Karma challenged us to photograph our meals for a week.  You’d think that would be easy, but it turned out to be quite the challenge.  Who remembers to photo dinner before shoveling it in after a day at work?  So I have, over the course of two weeks, taken photos of some of my more favorite meals.  And, because I had a huge family meal right in the middle of the two weeks, you’ll get to see some food that only shows itself once a year.  Enjoy!

At the beginning of the challenge we had just cooked a ham, and I was looking for something to do with the leftovers.  My cousin suggested escaloped potatoes and they turned out wonderful!  I didn’t get a photo of the finished product, but I did them in the crock pot and they were spectacular.

The wine didn’t go into the potatoes…but it was good.

Then later that week I did crock pot stew.  See a theme here?

Good on a cold night after a long day.

Then it was time to get ready for the big dinner.  Two of my favorite things to make are do ahead mashed potatoes….

Yukon gold, cream cheese & sour cream.

…and orange cranberry sweet potatoes that can also be done the day before.  Both just get heated up the day of the meal, leaving you less stressed and more available to your guests.

You’ve got to try this one. Easy and amazing.

But the star of our big meal was the rib roast.

Yummy!

We had a wonderful time, and ate leftovers for a couple of days.

No we don’t eat like this every day!

After that we settled down to more normal meals.  I forgot to take pictures of the night we ate hamburgers….or the night we went out to eat at a local eatery and I had chicken with dried Michigan cherries.  Or the night we wolfed down a frozen pizza.  After I heated it up.

I did remember to document the night we had scrambled eggs…which I thought would be boring, so I added sauteed onions, leftover ham, and cheese.  Filling and quick.

Who says eggs are only for breakfast?

And Saturday night we had marinated chicken (you can buy it already marinated or marinate it yourself in Italian dressing for an hour or so), more onions (you can never go wrong with onions!), stuffing bought already prepared from the grocery store (Bob Evans) and peas.  Pretty darn good and fast.

No leftovers.

So there you go….a week or so of meals.  Oh.  What did we have for desert?  Well.  We definitely didn’t take time to photograph that before we ate it.  But it involved chocolate.

Thanks Karma, for making me think more about what we eat.  AND for picking a perfect couple of weeks when I was really cooking.  Versus any other two week period of the year when you’d see a lot more of this.

Healthy and fast. Perfect.

If anyone wants to recipes to any of this let me know.  It’s all easy.  Trust me on that.