Weekly Menu Planning - August 2025

Cooking Discussions
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Cooking for 2 in Happy Valley. We finally got some much needed rain (our poor farmers!), and the temps dropped to being bearable. Fall is in the air… I may even need a jacket on my scooter today! Can’t say I’m angry about it :slight_smile:

I fell a bit off the menu planning wagon, as evidenced by my actual meals in our other popular home cooking thread, but we still ate well.

Tonight we’re invited to a dinner party with another couple, and I believe crab cakes are on the menu. We’re bringing a lovely German Riesling and Gewürztraminer from the same vineyard to contribute.

Tomorrow I have a quartet gig that was thankfully moved from 8-10pm to a more senior-friendly :wink: 7-9:30pm, theoretically enabling me to partake in the scheduled food truck’s fish fry, but I think I might just grab a little something at home to tide me over until after & probably snack on any leftovers we have in the fridge — there’s a little bit of that scrumptious Thai shrimp curry I made a couple of days ago — or steam a few har gow. Or order wings :woman_shrugging:t2: A buddy of ours who moved to VA a few years ago with his fam is in town & planning to crash with us. He’s apparently on Ozempic now (perfect candidate for it, too!), so he won’t clear out our beer stash :grin:

SATURDAY we’re invited to a retirement party hosted by the couple who’s joining us at the dinner party tonight. There will be Indian food from one of the local restos.

SUNDAY we have rain forecast for late afternoon/early evening — thwarting any grill plans we may have had, yet still warm. Maybe a spicy stir-fry or the laab I never made last week, or the two remaining short rib / chuck patties from our cheeborger dinner from last Monday.

MONDAY is the much dreaded beginning of the semester. The woo people have arrived. Yay. I may or may not make a shrimp & corn chowdah with the corn stock à la @LindaWhit I made & froze a while ago, in which I could steep the ginormous stash of shrimp shells I also have in the freezer. And hopefully the potatoes in our pantry are still good :sweat_smile:

TUESDAY we’re having a ladies night after a two week hiatus, probz at the gay bar (hoping the food menu for the week appeals).

WEDNESDAY is also supposed to be on the cooler side, so I may switch the chowdah plan around. There’s also this recipe I’ve been meaning to try:

(gift link, of course).

THURSDAY is another gig with the full band at the venue we play regularly. It’s unlikely that I’ll eat there, so dinner is a big fat ? ATM.

Happy cooking, peeps!

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103

I had a neighbor who asked us for our extra produce, but she quit talking to us when we built a wooden fence around our property to keep the deer out. :person_shrugging:

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Some places here use a cart. So you could wheel it away in bad weather.

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Lol.

She sounds sensitive.

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We thought about that, but figured it would probably get wheeled off. There are lots of bored kids in our town. Not far from us a woman filled her yard with unique sculptures she had made - one of them disappeared, unfortunately.

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Yes, indeedy!

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Our farmers markets used to have a place people could donate home-grown to the food bank, 20 years ago, but that doesn’t happen anymore. At a time when the city population is growing quickly and food banks are running empty.

We now have security guards at the doors of our drug stores and grocery stores because there has been so much theft. This is new for Ontario. Really sad

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We have a coffee shop/cafe for at-risk youth and other similar populations. I went down there to see if they wanted our produce, but they declined. The food bank is always an option, but it would nice to have something close by for small-ish quantities.

I’ll be brain-storming! In the mean time, it’s the Free Box.

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Sorry to hear about the theft of the sculpture.

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Change of plans!
Stuffed peppers tonight.
I picked up some really nice Shepherd peppers at a farm stand yesterday. Some of the last berries, too. And dog food for my dog who is always hungry. I can relate.

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That is so nice of you to do something like this. We have two groups in Ottawa for people to give things away (“Buy Nothing” for specific neighbourhoods in the city and “Share It Don’t Toss It” which is city wide). When food is offered, it gets snapped up in no time at all. Some people ask for food since they are on social assistance or disability and donations to the food bank are going down so they often don’t have enough food from one visit to the food bank to last until the next visit a month later. As a result we see a lot of requests for food.

