Our 1st Soup & Sandwich Sunday and Toasty Tuna Melt Casserole

This week I created a monthly menu calender and it is posted as a separate page which can be accessed by clicking the appropriate link under "pages" to the right. I will post a new one each month. As stated on the page itself, this is just my sample and what works for our family. There is also a link on it where you can download our own blank calender and create your own.

Mama's "helper"

As I explain on the Feb menu page, part of our new overall grocery saving plan is not dining out for Sunday lunch. Since I hate cooking on Sunday, I had to figure out something easy, but at least remotely fun. So, I started "soup and sandwich" Sundays! There are soup recipes in Mary's book, but so far I haven't started using them. We have a stock pile of soup in the pantry that we never eat, so I'm going to use that up first and then decide what to do.

For our first Sunday I used the Costco brand tomato and basil bisque soup. In the store sample isle I really liked it ... it has a creamy taste/texture that plain ol' tomato soup does not and it had just a bit of a kick to it. So the kids wouldn't think it was tomato soup, and to add something they might actually eat, I cooked up some alphabet noodles! When I was a kid, alphabet soup was all the rage! I don't remember having it much, but I know it was popular. My kids have never had it, so I didn't know if they would like the idea or hate it!

Ashley saw me cooking it and LOVED the idea! They actually ate the soup! Oh wait a minute ... go back a step ... all of my bio-kids HATE three things ... rice, potatoes, and SOUP! So, as you can imagine they were none too pleased when they heard about soup and sandwich Sundays! And, often used to create bulk in soups is potatoes and rice, so I don't know what recipes I can use that don't include those things for soup.

Ok, and now for our 2nd recipe from Mary's book ... Toasty Tuna Melt Casserole. Ashley scored it an 8 ... Brian scored it a 3 (scale 1 being worst 10 being best).

In typical Melissa fashion, I did not follow the recipe exactly, which is probably the primary reason why I fail in a lot of cooking exercises. Sometimes I just don't want to take the time to measure. Sometimes I don't know how. The recipe calls for 10-12 oz of dry bread crumbs. My package was 14oz. How do you remove 2oz of bread crumbs and what do you do with them? I've never used a recipe that called for them before, so it's not like they're a staple at my house. They would just go to waste. The recipe calls for 3 cans of 6oz tuna. My cans were 7oz each ... do I remove 1oz from each? And how do I measure that and what do I do with it? Half stick of butter ... well I didn't have one defrosted and I couldn't cut through the frozen one ... I figured since I had extra bread crumbs and extra tuna, I should increase the butter anyway. So, I used a full stick. It boiled over and made a mess in the microwave, so I didn't get a full stick, but probably more than half. All this to say, YOU CAN SEE WHAT A MESS I AM IN THE KITCHEN ... and, that the bread crumbs were a little dry on the bottom!

As you can clearly see, Dennis like it! Actually, he didn't like it, but he just wanted to make a silly face. We were able to convince him to eat it for ice cream, though!