Sunday Dinner- Crockpot style

Sunday is a slower paced day for us.  Between church and Sunday naps the last thing I want to do is spend a lot of time in the kitchen.  For that reason, I love the slow cookers.  I have 3 of them.  I can throw stuff in, go to church, come home and my house smells amazing!  Today, I looked in the freezer, found a deer roast and a small package of elk steaks to cook.

Here's what I did.  I took a bunch of those cute, little red potatoes that we got in our Bountiful Basket, threw in some baby carrots, and cut up one of the onions that we also got in our basket. 

The potatoes were already pretty small, so I didn't cut them or anything, just threw them in whole.  Then I sprinkled some italian seasoning on all that.  Next, I put the meat on top.

One of the great things about this, I didn't even need to defrost it, I put it in frozen.  Sprinkled some seasoning salt and pepper on there, put the lid on and turned it on high for about 4 hours.  When we got home from church I put it on low for about another hour while we got ready to eat and waited for my husband to get home.

Verdict: You can see from the first picture that I paired this with a green salad.  I'm not a big meat eater and half of my kids aren't either, so we really enjoyed the carrots, potatoes, and salad.  My husband and my other two kids really enjoyed the meat.  Next time I need to cook more potatoes.  Also, I love that I was able to use so many things from my basket.  My goal is to use all of it before we get our next one. 

This Week's Bounty

There weren't many fruits this week, but my family is sure going to love the veggies!

Lettuce

Red Bell Peppers

Green Bell Peppers

Asparagus

Onions

Green beans

Tomatoes

Red potatoes

Oranges

Apples

Grapefruits

Blueberries

In addition, we got the Tropical Pack (not shown).  It included kiwi, mango, pineapple, coconut, limes, plantain, mint, and vanilla beans.  The kids can hardly wait to crack open the coconut and help me pry out the meat. 

A New Year

Isn't it beautiful?

I hope everyone enjoyed their holidays.  I know I did.  Now, it's a New Year.  How many of you made new resolutions to eat healthier, get in better shape, or something along those lines?  I didn't.  At least, not a new resolution, that's always my goal.  Also, our lives changed quite a bit when my sweet husband took a new job.  His schedule changed quite a bit.  He used to leave early, but was home for dinner quite often.  Now, he leaves later, but misses dinner more.  This has led to breakfast being our "family meal" instead of dinner.  I now have the opportunity to make sure I plan good, healthy breakfasts to make the most of family time.  Also, since it's the one meal that I know I will be fixing for my husband, I want it to be a good one.  I'm finding this to be slightly challenging.  He doesn't like pancakes, one of my kids favorites, and I can't hardly stand french toast, one of his favorites.  I feel like I can do bacon, eggs, and hashbrowns only so many times before I need some variety.  In comes the cookbooks and other ideas.  We have a favorite that I do try to make at least once a week, biscuits and gravy, but the other days we are rotating through a few things and figuring it out.  If anyone has great breakfast ideas I'm all for it.  This morning I needed to make something quick so I did some mini muffins.  I wanted to add something, so I cut up the beautiful fruit plate you saw above.  The great thing, my kids didn't eat it all at breakfast, but they snacked on it the little while until it was gone.  I love that they knew they could eat it, it was healthy, and I didn't have to hear them whine about being hungry and asking what to fix, then telling me they didn't want it.  Please tell me my kids aren't the only ones who do that.  I'm really thinking that this fruit plate may become a breakfast staple, though.  It worked really well today and I can always switch out whatever fruits we get in our Bountiful Basket.

My kids are still helping me plan out some of our meals.  They get to pretty much pick about 4 out of 5 meals, and I make sure that if the meal doesn't contain enough variety (veggies) then I get to add the side dishes, and they have to at least taste them.  Once in a while I will over ride an idea if there are time constraints or we are out of a main ingredient.  Overall, though, the kids do a great job of looking at what we got in our basket and figuring out how we are going to use it.  In fact this week we got both broccoli and cauliflower and my daughter was so excited because she wants macaroni and cheese with both of those in it.