I get a CSA every year and I get a huge 10 lb bag of potatoes and a 10 lb bag of carrots at the end of the growing season. It’s too much for one person to eat so I usually offer them up on my local Buy Nothing group since it’s limited to the people in my neighbourhood and the people in that group pick up quickly. Last year I contacted two social enterprises that make meals for the homeless and they are always looking for food donations but neither of them called me back. It’s so frustrating when you’re trying to help…

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I was just about to suggest the same thing and then I saw your post—such a neat idea. We have many in our neighborhood but none full of veggies!

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Lovely and generous idea!
This person used an Ikea metal box. They don’t seem to have that one anymore, but maybe this cabinet could work.

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Thanks for the links. The Ikea prices sure are right, but I think things would cook in a metal box. We don’t have any shade up front. I’m thinking wood with chicken wire door in front - and holes drilled in back - for ventilation. Like a pie safe. If we do it, I’ll be sure and post a pic!

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We have a wooden fence and the deer still get in our small yard. I see them here in “downtown” Chapel Hill all the time now, nonchalantly chewing on people’s lawns.

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They’re voracious! When we first moved here, I didn’t understand the penchant for oddly sculpted shrubbery. Later I realized it was the deer eating everything below a certain height. :deer:

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Hello friends from a beautiful sunny day in Ottawa. We had some cooler weather this week with the temperature hovering in the 70s most days which has been a nice break from the unbearable heat we’ve been getting this summer. The temperature is warming up but it would be nice if we could get some rain. Our lawns are looking a little parched and our farmers could use a dousing on their crops. It has been a busy week with a sketching class on Monday, dinner out with a meetup group (non spicy yet delicious Korean food) on Tuesday then a jazz concert on Wednesday. Yesterday was an in-the-office day then CSA pickup day so Thursday nights are always late. I am getting a mountain of veggies now so it takes awhile to rearrange the contents of the fridge and unpack my veggies. My one token fruit this week was a canteloupe and it smells so sweet I can’t wait to cut it up tomorrow to put in the fridge. I usually snack on it while doing so, so I will probably get my fill of canteloupe tomorrow 🙂 Onto my menus for this week:

Today: I ran up to Farm Boy (grocery store chain) at lunch today to pick up missing ingredients for dishes this weekend so I picked up a roast beef caramelized onion sandwich for lunch today. The sandwich today is okay but there’s an Italian deli a couple of blocks away from my apartment that makes some really good, well packed sandwiches that I much prefer but I really needed to go to the store today so I bought a sandwich at their lunch counter out of convenience. Farm Boy’s groceries are lovely - fruits, veggies, meats and fish are always fresh and good quality and they have a nice assortment of non perishables but their take away dishes leave much to be desired. Tonight’s dinner will be a garden fresh corn salad.

Saturday: I will be staying at home today to do some random chores. Dinner will be shrimp and green beans with chili sauce from my “Simply Thai” cookbook.

Sunday: Off to the mall to do some clothes shopping. I will have a bagel with cream cheese and cucumber for dinner with a tomato green bean salad with an evoo, red wine and dijon vinaigrette.

Monday: My last sketching class. I will have the last serving of peanut soup in the freezer for dinner when I get home.

Tuesday: Pork chop, beans, corn on the cob.

Wednesday: Beef and cabbage stir fry. Off to another jazz show after dinner.

Thursday: Fettucine al pesto, tomato cucumber salad on the side.

Have a nice week everyone!

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Hi, all! Cooking for 2 in Chattanooga, where apparently we’re in for some unseasonably cool weather this coming week–Fake Fall, I think they call it.

Breakfast: Plum fritters from Jubilee
Saturday, August 23: Cumin-roasted eggplants and chickpeas from Diana Henry’s Simple, the tomato-cucumber thing I didn’t make last week, maybe baked rice on the side
Sunday: Crustless quiche, ricotta peach cake (gift link)
Monday: Shrimp scampi (ATK), pasta, broccolini
Tuesday-Thursday: Scrounge/takeout. Chattanooga now has a hand-pulled noodle place that I really want to try, but so does the rest of the town, apparently :slight_smile:
Friday: Creamy corn and chive pasta from Family
I hope everyone has a good last week of August! Happy cooking!

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If I could, I would happily give you some of the rain we’ve had this summer.

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And I would happily take it! We really need rain. We have a burn ban in Ottawa right now since it’s so dry around here. I can only recall the rural areas having burn bans in the past. I don’t even remember the last time Ottawa proper had a burn ban.

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