Welcome to the July 2025 edition of the thread where we share our weekly menus and more.
Some of us share a day by day plan, others report last week’s actual meals, and some put together a list of ideas to work from the week. You do you, and take comfort that the best laid plans do change for all of us!
If you have recipe links or sources, do share them, as we all love picking up new ideas from everyone else’s menus! For context and because we’re interested, please include your location and how many you plan and/or cook for.
It’s truly summer! Local produce, farmers markets, stone fruit, corn, tomatoes, blueberries. What’s cooking in your home this month?
Hi everyone, I hope you’re all enjoying the long weekend. Lulu is still visiting her boyfriend, LLD only has two more shots for his rabies series, and I am going to see a doctor about my knees this week. So things are moving forward. Here’s what we ate this week:
Sun: pasta with greens, onion, fennel, garlic and anchovy. I baked a peach ricotta cake, so that for dessert.
Mon: roasted tomato tart with ricotta and pesto (NYT), salad
Tues: carry out
Wed: beef and pepper stir fry over rice. I took one bite and knew I wasn’t going to be able to eat the meat (sometimes my former vegetarian self just can’t do it), even though I planned and cooked it. I gave all the meat to LLD and ate the peppers and rice. Wasn’t sad at all!
Thurs: we wanted something different. I came up with going for ice cream for dinner! Sat and looked out over farm land eating it, and it was a fun date.
Good news in on all fronts and wow, does that photo remind me of North Carolina in a very visceral way. The landscape always gets me. I’d go for the peppers and rice without the beef myself. I hope the new place tonight comes through! We were sad that our favorite lunch spot today was closed without any notice and ended up at a place we didn’t like at all.
Hope you’re enjoying the weekend, and some pleasant weather now and then (it’s been occasionally lovely between spells of heat and thunderstorms here in nyc).
I bought 2 packages of ground turkey in a row: made one into merguez seekh kababs and patties and shumai meatballs, sautéed the other for use in various things (oyako donburi, bibimbap, and more to come).
I also succumbed to a pack of hot dog buns for faux lobster rolls… so welcome to my annual Hot Dog Bun Week !
Ideas for the week:
– Faux lobster rolls with Argentinian shrimp (using red onion and fennel for crunch, and maybe cilantro, scallions, and sriracha for an Asian bent for some)
– Merguez seekh kabab “hot dog” with herby yogurt and harissa (COTM Julia Turshen)
– Viet roast chicken thighs + garlic butter noodles (both from prior COTM Andrea Nguyen)
– Leftover chicken salad rolls with scallions, cilantro, fennel, and spicy sriracha mayo (and this should finish the pack of buns… hopefully)
– Ikea copycat broccoli & potato patties (maybe as a large single Spanish tortilla-style cake)
– Quick Bibimbap — ground turkey “bulgogi”, garlic zucchini muchim, scallion salad, kimchi, ssam sauce
– Shumai meatballs (COTM NY Times) + fried rice or scallion noodles
– Japanese-style Korokke or Indian potato "chops" stuffed with ground turkey (but not deep-fried)
Salads to mix & match:
– Fennel & orange (two bulbs last a looooong time)
– Vinegret — beet, potato, carrot, fennel, onion, scallion
– Tomato — Caprese, Japanese, & mom-style
– Zucchini — carpaccio, shaved, & Korean banchan-style muchim
Hot milk cake is still on my mind — maybe this weekend.
Wish you all a relaxing weekend and a lovely week ahead.
Only a ten minute drive from downtown Chapel Hill, and we drove by cows on the way there. It was beautiful!
The cheese place was a total hit. Great cheeses, a nice canned tuna pate, smoked salmon toasts for me and a ham and butter baguette for LLD. They’ve made a beautiful space there and I was happy to see it be fairly busy.
Hi all, half-a$$ing a meal plan for three in the Boston burbs. I feel like I have enough energy for five dishes per week - either five dinners, or four dinners and a something else for lunches. That sixth dish never seems to materialize in my mind…
The laundry insanity is still ongoing (after another trip to the laundromat on Weds) but the plumber is coming tomorrow morning to do what will hopefully be the last fix. I don’t think I have ever looked forward to doing laundry as much as I am now! Since we’d pulled everything out of the laundry closet/room before the new appliances were installed, I decided to organize before replacing it all - now I feel much better organized AND I’m $0.12 richer.
Sun: slow cooker bbq pulled chicken (NYT for inspiration), pepper strips, chips. I also made a batch of cowboy caviar (two peppers, no avocado, forgot the onion) for lunches.
Mon: Vietnamese meatballs - not sure who shared the link here but it seemed like it would go over reasonably well here.
Tues: tbd, I’m thinking fish but haven’t gotten any further than that.
Weds: pasta with fresh marinara (basically marinated tomatoes) and cheese. DS is skeptical of burrata, and my description of it as “like a chocolate lava cake, but cheese instead of chocolate” hasn’t helped, so I’m hoping he is willing to try it!
Thurs: birthday eve nachos
Fri: out for fancy dinner (steakhouse) for DS’s birthday!
Boo on the appliances. Hope yours gets fixed soon.
We got our new laundry machines yesterday. Really don’t like in some ways, but getting used to them while doing about 12 large loads of laundry. They are efficient, too many options, and now I need to get used to hearing from my phone what the laundry is doing after the difficult adjustment to needing to use my phone to know when the new (several months ago) dishwasher’s cycle is finished. I wish I had sapphire blue, but getting laundry done is unexpectedly delightful.
DS and I both have a lot of allergies, including chemicals and scents, and laundry done at the laundromat seems to bring home accumulated chemicals and scents from their machines.
Happy birthday to DS!
I don’t have energy for even 5 meals a week. Cowboy caviar sounds great to use up some farmers markets veg that is coming in Boston area. Some early cabbage and garlic chives are enticing and I need to use up green garlic and early radicchio.
Or the dishwasher! But the 10 year old one was leaking and we had to replace a few months ago. The the blue light that used to tell us the old dishwasher was finished…never to be seen again. Red light shows up at the bottom when d/w is on, disappears when it’s finished…so no separate light to tell us it’s finished!
I hated it at first but got used to it. Well, I still hate it, but I know that the dishes are clean even if DH forgot to tell me he turned it on…
New washer doesn’t tell us on the washer that it’s time for sanitation cycle like the old one did, which is really necessary to avoid mold etc. on the high efficiency front loading washers. So we have to sign up for “notification”“”…
It would be worth it maybe if the new machines were sapphire blue…
I looked at the News and Observer website. Looks like some neighborhoods of Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill have major flooding. Best wishes to LLM, LLD, LL, and Lady Berkeley! (Edit)
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