Day Four hundred and eight

Dinner: Pasta pesto salad (brown rice fusilli with pesto, mozzarella, and grape tomatoes), chicken spinach sausage, fresh pineapple, and steamed veggies.

School lunch: Rolled deli turkey and cheddar, ants on a log, pretzel sticks, and an orange.

Day Three hundred and fifty-eight

Pesto, for the freezer.  A little taste of summer that will wait for me in the winter.  Recipe here.

Turkey stock, from the carcass from yesterday. I always hear how great it is to make stock after Thanksgiving, so I decided to try it this year.  The carcass, some leftover vegetables, and water went into the crockpot and it cooked overnight.  By morning, voila!

Day Eighty-three

Dinner: Lemon rosemary chicken (crockpot), whole grain penne with pesto sauce, steamed carrots & green beans. The pesto sauce was from a batch I made at the end of the fall and froze.

Lemon slice cookies. These were for a cookie swap I went to at a neighbor's house- each person showed up with three dozen and traded for other cookies. I left with a nice assortment. :)

Day Thirty-nine

Purees for the freezer: Butternut squash. This typically goes into pasta dishes, chili, etc.

Lunch: Annie's mac & cheese, baby spinach with ranch dip, and sliced apples. My girls were home sick w/colds, so I treated them to "boxed" mac & cheese. Sadly, they love it as much as the homemade kind. For it's ease, I do, too, but don't tell anyone. ;) Oh, and I had to make peas for my little one, b/c her spinach was "yuck."

Dinner: Hashbrown Casserole (crockpot; recipe: Make it Fast, Cook it Slow). This came out so well! I used spinach instead of the red peppers it called for, b/c I don't care for peppers in breakfast food, and steak fries instead of hash browns, b/c they are healthier, and it's what I had in my freezer, and Trader Joe's chicken apple sausage, b/c they are just about the only ones to make a poultry sausage and not put it in a pork casing).


Using up my basil plants before the next freeze: Pesto sauce. I think my recipe is from Cooking Light. I add everything but the cheese, then freeze in jars. Each jar is enough for one lb. of pasta.