menu planning – chicken, chicken, chicken

So I meant to post a menu planning update on Monday. And then it turned into Tuesday and work has been a little chaotic, so it turned into Wednesday.

Better late, than never, right?!?

This week has been NUTS. My husband has meetings, and I’ve been in week-long training sessions with corporate folks, and not getting out of work on time. Last night, I got home at 6:00, which is late for me. I knew going into this week that we needed easy and fast, and I remembered way back in the day when we’d prepare chicken ahead of time so we could cut down on cooking time. 

On Sunday, we pre-cooked a lot of chicken. We used to have real recipes with pre-cooked chicken, but the recipe fell behind our counters a year or so ago and we can’t get it. So we improvised. We used 10 chicken breasts, covered with olive oil, salt and pepper, and baked for 10 minutes at 500 degrees. Turned the chicken over and baked them for another 10 minutes. The chicken then was placed in a container to use the rest of the week.

This is what our menu looks like this week: 

Sunday – Fajitas

Monday – Salad with chicken

Tuesday – BBQ chicken pizzas (on pita bread)

Wednesday – Penne pasta with chicken and pesto

Thursday – Chili

Friday – Meatloaf

Saturday – date night! (We have a Groupon we’re using.)

Recipes – kind of: 

The fajitas were simple – two peppers (we use one red, one green bell pepper), an onion and garlic were sauteed, and we added the chicken towards the end. Throw those on to whole wheat tortillas, top with cheese and/or sour cream and call it a meal.

The salad with chicken is pretty self explanatory.

The pizzas have a particular recipe, but I never did follow it exactly. You need whole wheat pita bread (these are individual pizzas), barbeque sauce, onion (chopped), mozzarella cheese, oregano and chicken. As you can imagine, it’s fairly simple. Top one pita bread with the bbq sauce, cheese, oregano, onion and chicken. Bake at 375 degrees for about 10-15 minutes (or until they look done.) We make 4, and have two leftover for lunch the next day.

The chili takes about 30 minutes – from prep to table – to make. And the meatloaf is actually a second meatloaf I made last week, and froze.

And I hope this post helped some of you. If you have questions, please ask!