Sunday Dinner

Okay, so I usually do not make a dinner like this for Sunday nights.  I  am wanting to make big changes to our diets and start eating organic local meats as much as possible.  So we are trying to slowly get rid of the meat we have had in our deep freeze, and of course we had purchased three turkey breasts when they were on sale at Thanksgiving. 

Right now we buy very few organic items, mostly because we try and stick to a budget.  We shop at Aldi and Hy-Vee for the things that just do not taste the same from Aldi, but we are able to get groceries for our family of four for $500 a month.  This has been $100 each week plus one time a month we have been making a trip to Sam's Club to stock up on meat, yogurt, olive oil and some spices.  I am not sure we will be going to Sam's Club any more after watching Food, Inc.  We are barely able to stomach eating the food we have and are already up to about three vegetarian meals a week instead of just one.

I made these items from scratch and they mostly fit in the 100 Days of Real Food challenge rules except for the meat being local and I did use some sugar in the cranberries, but you have to sweeten them with something.  It was Morena Pure Cane sugar (that I found at Aldi), so I felt better about that.

I roasted the turkey in the oven like I normally do, but I tried a Porcini Gravy from Cooking Light that I was interested in from their November issue.  I am terrible at making gravy, but I thought a recipe might help.  I was right, it turned out well, but the taste was just eh.  So, we will probably not do that again.

The Oatmeal Knots and Sweet Potato Casserole I have made before, from Cooking Light as well.  I did put pure maple syrup in place of the sugar in the casserole, but I am thinking in the future I will substitute a couple over ripe bananas instead of that.  I also left the marshmallows off the top.

The Green Bean Casserole is a recipe from the 100 Days of Real Food website that I wanted to try and they were fabulous and easy.  I will never buy cream of mushroom soup again. 

My family gobbled up everything, well we had plenty of leftovers for lunch today, but they ate well.  I am so glad my husband is on board with this and that he let me have some time yesterday to cook.  Vegetarian Baked Cavatelli tonight and making some bread so we can have leftover turkey paninis tomorrow night.

Gotta run!