Crafty Bitch: Meal Planning

When I think "meal plan," my mind automatically goes to freshman year of college when every meal I ate was purchased from my meal plan. It was like this magic little credit card that bought me any food on campus I could ever hope for. Chick-fil-a in the student union, mixers for that date party in the student convenient store (sorry, Mom!), pizza bagels from the cafe, you name it.

Well, fast-forward to the real life and sadly enough, there is no magic credit card (at least not one that we don't have to pay off every month) that my parents under-write and meal planning means sitting down each week to decide what we're going to eat for dinner and making a grocery list. It's a sexy life, but someone has to put on her sexy sweatpants and go grocery shopping. (Oh don't worry, I plan on upgrading to the Frisco Mom uniform of a Juicy Couture track suit as soon as I have children. I mean, as if you even had to ask.)

So, when I came across these little erasable menu boards on Pinterest, I just had to put the craftiness into action and I actually really use it.

(via)

It took all of about 10 minutes to complete (my kind of craft). I picked up this frame from Ikea for like $7, a cute piece of scrapbook paper, some scrapbook letters and um, voila?

(Of course I had to pay homage to my alma mater with the orange and white paper! Think it looks just great next to my OK State Scentsy.)

And while I'm at it, I thought I'd share a few recipes that we've tried recently that we give two enthusiastic thumbs up.

First up, we tried out these (skinny) chicken rollatinis and thought they were fantastic. You also have to use a meat hammer and I found that to be therapeutic. I also forgot to take a picture until we'd already eaten several. Woops.

(recipe here)

We LOVE seafood so when I stumbled across this spicy cajun chicken pasta recipe, we subbed the chicken with shrimp and it was ah-mazing.

(recipe here)

We've gone on an appetizer kick lately and tried a few items:

(OK, I lost the recipe. But they were delish.)

Jalapeno poppers (though I'd recommend cutting back on the cumin; we're also going to wrap them in bacon next time!)

(recipe here)

OK, so let's get real: my avocado fries didn't look this pretty, they took forever and made my house smell like a KFC for several days, but I have to admit: They. Were. Freaking. Awesome.

Does anyone else obsessively meal plan?