A Week in Dinners

Today’s post is a quickie about my dinners this week. Without further preamble, here you go!

Baked Salmon with Mustard Sauce and Kale.

The way I bake salmon is fail-safe. I use a piece of foil, put the salmon down, season it however I want, then loosely wrap the foil. I bake it at 350 degrees for 16-20 minutes depending on how thick the salmon fillet is. Usually 18 minutes is a good time.

I have about four or five favorite salmon “recipes” and this one is probably #2. I make it a lot. I take some dijon mustard and add a little brown sugar, mix well and top the salmon with the mustard. It’s sweet and tangy at the same time. This time I added a little cayenne pepper to it to see how much of a bite it gave the sauce. It wasn’t very spicy.

I sauteed some kale in a skillet with chicken stock and topped it with the salmon. It was a filling, delicious dinner for 400 calories.

Thai Noodles with Broccoli.

I have fallen in love with the Thai Kitchen noodles. They come in a little packet (like Ramen) and there’s about four different flavor. This time I used the lemongrass and chili flavor. The packet itself is around 170 calories and it’s SO GOOD!

I cooked the noodles and added steamed broccoli to it. I topped it with sriracha sauce. I know it was an “easy” dinner and nothing fancy but I loved how tasty it was. I made a salad to go with my noodles. The salad was: spinach, Oregon Gorgonzola, slivered almonds and half an avocado.

It was definitely enough food, and it was only around 400 calories for everything. This is a good dinner for me when I’m cooking for just myself because it’s so easy and quick.

Cheeseburger with Greens.

Michael is the burger connoisseur in our house and he makes good burgers! Since Michael is gluten-free, he uses gluten-free buns for the burgers. I’d much rather just skip the bun altogether, so that’s what I’ve been doing lately. He grilled up the burgers and I had a slice of smoked Gouda on mine.

I added stoneground mustard to the top of my burger and had steamed green beans as my side with pickles and green olives. Weird, I know, but so good. Not seen in the photo was the glass of Cabernet I had with dinner, too. Calories for dinner: 650.

Spicy Shrimp Tacos.

Tuesday night was dog walking! It was a really nice day, the sun was out and warm and the dogs were super excited to be outside. Michael and I walked Cindy and Tiki again. We’ve walked them before. They are an adorable pair.

ADOPT US!

They are a funny pair. They walk really fast but they have tiny little legs so it’s hilarious to watch. They also have to stop and pee on EVERYTHING. Even if there’s nothing else coming out. It’s silly.

ADOPT ME!

They are sweet and affectionate and so chill. After those two, we walked Bessie. She’s not for adoption (she previously was, was adopted and was there for some medical treatments only). She was a basset hound. I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve only seen basset hounds in cartoons and never in person. 😉

When Michael and I got home from volunteering at The Pixie Project, ready to make dinner, I realized our dishwasher was broken. This comes after Michael’s old TV broke and then his iPod broke…so instead of fixing dinner, I spent an hour washing three days worth of dishes that were sitting in our broken dishwasher!

Despite that, dinner was simple and quick. Michael sauteed the shrimp in a skillet with coconut oil and cayenne pepper. I prepped the small corn tortillas.

Two tortillas equal 110 calories. I put refried beans on it, sour cream, guacamole, salsa, chopped jalapenos, and black olives in the tortillas and topped it with shrimp. The shrimp was super spicy! A serving of shrimp was about 100 calories but dinner ended up being around 700 calories total because of all the fixings (and tortilla chips)!

Grilled Cheese.

Yeah. It was one of those weeks and by Thursday I was over it. We’d had house guests the previous two weekends in a row so I hadn’t done a whole lot of grocery shopping. Which meant the choices for dinner were slim pickings. We decided on grilled cheese. Michael picked up a fancy loaf of bread at the store and we had grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner.

Guess which one was mine? 😉 I went with half a sandwich. The bread was pretty rich. It also got smashed down pretty good with the press.

I had steamed broccoli with Goddess Dressing and some green olives. I just felt like I needed some green on my plate. Man, it had been a long time since we had some REAL BREAD. Michael even broke his gluten-free thing to enjoy the sourdough. It was so good. (We might have eaten a piece of bread slathered in butter while dinner was cooking…and we might have both looked like we’d been on a deserted island for a month starving…)

The grilled cheese was exactly what I needed last night. Sometimes comfort food is good. Calories were high. I estimated around 800 with all the snacking I did while dinner was cooking. But the grilled cheese was so good!

QUESTION: Any remarkable dinners this week?