chest.  Let me point out why A is really my biggest concern:

That?  Right There?  Is my lunch from yesterday.  A bean and cheese burrito, and chicken fried rice.  No, it's not because I was wanting both Mexican and Chinese food.  It's because I didn't plan ahead, and so Wednesday morning, in an effort to just stick to the freaking plan already, I grabbed whatever I could find from the freezer.  This?  Is why I buy my lunch everyday.  However, I persevered.  (PS-I think my rice may have been freezer burnt, too.  Super added bonus.) Really, it's been lunch that's been my biggest struggle.  I'm not a huge fan of leftovers, so it's really hard for me to bring the same thing to lunch that I had the night before. 

My breakfasts this week have been pretty simple, which I am more than okay with, but I did get an added bonus yesterday.  Normally, when we buy yogurt in our house, it disappears within hours, it seems.  It's like a yogurt loving ghost comes and raids our refrigerator while we sleep, and even though I swear I bought like a dozen of them the day before, there are never any to be found in the fridge when I want one.  However, in my crazed wild woman scavenge through the contents of my fridge yesterday morning on the search for lunch and breakfast, I found two GLORIOUS containers of blueberry yogurt.  Granted, it wasn't the Greek yogurt that I had bought specifically for me that I ate none of, but still.  It was yogurt.  And it was mine.  I took them both to work with me, and yesterday and today, my breakfast looked like this:

A Fuji Apple, Blueberry Yogurt, and a little Kashi GoLean Crunch.  MMmmmm.  I could eat this everyday.  If I could get to the dang yogurt fast enough.

 
Last night, Chris made dinner again.  As I've mentioned numerous times in the past, we're both pretty passionate about making sure that our food has TONS of flavor.  One of our favorite cookbooks right now is Guy Fieri's Cookin' It, Livin' It, Lovin' It.  Chris decided to make the Penne with Cajun Hot Links and Chipotle Shrimp,  Instead of the Hot Links, though, we used andouille sausage.

The shrimp in this was AMAZING.  I would eat a whole meal out of just that.  I really liked the different taste of the sauce, too...it's not your typical pasta dish.  Our kids absolutely loved it, and completely cleaned their plate.  Apparently a little andouille sausage and Cajun shrimp aren't too much spice for them to handle.  Two cheers for the Ericson kids!  One disclaimer on this dish, though...it was not very good for lunch today.  If you're going to make it, I would make enough for just one night, because the next day, you will be disappointed with it.  The sauce kind of separates when you warm it up again, and the shrimp gets a little rubbery...this is definitely not a dish that gets better the second day (see???  I try to bring the previous nights dinner in for lunch, and this is what happens!).

On to dinner tonight.  I had planned on making some chicken sandwiches, but forgot to put the chicken in the marinade last night.  (oops).   So, today on my lunch break, I found an awesome app on my phone called BigOven.  There are thousand of recipes, but what I really liked about it was the ability to input any leftovers you have in your fridge, and it will show recipes that you can make from them.  I planned and mapped out what I had.  Chris called right as I was leaving work and said he was starving and so were the kids, so he pulled some of the Pork Chili Verde out of the freezer and made some Chimichangas tonight.  A little Spanish rice, a spinach salad, and we called it a good.

Long story short?  I have got to come up with some lunch ideas, and I need to plan ahead on them.  Horribly planned lunches like yesterdays frozen burrito/freezer burnt rice and today's dinner gone horribly wrong lunch leftovers leave me teetering on the edge.  Not planning ahead is why C above is a problem, because I am making this WAY harder than it needs to be (which is pretty much par for the course for me, anyway!).

As for B, though...it's actually really amazing to me that people want to read this, and I sincerely appreciate all the comments, emails, and "atta girl" support while starting this endeavor.  The object of this is to make us think more about what we are eating, and how we are spending our money on food.  While it's designed to be a thirty day challenge, I really do want to incorporate this into our lives.  I want dining out to be the exception, not the norm.  So, we will keep trying to make new and exciting dishes, mostly because we like new and exciting things, but also to inspire others to get in the kitchen and make something new, too (and if you do, please invite us over to eat, so I don't have to cook and then it's not technically dining out.  Okay?  Thanks!!) 

Talk to you tomorrow night!!