Every weekend, we sit around and plot our meals for the week. Generally one trip to the grocery store follows the meal planning and we rarely stray from the plan. We may not get around to cooking everything we planned to cook but we don’t usually decide to make something completely different once the shopping is done.

Despite having done this for about 2 years, planning meals for the entire week is a challenge for me. I used to be the type that would make a zillion trips to the store and would decide what I wanted to cook on a complete whim. This ended up costing a lot of money and I wasted a lot of food. I also worked in a restaurant for a long time and quite honestly didn’t have to cook that many real dinners. I pretty much never had to think about what to eat for lunch since the restaurant fed me. In addition, I detested leftovers and rarely wanted to make something that would last for several meals.

Fast forward to now and life is pretty different. Instead of working 4+ nights a week, I’m home every night and need to have something to eat for dinner just about every night. I also take lunch with me to work most of the time. When we plan our meals for the week, we think about what we want to eat for lunch and dinner for a full week. To make decision making a little easier, we keep a list of all of the meals I’ve cooked that we liked enough to eat again. We also have to think about leftovers. It’s rare that I don’t cook something with the intention of eating it again at least once. All this planning is not an easy task. For me, it takes a little bit of the fun out of cooking. I liked the old way…where I would wake up and decide what I felt like cooking. Fortunately I still get to bake on a whim as we don’t plan desserts or baked goods in advance and I keep enough supplies in the house to bake nearly anything we might crave.

So…here’s what we’ve planned to eat this week. Pretty much everything on the list will be eaten more than once.

Pork Fried Rice - I use a variation of the recipe in Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. I’ve made this enough times that I don’t actually need the cookbook anymore. This is great reheated in the microwave and even better if you fry it a second time. Also, my version is made with brown rice.

Potato Leek Soup – I like mine pureed and topped with cheese and chives. The topping is not necessarily traditional but it’s delicious. The version I’ll make is from The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters.

Shrimp Cakes with Tartar Sauce - Like crab cakes…but with shrimp. I found a great recipe online last year at Je Mange la Ville and this will be the recipe I use again this week.

Turkey and Muenster Cheese Sandwiches on Homemade Oatmeal Wheat Bread - I could eat turkey sandwiches every day so they’re a common item when we plan meals. The bread recipe is slightly adapted from one found in the February 2010 issue of Martha Stewart Living. It’s great tasting and doesn’t get stale as fast as a lot of the homemade breads I’ve made.

If all of the food above doesn’t last until Saturday, we’ll have baked potatoes or eggs or vegetables or even a bowl of cereal. We probably won’t have to resort to any of these as I usually make more than enough food.

And then there’s dessert. I don’t have anything planned for later in the week but I did already bake a batch of dark chocolate oatmeal cookies – minus the oatmeal and white chocolate chips in the recipe. Instead I used toffee bits and peanut butter chips. Still very delicious…so much so that they won’t last all week. By Wednesday or Thursday, I’ll need to dream up something else.

P.S. Let me know if you want to stop by for dinner…we’ve usually got plenty of food!

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I found the recipe for this Spicy Hot Chicken Soup in the latest issue of the Penzey’s Spices catalog.

I can honestly say that I don’t like plain chicken noodle soup. In fact, I’m not sure that I’ve voluntarily eaten plain chicken noodle soup in my adult life. It’s bland and boring and I don’t want to eat it. Not even if I’m sick.

That being said, I immediately wanted this soup when I saw it in the catalog. If it were plain chicken noodle soup, I would have turned the page…but the addition of ginger, cayenne pepper and green onions to chicken noodle soup made me stop and salivate.

If you’re in the mood for chicken soup with a kick, make this. Just keep the Kleenex on the table as your nose is probably going to start dripping.

I’m not going to add the recipe to this page as it can be found here on the Penzey’s website.

