Yumminess

We've had a good week of food. Some weeks I do really well with making good, sound meals. Other weeks feel more rushed and make whatever comes off the top of my head type meals which are sometimes suspect. Ideally, I would plan a week or two in advance of meal ideas for a few weeks at a time and then I would just pick what I feel like making that day. That helps with my 4PM oh-no-what's-for-dinner angst. Plus I can do my grocery shopping excursions around those meal plans and make sure I have everything I need. I usually go grocery shopping once every two or three weeks - so I have to plan well in advance! Having had numerous gatherings last week and this week helped me be a little more organized in the meal planning so here are just a few of the highlights...

Ana always wants to be in on the food action, since she wants to own her own restaurant someday. So when I was busy making food for various gatherings, she was busy scouring her cookbooks for ideas of things she could make. She liked the idea she saw of fruit kebabs. Unfortunately, we didn't have any skewers or kebab-worthy fruit at the moment. That didn't stop her! Here's her substitution - raspberries from her patch on toothpicks! I thought it was super cute. :)
I made some honey twists (can't really go wrong with bread, in my book) and lemon bars for a gathering on Wednesday night.
Cheesecake! This is a lemon-raspberry one. I topped it with some fresh raspberry sauce. So good! It was good that we shared it with many people or I would have had issues with eating the entire thing by myself. I was torn between making this cheesecake or a toffee-coffee cheesecake. I feel that there will be another cheesecake made in the very near future.

This is one of my all-time favorite "salads" - a santa fe bean salad. I adapted it from a recipe I got from my mother-in-law. So easy and versatile and SOOO good. Makes me want to make more RIGHT NOW! Maybe that's what I'll have for lunch. I could seriously eat this everyday. Unfortunately it was gobbled down by everyone and I didn't have any leftovers. : ( Much sadness.

Other highlights of things that I have eaten recently, but sadly no pictures - fresh salsa, a fresh herb/pesto pasta dish with shrimp (another one I could eat everyday), peaches! (we are quickly working our way through a 1/2 bushel I bought at our local Amish bulk food store earlier this week), a BBQ pulled beef dish (I'm not a huge BBQ or big chunks of meat fan, but Aaron sure is and turns giddy when I make things like that for him). I'm sure there is a peach dessert of some sort in the near future (peach crisp or pie or maybe both!), and I'm hungry for some bread of some sort so I'll have to make some soon. Okay, now I've made myself hungry. I think I'll stop now.