New Monday

Mondays are an opportunity to start fresh and plan for the week ahead. It’s a day to set new goals and pat yourself on the back for achieving last week’s goals! My goals for today were to cook a few things, run some errands and get some meal prep done. While they are small goals, I am thankful that I am able to have a day off during the week to be able to do these things.

Yesterday I made the banana bread I did in my first post and it’s even better than before! I think I used two bananas last time and this go around I had three. It definitely makes a difference.

I was still in a baking mood today so I made a coffee cake from Dinner then Dessert. I’ve made this before and it’s so good! The only difference is that I didn’t put glaze on this time. I found it to be too sweet for me.

All you do is put flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in one bowl, and eggs, milk and vanilla in another. Mix those babies together and then add the melted butter. It’s a quick recipe which I love! It always takes me longer because I have OCD and have to clean while I’m making a mess ::eye roll::

You then place the batter into a pan and swirl a cinnamon-brown sugar mix into it. I think a crumble topping would be good as well!

The end result looks delish! I plan on bringing it into work tomorrow for a meeting and I’ll be sure to enjoy a piece with a hot cup of coffee.

I did some meal prep while I was waiting for my coffee cake to bake and made a corn and tomato salad for our Taco Tuesday dinner mañana. I’m going to add avocado right before I serve it which will make it nice and creamy. For the main event, I’m going to put chicken breasts and a can of green enchilada sauce in my slow cooker. Hopefully it’ll shred apart nicely for tacos!

I also seasoned a hunk of pork I found on sale yesterday. I made a rub with liquid smoke, brown sugar, onion powder, garlic powder, paprika, salt and pepper. I’m going to let it sit and marinate for a few days and put it in the slow cooker for our BBQ dinner on Wednesday. We’ve been craving BBQ for a while now! I’m going to make BBQ pork sammies using refrigerated biscuits in a can and have a side of store-bought coleslaw to go with it. I do make a mean homemade coleslaw but it’s always too much for the two of us to eat!

My recipes are on point this week! Toot toot! The leftover biscuit dough will be used in a chicken and dumplings recipe I found. I’ve never made it before so that’ll be interesting. I’ll add in all the recipes I use to next week’s post. Maybe one day I’ll be able to come up with my own 🙂

Tonight for Meatless Monday, I’m making a Minestrone soup I found from skinnytaste. I love that she gives different options for cooking this and I’m going standard stove top. I finally gave in and decided to buy the celery for this recipe. Earth shattering! I definitely think celery can make a difference in certain recipes but I couldn’t really taste it. She uses white beans and other Minestrone soup recipes call for kidney beans. I only had pinto beans so I used those. This is a Mexican-American household after all! I didn’t puree the beans because I like the texture of them in soups and I only had orzo pasta so I used that instead. It’s all the same.

She did use fresh herbs and that is something we rarely have at home. The herbs tend to go bad before you can even use it all! For future reference, you can use about one teaspoon dried herbs if your recipe calls for one tablespoon fresh.

I enjoy cooking and am happy to share how easy it can be for everyone by just using what you have at home. Cooking should be experimental and fun!

Happy cooking, friends!