Hosting Friends Dinner #20180228

I never know what to call this thing we do, but there are six households and we each take turns making a weekly meal to share together. It started out as Tuesday night dinner, but then the night changed to Monday and we had to stop calling it a specific day of the week. The little ones call it Friends Dinner so we’ll go with that. This week it was my night to host, and this is what I made:

• Meatloaf.  A lot of meatloaf. Four recipes of meatloaf. Two recipes were the regular kind, and two were this keto-friendly recipe. I cranked up the oven to 400 and baked them in muffin tins to try and speed up the process, cooking two muffin pans at a time.
• Green beans, three pounds were trimmed, steamed, then heavily buttered.
• Fried cabbage which started with two packages of bacon, two heads of sliced up cabbage, a whole bunch of black pepper, and just a tiny bit of additional salt.
• Mashed potatoes made in my instant pot, because it’s fast. Like this recipe, but with way more butter.
• Dessert was this oreo poke cake and rice krispie treats made with double the butter of the original recipe. Because it was Darian’s 9th birthday last Friday, and also because I almost always make dessert.

That’s what it was! It was mighty tasty, though I do wish I had a convection oven to get all the meatloaf-muffin-things done in one batch. At any rate, here’s the menu plan for the rest of the week:

• Monday was the dinner described above. Tasty and cleaned up with three dishwasher loads.
• Tuesday we had leftover meatloaf served up on burger buns with broccoli on the side. Also tasty!
• Wednesday Pasta with smoked sausage, tomato sauce, peppers n onions. Served with a side salad and garlic bread.
• Thursday Stirfry Stursday returns! Garlic/chili/soy will be the base of the sauce, which will be thickened up with a bit of cornstarch and tossed with chicken and veggies. Served with plenty of rice.
• Friday The boys will be ravenous after a full day of snowboarding, so I’m going with their requested dinner of pizza and baked lemon pepper chicken drumsticks. I’ll also make them eat some apple slices.

That’s all for this week, but please do let me know if you have any brilliant ideas for what to feed 6 households.