What We Actually Ate for Dinner - Feb 2-9, 2025

Sharing our real-life meals and recipe inspo, whether home-cooked or not.

Overall, I’d say this week involved more convenience foods than we typically lean into, and that’s okay! I am sharing what we really ate, not some idealistic picture or a “goal” or “perfect” week.

I feel no sort of way about whether we eat convenience foods or more fully home-cooked meals, I simply wanted to provide that context.

In a typical week, I typically cook 5 dinners for us. I’ll share more about how I plan meals for the week in a future post.

I also want to caveat/provide the following context when you see photos of plated food that I (or anyone else) share here or online and that is…

Reminder: A snapshot of a meal cannot and does not tell you a full story of what someone is eating.

I do not share the photos as portion info or inspo! I simply know that we often eat with our eyes first, and seeing what I’m talking about can be helpful in imagining making this dish for yourself or your family.

I sometimes use very large or deep dishes, and sometimes smaller. How full the dish appears to be is totally misleading - I can see this even in the images in this post. One bowl may be super deep, another very shallow. One dish may be 8-9” wide, another may be 7” wide.

So, know that it is not only extremely hard to tell portion sizes from these photos, but you also don’t know if I am or am not finishing all of what’s here, or going back for more, or whatever may happen - and that’s between me, myself, and I.

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Let’s get into what we ate…

(Full transparency: this image is not from this week as I couldn’t find any, but it’s pretty close to the same thing. The sauce I describe below won’t be as vibrant and red as the one pictured here.)

Sunday: High Protein Red Sauce with Sausage, Noodles & Zoodles.

This is a weeknight staple for us, and the batch I make always covers at least two dinners for us, so it’s worth the extra hands-on time breaking up the meat over the stove.

I don’t cook from recipes, but the gist of it is this:

Brown a package each of Italian pork (hot) and chicken (mild) sausage from Trader Joe’s in a skillet. Once browned well, add a jar of red sauce (we use the TJs Bolognese sauce) and simmer. If we have red wine on-hand, we add a splash. While that simmers, blend together about a cup or two of cottage cheese, a little water, a LOT of basil, and SUPER GARLIC spice blend, add to the pan with the meat and red sauce, stir well to combine, and simmer until hot through and the alcohol has cooked out. The color isn’t the most beautiful, and sometimes the texture gets a touch funky visually, but the flavor is truly fantastic.

We eat this over a combination of whatever noodles we have on-hand at the time and zoodles to boost the veggie content of the meal.

Garnish generously with pecorino Romano cheese and a pinch of truffle salt.

Monday: Leftovers from Sunday night’s meal.

We did have to boil more noodles and sauté more of the zoodles, but I had pre-spiralized all of the zucchini the first night, which I always do, so at least that was quick.

Easy weeknight options we've gotten from Safeway recently.

Tuesday: Perdue Chicken Nuggets, leftover fries from Sunday lunch out getting burgers.

I forget what else we had with these - I may have even just eaten nuggets and dipping sauce.

We love to dip our nuggets into Date Lady BBQ sauce and Honey Mustard (from our local Safeway).

Wednesday: Perdue Chicken Fingers and Alexia Seasoned Waffle Fries.

We had a couple of mid-week evenings where I was busy until pretty late with work, and then it got too late to cook something more involved, so chicken fingers again it was.

I find that having something quick on-hand like this is helpful, and really fun and enjoyable for us. It’s a break from the “chicken, veg, rice” vibe, and I like having a break from putting in more effort when I end up working a bit late to deal with food.

One of the best things that happened for me during my divergence from diet culture was the release of too many strict “food rules.”

So, enjoying frozen items like these nuggets/chicken fingers and waffle fries that are cooked in oils I don’t buy or use regularly at home, has become something that I can relax into. In the past, I would have read the ingredients then put these items back and missed out on that ease and enjoyment. While the nuggets don’t list a cooking oil, I did contact Perdue and asked and they do use soybean or canola oil for frying them in their facility. I am not stressed about it, but I did want the information because the lack of transparency on the label bugged me!

Thursday: Super Trifecta Chicken Thighs with Umami Green Beans and white rice.

This dish is a weeknight staple for us and I am so in love with this chicken I can crush a lot of it at once, it’s simply so flavorful and the texture is great.

I don’t measure when I make this, but the gist of the “recipe” is this:

Prep chicken thighs with a drizzle of EVOO and fresh lemon juice, then coat liberally with SUPER TRIFECTA spice blend (a chunky blend of garlic flakes, sea salt, and cracked black pepper) - they should look almost “breaded,” but not quite, with the spice blend. Allow to sit for a few minutes, but marinating isn’t critical. I air fry mine for 16-17 mins at 375F but your oven may work differently than ours, so be sure you cook chicken until it’s 165F internally.

To prep the green beans, I microwave steam them in the bag for about 3 minutes, then pop them into a hot skillet with some butter, a dash of coconut aminos, and some TRIFECTA spice blend (garlic, salt, and pepper) just to sear and finish them off for flavor and texture.

Friday: Thai delivery.

If you’re local, we ordered from The Baan Thai Cuisine in San Anselmo and we like this place a lot. We’ve ordered from here several times now and have enjoyed it.

Things we ordered this week and loved:

Pineapple Fried Rice, Panang Curry Chicken, Fire Cook Beef, Satay Chicken, Steamed Dumplings. We don’t usually order white rice as we always have it on-hand.

This much food also morphed into lunch for us on Saturday, some extra fried rice for Scott for a couple of breakfasts, and I think we’ve got one more meal for one of us left.

Saturday: Rice Noodles with Peanut Sauce & Shrimp

For a couple of weeks now, I’ve been planning to make rice paper rolls with shrimp, but I just hadn’t gotten around to it. Finally I decided, inspired by just having eaten our Thai takeout, to turn the whole thing into just rice noodles with peanut sauce and add the shrimp to that. I was too tired to be rolling a million little wraps up, so this worked really well and I’d do it again.

Here’s what we did:

While I steamed shrimp, I whisked together peanut butter, coconut aminos, sesame oil, rice vinegar, chili crunch until smooth - this takes a while and the sauce will look broken and weird for a while, then it’ll come together. I do this purely to taste, I don’t measure anything, but here’s a ballpark: a couple of tablespoons each of peanut butter and coconut aminos, a few dashes of rice vinegar and a teaspoon or so of sesame oil. I whisk that then usually add more of whatever it needs to my liking. Then I mix in the chili crisp and freshly chopped green onions.

Once the shrimp was steamed, we took them out of that pot and placed the noodles into the water that had just steamed the shrimp for about 5-6 minutes.

I also had some finely sliced green onion added to my noodles, and if I do this again I’d add some fresh mung bean sprouts, too. We topped it all with chopped fresh basil, mint, and cilantro - and sesame oils and some chopped seasoned cashews Scott had made last week for extra texture.

The rice noodles I found at Safeway - we liked these and would get them again! They would also work inside a fresh spring roll, which was what I originally bought them for.

Let me know if seeing this is helpful and if you have questions.

I’ll continue to share other weeks of dinner inspo over time.

Cheers,
Diane