Local Menu Plan

We were out of town on Monday and Tuesday and I completely forgot that I was going to try to post my weekly menu… on a weekly basis!  Anyways, we didn’t forget to make a menu plan for this week, I just didn’t share it.

Every week we tend to focus on one cookbook, this week the cookbook was Food & Wine Annual Cookbook 2012 .  We got this cookbook as a “free gift” from our credit card…. weird.  However, it’s a great cookbook and has lots of great seasonal ideas in it.  (What follows is memories, you can skip it).

Our second son was born in December of 2011.  He was due around the 14th and arrived the 20th.  We were a bit stressed out by the end of that week but he arrived and was awesome so we quickly forgot our stress!  What also arrived around then was the Food & Wine Annual 2011 cookbook.  Well, I had two weeks of vacation because it was winter holidays (I was teaching High School Spanish at the time) and we couldn’t travel for the holiday so we spent the entire 2 weeks trying new dishes from the cookbook and pairing almost all of them with the appropriate wines!  We had lots of fun.  Our new son basically slept for his whole first month (no, not because of all the wine pairing, although I hadn’t thought about it until now…) and our first son who was 2 at the time was having lots of fun because we were all home and it made for a very special holiday for all of us, full of relaxed times and wonderful homemade food.  Thus, these cookbooks have a special place in our hearts and we revisit them every few months and find all sorts of recipes we haven’t yet tried that look wonderful and emphasize seasonal ingredients.

Okay, back to the point of the post, there are a few gaps in this menu still that will get filled as the week progresses (I hope!):