I did make a few changes to the recipe:

• Their recipe calls for just powdered ginger. I used a bit of powdered ginger and a good 1 1/2 or 2 tablespoons of finely minced fresh ginger. I like ginger.
• The recipe calls for cayenne pepper. I didn’t have any so I substituted ground ancho pepper powder, a dash of chili powder and a dash of Spanish sweet smoked paprika. I decided that it wasn’t quite spicy enough so I threw in a good teaspoon or so of Sriracha.
• Penzey’s used egg noodles. I don’t particularly like them and they warned to keep them separate from the soup (as they get really soggy if kept in the soup) for leftovers. That’s kind of a pain so I used orzo instead. I’ve made lots of soup with orzo and it doesn’t get soggy like a lot of other pasta does. I used about 3/4 of a cup of it and cooked the soup for about 20 minutes after adding it.
• I used regular chicken broth instead of the “Chicken Soup Base” the recipe prescribes. I used 6 cups of broth and 2 cups of water.
• It’s not mentioned in the recipe, but you’ll want to add some salt and pepper.

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For some reason, I feel compelled to write about chili before I write about all of the other things I’ve cooked lately. I think it’s probably the cold, breezy weather we’ve had for the last week. It’s definitely soup weather.

Chili seems to be one of those foods that people are a little particular about.

Whether the chili has beans or no beans seems to be the largest concern. Some people (mostly those that hail from Texas, in my experience) are very anti-bean. Their chili is essentially a bowl of spicy sauced meat. I’ve nothing against meat or sauce (or even spice) but my chili needs to have more. Yes, I sit on the pro-beans side of the fence. This should not be a surprise since I’m not from Texas. Nor have I ever been anywhere near Texas. I do not want to eat a bowl of chili without beans. In my book, it’s not chili if it doesn’t have beans.

I think that how you like your chili depends a lot on what kind of chili you grew up consuming. Some people (again, those from Texas mostly) will scoff at the thought of adding a lot of chopped vegetables and beans to their chili because that’s not what their parents made. I, on the other hand, grew up eating chili with lots of onions and celery and beans…I think there might have been green peppers as well but I’ve blacked that out as I hate green peppers. I’ll pick around them in any form in any food. I digress.

I’m also a little picky about chili. I will eat other people’s chili but I don’t think they ever compare to my own chili. My sister held a chili cook-off last weekend. I didn’t make chili (as I was too focused on making dessert) but I ate chili. The four chilis at the party were all good but none of them compare (in my mind) to my chili. I’m so full of myself that I’m pretty sure I would have won had I made chili.

The recipe I’ll add below is only a rough approximation of what I put into the chili pictured here. This is because I’ve never made the same chili twice. I’m not sure anyone in the world has ever made the same chili twice. Even if I added exactly the same amount of spice each time, I think it would taste a little different. I make my chili just a little bit spicy and I add a little sugar to offset that heat.

So, here’s a list of what I put in my chili and some basic directions. Use steak instead of ground beef if you prefer. Skip the celery if you don’t want it. Adjust the spices to your own personal taste. Just make sure you add the beans. You’ve gotta have them (if you’re not from Texas).

You should also make more chili than you plan to eat in one sitting. It’s one of those foods that without question tastes better the next day. Even when I was staunchly anti-leftovers, chili made the cut.

Credit for the basis of this recipe goes to my dad. I make my chili mostly like he makes his chili. I’ve taken a few creative liberties over the years but it’s pretty much the same chili he made in my childhood.

Beef & Bean Chili

Ingredients

• 1 pound lean ground beef
• 1 large sweet onion, chopped
• 2-3 ribs celery, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 small can chopped green chiles or jalapenos
• 2 teaspoons chili powder
• 1 teaspoon oregano
• 2 teaspoons cumin
• 1 teaspoon onion powder
• 1 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 2 cans dark red kidney beans
• 2 cans diced fire-roasted tomatoes
• 1 1/2 cups chicken stock
• water
• 1 can tomato paste

Directions

1. Brown beef. Drain and rinse well.

2. Saute garlic, onion and celery until soft in olive oil in a large soup pot.

3. Add all remaining ingredients except tomato paste.

4. Add water to nearly cover ingredients in pan.

5. Bring to boil.

6. Reduce to a simmer and cook for at least an hour.

7. Add tomato paste to thicken to desired consistency. Simmer chili a little longer.

8. Taste the chili. Add more spices, salt and pepper depending on personal preference.

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