In the deep dark depths of my freezer

I love my freezer. I buy things when they are on clearance and stick them in the freezer until I can use them. This week, I'm planning my menu around things I've found in the depths of my freezer: fancy cheeses, whole limes, whole peppers, leeks, bacon, tomatoes from last year's garden, frozen steak and fish.

Did you know you can freeze all of those things? Smith's frequently clearances out their poblano peppers, lemons and limes. I buy the entire bags for 1 dollar and stick them in my freezer whole. When I'm ready to cook with them, I just microwave them until soft and cook them.

Here's the menu I created from things found in the deep dark depths of my freezer. Have a great week!

Monday: daughters birthday: takeout pizza + green salad

Tuesday: Cooking Class! Quick microwave oatmeal + breakfast burritos

Wednesday: Corn and poblano chowder with gouda cheese (using poblanos, corn, gouda cheese and leeks from my freezer)

image from link above (fromachefskitchen.com)

Thursday: Creamy coconut lentil curry (using tomatoes and ginger from my freezer)

image from link above (theendlessmeal.com)

Friday: tuna salad wrapped in a tortilla

Saturday: fish + steak tacos + cabbage slaw (using frozen steak and fish from my freezer)

I'm too tired to cook!

I've reached the summer burnout zone. The heat makes me tired, and thus I'm too tired to cook. However, I am still hungry, so I must soldier on. Here's what I hope to muster the energy to put together this week.

Monday: frozen tortellini noodles with store bought pesto sauce + canned green beans + watermelon

Tuesday: corn and black bean salad (too lazy to cook rice this week) + queso fresco on whole wheat tortillas + watermelon

image of cowboy caviar, click link above for recipe

Wednesday: cabbage with noodles + watermelon

Thursday: tropical cabbage salad + grilled salmon

Friday: little Cesar's pizza + bagged green salad

Simple Summer Salads!

My menu is a bit sketchy this week. We're still trying to sell our house and we've had a lot of people coming to see the house around dinner time. Today we had to be out of the house at lunch time and dinner time! I'm running low on energy to cook a big meal and still keep my kitchen spotless for a house showing. So, we will probably eat out a lot this week or have simple things like quesadillas.

Instead of pretending like I'm going to follow a menu this week, I just want to share two salads I made and LOVED this weekend. I hope you enjoy them too. Both recipes are from this cookbook I found at my inlaw's house. I made 5 recipes from the book and we had ZERO leftovers...which was actually disappointing!

Here's the salads!

5 Minute Greek Salad

(this is a photo from the photo in the book because I ate the whole salad before I took a photo!)

Sweet Jicama Salad

This is also a photo of the photo from the cookbook. This was SO YUMMY served with tacos!

What is your favorite summer salad?? I would love to try it when I finally sell my house and can use my kitchen again! I would love to create a post with everyone's recipes next week. Please email it to me: nicolebuhlerRD@gmail.com