Real Food for the Weekend

Eating real foods is much easier on the weekend. Being at home, we have the opportunity to control the menu and prepare the food.

Saturday morning the hubby and I got up and went to Fresh Market and Easy Way to see what we could find.

Fresh Market has an impressive meat department! We decided to get some prepared (gasp!) sausages, hamburger patties, and stuffed chicken breasts. There are somethings that I may try to make at home but I don't think I'll always be able to make everything myself. If we are going to eat prepared foods, at least we can choose items we feel are fresher and made with better ingredients.

The sausages contained chicken or turkey with various seasonings (spinach, feta, asiago, garlic, etc). The burgers consisted of high grade, less fat ground beef mixed with (1) bleu cheese, (2) bacon, sundried tomatoes, and cheese, and (3) swiss-steak style. Hubby grilled all those and we all tried some of each item. They were all really, really good!

The chicken breasts were stuffed with (1) crab and shrimp, (2) asparagus and crab, and (3) feta and chives. Those were all excellent, too.

Last night we had more grilled meat. Hubby grilled salmon that had been in a marinade overnight. He doesn't care much for salmon but declared it was good and the marinade had taken away the "fishy" taste that he doesn't like so much.

Our side dishes were steamed broccoli, orzo with onions and garlic, steamed baby carrots, steamed summer squash/zucchini, and balsamic vinegar rosemary roasted fingerling potatoes. We did have canned corn. That was the only commercially canned/prepared vegetable we ate this weekend.

I made a chocolate cake from scratch this weekend with homemade cream cheese frosting. It turned out extremely well! The cake is dense and rich and the cream cheese frosting goes really well with it! We haven't gobbled it up yet, either! The cake recipe is from the Country Living website and they call it "Basic Chocolate Cake".

So far, so good!!!