Menu for National Birthday Week

(Mr. Honey's family has a great tradition of celebrating birthdays with a National Birthday Week, which involves special treatment all the week long. Triss' and Mariel's birthdays are both this week, so here we go!)

Our menu for National Birthday week includes two cakes, one chocolate and the other strawberry with cream cheese frosting. Yum. National Birthday week is tasty. Although the girls' birthdays are just a day apart, we are spacing the cakes (one on Sunday, one on Wednesday) so we don't get overloaded with cake. We could just have one, but they each enjoy picking the flavor, and why not?

Here is our menu for this week (I did follow the menu for last week, although I changed the order around a little, and didn't fix the chicken spaghetti meal because we didn't end up needing it):

Sunday (lunch at church): Crock Chicken Spaghetti, green beans, salad, chocolate birthday cake

Monday: Basic Black Bean Soup from the Saving Dinner cookbook (page 84), salad and cornbread muffins.

Tuesday: Southwest Stew in the crockpot, from here (with some modifications) and carrot sticks.

Wednesday: Basic Baked Beans from the More-With-Less Cookbook (page 99), peas, rice, and salad if we still have any. (Making the rice ahead worked so well last week that I think I will do that again tomorrow night in preparation for this meal.) Also, strawberry birthday cake with cream cheese frosting!

Thursday: Leftover night. If we have eaten the leftovers already (for lunches, etc.) then we can have a breakfast supper!

Friday: Garlic lime chicken from the Saving Dinner cookbook (page 57-- using bone-in thighs instead of boneless breasts, and adapted for the crockpot), potatoes, green beans, carrot sticks.

Also, I was running out of inspiration for beans, so I went googling and found this great blog thread about beans and rice, rice and beans (and other things). (I googled 'non-boring bean meals', lol.) One commenter gives a complete rundown on how to make authentic New Orleans red beans and rice, which apparently is served every Monday all over that city. She even gives suggestions on what to do with leftovers.

My family doesn't like kidney beans. We might try the red beans and rice thing with pintos, great northerns or navy beans.

And finally, remember:

If you should ever choose
To bathe an armadillo
Use one bar of soap,
A whole lot of hope,
And seventy-two pads of Brillo.

--Shel Silverstein