Here's the food that I made us this month! I really do enjoy doing this occasionally to see what we've been enjoying:
April 1: It was General Conference, so I made caramelized french toast for a special breakfast, and then we had a stir fry with chicken sausage, quinoa, spinach, and apples for dinner.
April 2: We celebrated my brother's 32nd birthday with a blackberry lime Italian soda cake (lime cake, whipped cream, blackberry jam, and blackberry frostin) between Conference sessions. I made a beef stroganoff soup with homemade egg noodles for dinner. Egg noodles, for reference, are very easy.
April 3: Skillet gnocchi with spinach, sausage, and ricotta. I'm a sucker for any recipe that uses gnocchi!
April 4: Curried sweet potato soup with pepitas and corn muffins on the side. Early April still feels mostly like winter so soup works well.
April 5: Sometimes I make more elaborate dinners during Spring Break because I'm not driving people all over the place during prime dinner-making hours. These are tacos tojas with tomato/chile tortillas and then a cheese and jalapeno filling and homemade salsa verde. They're delicious but they took a TON of work and involved Miles cooking the tortillas while I pressed them.
April 6: Dairy-free bolognese and asparagus. I didn't make this because I'm trying to cut out dairy, but because I have a big thing of nutritional yeast in my pantry that I am trying to use up and the recipe uses that to substitute for Parmesan. Gerrit and Miles particularly loved this one!
April 7: This is a southwest vegetable soup that is most of the way to tortilla soup. It's loaded with vegetables but the kids like it for the tortilla chips.
April 8: The "meatiest" veggie burgers and spiced sweet potato fries. I like veggie burgers on their own merits, which is to say that they make yummy vegetarian sandwiches...but I don't like the ones that are meat substitutes. I like the ones that are bean/grain/vegetable based.
April 9: Our Easter feast! You have pineapple-glazed ham, cheddar cathead biscuits, salad, two flavors of deviled eggs (Parm + pepper and traditional), creamy potatoes and leeks, Cadbury egg blondies, and key lime bars.
April 10: In theory, this is a mozzarella stick salad. In practice, the mozzarella sticks REALLY did not work so it's more of a mozzarella "frico" salad. I think you might need them to go in extremely cold so the mozzarella doesn't melt on contact.
April 11: This is tortellini and vegetables in brodo (read: light soup) and sun-dried tomato biscuits. The family was not a fan of the biscuits but everyone did like the soup!
April 12: Breakfast sandwiches with homemade sausage patties and folded eggs. I was also going to make the English muffins but that did not happen, schedule-wise.
April 13: This is actually a picture of the leftovers, but it was baharat-seasoned chili (North African?) topped with cornbread. It made a truly dramatic amount of food and claimed to serve four.
April 14: This was a special request from Miles, and it's lemony salmon penne with fennel. He loves seafood pasta! I served it with a carrot loaf cake with brown butter frosting.
April 15: Miles: Mom, why are we having so much pizza? Me: Because I bought way too much shredded cheese for your sister's chef party, and it doesn't last forever in the freezer. This particular installment is one pepperoni (always) and one pesto with sausage and arugula.
April 16: These pinto bean and brown rice taco bowls don't look like anything special, but please trust me when I say they are truly delicious. The cauliflower is a side dish, not part of the bowls.
April 17: Everyone eats breakfast for dinner, so here's lemon poppy seed pancakes and smoothies!
April 18: This honey-soy steak and green beans was such a disappointment. I had to do grocery pickup this week, and the steak they got was NOT well suited for stir-fry. The meat was very tough, which was sad because the sauce and the beans were good.
April 19: The tortillas are not selling it, but I promise that pinto bean, mushroom, and kale tacos are tasty. Taco-seasoned mushrooms are some of my favorites!
April 20: Your eagle eyes may notice that this picture is from a magazine. This is because I made dinner in the middle of the afternoon so that Molly and I could eat dinner in the car between her physics class and parent watch day at dance. They were tasty and also maybe slightly too drippy for optimal car food.
April 21: This was Miles's birthday party, and since he and Gerrit would be buying dinner from a restaurant, I took Molly and Elliott out for dinner of their choice. That was burritos for me and Elliott and a French dip for Molly, and then drinks and chonuts with a free coupon they got from school.
April 22: Loaded baked potato soup and homemade cheese crackers. Homemade cheese crackers are, to quote Miles, "an awful lot of work for something I could just eat all of in five minutes."
April 23: This is a mediterranean sheet pan gnocchi with zucchini, gnocchi, and tomatoes that go on the sheet pan, and then gets topped with olives and feta at the end.
We had family over for Miles's birthday dessert. I made peanut butter cookies with chocolate ganache (the cookies are kind of delicate for filling) and peanut butter ice cream with no-bake cookies in it. The ice cream was great!
April 24: We went out for Miles's birthday dinner since it was a less busy day, and he wanted conveyor belt sushi.
April 25: French toast with pecans and syrup and scrambled eggs. This whole week Molly had extra dance practices and performances, so I neeed either easy dinners or dinners I could make earlier in the day and then would save well for dinner time. This was the easy kind.
April 26: This is the Chinese version of the vegetable soup from earlier, believe it or not. They have the same base recipe but different seasonings and mix-ins. I also made brown sugar shao bing from a Chinese bakery cookbook I have. You also have a Nutella swirl cake that I made for braces-friendly breakfasts.
April 27: Like Miles mentioned, lots of pizza. Again, you have pepperoni (always and ever) and also a salad pizza.
April 28: Italian hoagie salad! It has provolone and salami and no one liked it but me, but it did make for great leftovers.
April 29: We were so, so busy with dance that we ended up eating leftovers. This is how I know that the salad worked so well as leftovers :)
April 30: I had a chicken and gnocchi soup on the menu, but it was too hot outside for soup, so I used the gnocchi I was going to use with a jar of sauce and some vegetables from the fridge along with a loaf of bread I had in the freezer.
