Cooking For Two

Cooking for two has been a struggle for me since we got married 8 1/2 years ago - it isn't as hard now as it was then but still... I am learning ways to adapt my bulk cooking into cooking for a small family and one of them is by using leftovers.

Here is how we ate last week:

Sunday - I made chili and we had frito chili pie

Monday - we grilled two deer steaks, made baked potatoes (I made 4 of them) and had green beans

Tuesday - we grilled the backstrap out of a deer, I made Season Salt Potatoes, broccoli, deviled eggs (I boiled 6 eggs but only deviled 2 of them) and cut up an avocado

Wednesday - we ate baked potatoes with chili and I didn't cook anything - chili from Sunday, baked potatoes from Monday

Thursday - I cooked a deer heart in the crockpot and boiled some more potatoes - I don't like organs so I ate some of the backstrap from Tuesday night, Hubby ate the deer heart, I mashed the potatoes I boiled into the leftover season salt potatoes added a little butter, milk and sour cream and we had mashed potatoes, we also ate the leftover green beans from Monday.

Friday - I sliced what was left of the backstrap (it was a BIG backstrap) into medallions and warmed them in an iron skillet (the trick here is that we only grilled the backstrap until it was medium rare on the ends and rare in the center - the part I'm cooking again here is the part that was rare) once the meat was hot I removed it to a bowl and made pan gravy then put the medallions back in the gravy. I was planning on making potato pancakes with the leftover season salt into mashed potatoes but my husband was hungry NOW so I just warmed them up in the microwave then sprinkled some Monterey Jack cheese on the top of them and broiled it for a couple of minutes and we ate them with gravy, we also ate the leftover broccoli from Tuesday.

Saturday - we finished off the chili.

I ate the boiled eggs from Tuesday that I didn't devil for breakfast with a piece of toast over the next couple of days. I also ate some of the chili for lunch a couple of days. After Saturday there was only about a bowl of chili left, I would have eaten it on Monday but I was at my customer's office making last minute changes to that catalog so the chili got tossed.

I've found that I can't make a small pot of chili, soup, or any type of casserole, or steak and gravy or etc... so I try to cook those kind of things on Sunday or Monday so that we can eat them again towards the middle of the week. Soup and beans and things like that I've been known to freeze after we ate them once and then reheat them later to add to our menu. This way most of the leftovers get eaten and since I try to dress them up differently as much as possible, my husband doesn't really mind - even though he would rather not eat left-overs unless it's for lunch.

This week has been a little tougher - we are having special services at the church so that has made my evenings pretty hectic and my meals less economical by re-use than normal.

Sunday - I cooked a bunch of taco meat and took part of it and made a small enchilada/burrito casserol. This is one casserole I have figured out how to make small so there wasn't a lot left and I ate it for lunch Tuesday.

Monday - we ate tacos so all I did was heat up the rest of the meat and chop up tomatoes, I bought shredded lettuce to save time.

Tuesday - I chopped up a couple of tenderloins, cooked them and made a gravy to go with them, then I cooked a lot of rice and baked a small cabbage with a bunch of butter and seasonings. We ate the tenderloins and gravy over the rice and then had the cabbage (heavenly stuff). We were going to have the cabbage again later in the week but I ate the leftovers for lunch Wednesday.

Wednesday - is the day the schedule went wacky and we ate sandwiches for dinner

Tonight - I have some soup that I froze a couple of months ago in the crockpot - warming up.

Tomorrow - is the first night this week that we'll have at home so I'm making dirty rice with the leftover rice from Tuesday, skillet frying some shrimp, I'll either pick up stuff for a salad from the grocery store or dig around and see what frozen vegetables we have that sound good and I plan on trying Pioneer Woman's bread pudding - although for us, I'll leave the whiskey out of the cream sauce - I'm sure it will still be good.

Saturday - we will have leftovers or we'll grill something or we'll have grilled cheese sandwiches, while we try to get some general housekeeping done and the rest of the hunting stuff put away again - I organized it all last summer and put it away in totes well this winter my husband wanted to see how I had organized it so he drug all the totes in from the garage shelf they were on and emptied them all over the living room. Most of the stuff has been put back away, but the totes are still sitting in the dining room so they have to get put up this weekend!

Well - that is how I cook for two, do any of you have any other money saving/time saving ideas for cooking? Next week I'll post my famous "Oh no I have people coming over and I don't have anything quick for dessert" cake. It is good, quick and the cake part only takes 3 ingredients and everyone always asks me for my recipe!