Seven Days of Dinner, Sept. 25-Oct. 1

This is actually Brie, not Camembert.

When I get started with an idea, I really like to flesh it out. Take this Seven Days of Dinner thing, for instance. I'm happy with it. It's working for me. It's working so well, I've already listed down about 3 weeks' worth of dishes that I want to try. But in typical Type-A personality style, I've decided to set some criteria for the dishes I pick:

* Some kind of vegetable must be on the menu every day.
* No more than 3 meat-based dishes per week.
* Soup or salad must appear at least once per week.
* At least 3 of the meals must be fairly simple to make (i.e. 1-dish meals, 30-minutes-or-less, etc) because we've got swimming on Mondays and soccer on Wednesdays and Fridays which run late.
* No cooking the same dish more than once a month. Okay, maybe twice a month.


Of course, rules were made to be broken. For instance, if a soup calls for chicken stock but doesn't have meat floating in it, I'm not going to count it as a meat-based dish. If the recipe calls for ground beef and I substitute veggie crumbles, that doesn't count as meat either. And what about the pasta dish below, which has smoked bacon crumbled on top? Hmmm.... oh wait, it's only my 3rd dish with meat, so I don't have to worry about it. Phew :)


* Baked Camembert pasta with spinach
* Veggie burgers
* Cauliflower cheese soup
* Lentil spinach soup
* Chef's salad
* Lamb rogan josh
* Mini shell pasta with creamy smoked bacon and pea sauce


Bon appetit!