Saturday: Pizza Salads, Freezer Turnover & Steak at Mom’s

Got up this morning and made a fresh batch of bacon, because apparently we’re just fully committed to the bacon lifestyle at this point. I like to do 2 trays with parchment paper in an oven at 400ºF.

We also had a couple of leftover Chick-fil-A biscuits from yesterday, plus toast, and then got into a pretty normal Saturday.

Leftover Costco Pizza Becomes Lunch

For lunch, I had all that Costco pizza my mom dropped off yesterday, so obviously we were going to use it.

I reheated a bunch of slices, and a couple of my kids turned theirs into pizza salads.

If you’ve never done this, you make a regular salad, cut a slice of pizza into small pieces and basically use the pizza as giant croutons on top.

Pizza salad.

It’s a thing.

Some of the other kids had their pizza with side salads because, as always, foods are allowed to remain separate in this house.

The Freezer Is a Pause Button

For some extra protein for Chris and me, I finally pulled out one of the Kevin’s meals that’s been hanging around.

This particular package actually went all the way to Norris Lake with us earlier this month. We never ate it, so it came home and went right back into the freezer.

But here’s one of my general freezer philosophies:

The freezer is a pause button for food. It’s not a place where food goes to die.

I’m completely fine with keeping things frozen, obviously. That’s why I have a freezer. But I also like to keep food moving through it.

If something has been sitting there for a while, eventually I purposely pull it into the refrigerator so that I’m forced to find a place for it in our meals.

I did that with this Kevin’s pineapple chicken earlier in the week, and Saturday lunch became its moment.

My Kevin’s Meal Hack

The package says it serves more people than I personally think it does.

Maybe we just eat a lot of protein, but to me, there’s enough chicken in there for about two adults.

There is, however, plenty of sauce.

It comes with two packages of chicken and two packages of sauce, and I only use one sauce packet for all of the chicken.

That’s plenty for us. I also have some leftover Lundberg Family Farms Jasmine Rice packages…they’re QUITE sticky, but I want to use up the rest of them (I bought these for the lake trip earlier this month, and I don’t want them to just sit on my pantry shelf forever…)

Then I save the unopened sauce packet. I can use that another day with plain chicken I’ve cooked myself instead of throwing it away or drowning today’s chicken in sauce just because it came in the box.

We had the pineapple chicken with a little rice alongside the leftover pizza and salads, and it made for a really good Saturday lunch.

I still think I prefer the cilantro-lime Kevin’s chicken that Costco used to carry, but the pineapple version was good.

More importantly: it’s no longer in my freezer.

Mission accomplished.

Dinner at My Parents’

Tonight we headed to my parents’ house for dinner, and my mom made her steaks that we always love, along with potatoes and the rest of dinner.

And then she made a really fun apple cake for dessert that was gluten- and dairy-free.

I wish I had the recipe to share, but I don’t….I’ll see if I can get it from her soon!

She also made a dairy-free dulce de leche-style caramel sauce using dairy-free sweetened condensed milk. She cooked the can for a long time in hot water until the sweetened condensed milk turned into this thick caramel.

It was delicious with the apple cake.

Going Into Sunday

And, as usual, I didn’t come home from my parents’ house empty-handed.

I now have:

• Leftover steak
• Leftover cooked chicken
• Leftover potatoes
• Fresh bacon from this morning

That’s a pretty great start to my rolling three-day protein supply without me actually having to cook any of it today.

And tomorrow morning I’ll be doing a big Costco order, which means we’ll restock and start the whole cycle again.