This dish tastes like it took you all day, but it can be done in 30 minutes. The chicken goes especially well with a crisp garden salad topped with any South Beach Diet®-approved dressing.

Simple yet great seafood stew!

Just came across the recipe search engine, SuperCook.

This is a nifty little application that allows you to search for recipes by entering the ingredients you have on hand into the search interface. The engine will return recipes that can be made with the ingredients you have,and will indicate what additional ingredients you will need to complete each recipe.

All with an INCREDIBLY SWEET Ajax interface.

Wow, over two whole months without a post! I guess that's what a busy holiday season and strangely busy January will do for you.

Anyway, things have settled down quite a bit, and we've been back in the meal planning for a few weeks now (without the time to actually BLOG said meal plan).

We have, however, added a few tweaks to the system that have improved our efficiency by an estimated 3.27%.

These changes are:

Well, the Christmas season has finally arrived at our household. We set up the tree and decorated today, and watched the first DVD of our holiday tradition movie trilogy - The Lord of the Rings.

We were supposed go to the Yahoo's Christmas Party tonight, but we found out at the last minute that our babysitter couldn't make it. Fun stuff. However, we're looking forward to the Idealab Christmas party tomorrow night, to which we can bring our young'un.

Here's this week's menu:

Sunday: Idealab Christmas Party

We just got back in from a nice week of Thanksgiving vacation in Tucson with my family. It was great to see them, and they made such an impression on little O that when we got home, she ran around to all the pictures of my parents and sister and kept pointing them out. How cool is that!?!

In any case, time to do a quick and dirty meal plan for this week.

Sunday:  Corned beef and cabbage

Monday:  Spaghetti

Tuesday:  Henry's awesome corned beef sandwiches

Well, Halloween is over. It was a great week, and we grabbed lots of great pictures. However, I'm definitely ready for a breather for a little before Thanksgiving and Christmas decend upon us!

Sunday - Roast Beef (ahhh, the Sunday dinner choice of my family for generations...)

Monday - Carne Asada

Tuesday - Roast beef sandwiches (Henry makes the *best* sandwiches)

Wednesday - Hamburger Helper

I just came across Tastebook on one of the mommy blogs I read regularly.  The basic idea is that instead of printing (and reprinting) out all those yummy Epicurious recipes that you try and reuse, you can put up to 100 recipes into your own customized printed cookbook.  It accepts personal recipes also, so you could put together a family cookbook using this site also.

So, we took a week hiatus from meal planning since my sister has been out this past week. Although we cooked mostly at home, I was a little too lazy to post what the meal plan was. My sis is leaving tomorrow, so I need to get back on the horse this week.

Sunday - Pasta with Chicken, Sun-dried tomatoes, Gorgonzola, and pine nuts

Monday - Country Style Chicken Soup (crockpot)

I just found a great article on buying in bulk on Wisebread.

While I was growing up, in order to save as much money as possible my mother was always stocking up on items that were on sale.  Unfortunately, she was the type to buy ANYTHING and stock up on it if it was on sale.  This included things that we NEVER used, like potted meat, or powdered eggs.  I mean, what the heck do you do with powdered eggs???  There was NO way any of us would ever eat them.