Menu Planning Monday

I am usually pretty good at planning our dinners for the week, but I have never been very formal about it and the weekly menu and shopping list are usually jotted down on some random scrap of paper.  As a result I don't have a record of favorite meals and reciepes.  When I want to make something again I have to look through cookbooks/magazines and search on-line, I often find something, but it isn't always the orignal receipe.  Maybe this will get me away from the scraps of paper and actually get my receipes organized.

On the menu this week:
Monday - Shepherds pie
Tuesday - Roasted Chicken with squash (no receipe just throwing it in the crock pot) tomato soup
Wednesday - Tuna Noodle Casserole (can't beat the classic)
Thursday - Mongolian Beef  (love Mongolian beef, trying a new receipe for it this week)
Friday - Baked Ziti

Apple Cookie Pie

Everybody was a little crazy this afternoon, so while Marshall took the girls out for a while Liam and I spent some time in the kitchen.  With some sugar cookie dough that was in the freezer and apples that needed to be used this is what we came up with.

Here is the recipe that Liam created:

1 batch Sugar Cookie Dough

3 Apples

1/2 cup Brown Sugar

1 tsp. Cinnamon

1/4 cup Crasins

1/4 cup Nut Topping
1/4 cup Apple Butter

Roll out cookie dough and place in pie pan, refrigerate.  While dough chills thinly slice apples.  Combine apples, brown sugar, cinnamon, crasins and nut, stir.  Spread apple butter in cookie crust, add apple mixture.  Bake at 350 for 30 minutes. 

Fruit Kabobs

We belong to a co-op preschool, which means about once a month I help out in the classroom.  One of responsibilities of the co-op parent is to provide the snack.  I usually try to bring in something the kids can make, so this time we did fruit kabobs.   I hadn’t really thought through the process, so it was a little disorganized with the first few kids, but once I got things figured out it was a great project.  Each child got an orange, with both ends cut, a straw,  strawberries and half a banana.  For the first group I gave the kids the fruit whole, but I quickly realized having the kids, peel, slice and skewer the fruit was too much, so I cut the fruit and let them focus on the assemble process.  I didn’t get any pictures of them assembling the kabobs, as I said I wasn’t organized.  Some of the kids put a lot of effort into making the kabobs and tried to make patterns or group all the same fruit together.  Others put on one piece of fruit and called it a kabob.  Almost all of the kids spent a lot of time just trying to suck the juice out of the orange, I had intended for them to do this at snack time, but a straw is just too much fun.