Jeremy and I have been traveling A LOT and I felt like I was in just a rut of what to cook. We basically had the same few borning meals on rotation and I was just getting sick of cooking which leads to use eating our way too much.

I took to Pinterest to find some new recipes. I searched “Whole 30 dinner recipes”, “Plant-based recipes” and “Healthy recipes” on Pinterest and found tons of great recipes and ideas. We are no doing Whole 30 or going completely plant-based, but I wanted to find some options that would push me outside of my comfort zone. For each meal, I followed the recipe pretty loosely and there are definitely things I would change for next time and I will add those things under each meal.

Sunday: Bang Bang Taco

We went grocery shopping right before we came home to cook dinner, so I wanted something that seemed easy, quick and low maintenance. We made Bang Bang Cauliflower Tacos found here. I made this pretty true to the recipe and used the Whole 30 version of the bang bang sauce. Jeremy could not wrap his mind around the fact that we would be having tacos without some type of meat. It was a super easy dinner to make and it was SO good. The only thing is that I would probably add a little bit of chicken baked with the cauliflower to make it more of a filling dinner whereas her recipe was more for an app.

Monday: Chicken Pesto Stuffed Sweet Potato

This recipe we were a little wary of. It seemed a little off to have something so sweet paired with something that is kinda tangy. The original recipe can be found here. I cooked the chicken separately and then mixed the chicken and pesto in a bowl. She has a recipe for Pesto, but it was honestly so much easier to just buy pesto. I usually get the Kirkland brand Pesto from Costco. I used about half a cup of pesto. I cooked the sweet potatoes in the microwave then cut the sweet potatoes in half and filled it with the chicken pesto. I threw them back into the oven for about 15 minutes at 400 to get it nice hot and allow the pesto to kinda seep into the potato.

Tuesday: Cajun asparagus and sausage

For this recipe, I got more inspiration for this dinner than anything. She had a lot of peppers in this dish and honestly, we are not the biggest fans of peppers. I used one regular potato and some chopped carrots along with the asparagus and it turned out SO good. I used a little too much cajun seasoning which made it a little too spicy, but this is a recipe that will for sure be used on repeat. It was so easy to make and it was one of Jeremy’s favorite.

Wednesday: Pineapple Chicken

Personally, I thought this one turned out the worst out of all of them, but Jeremy liked it a lot. I forgot to get soy sauce which makes this a totally different taste than it should have been. I cooked the chicken first, then added the pineapple to the pan. I also used cauliflower rice, which was amazing. It was a super simple and easy dinner, but it was missing the soy sauce for sure. It ended up being super sweet which Jeremy really liked. I think next time we cook this I will add the pineapple in last because they did get a little too hot. I will not forget soy sauce next time, for sure. Where I got the recipe had a really cute way of setting up the dinner that I think would be fun to try.

Saturday: Mexican Quinoa Stuffed Sweet Potatoes

Because of the way the holiday landed we ended up not making dinner on Thursday or Friday, but this also meant our sweet potatoes that I had bought to use for this recipe were starting to get bad, so instead of using them for this recipe I went ahead and made a little casserole for Jeremy to eat since he is getting his wisdom teeth out soon. This turned into a Mexican Quinoa butter lettuce bowl instead of a stuff sweet potato. I also added ground turkey to give it a little more protein and asparagus just because that sounded good. I cooked the asparagus in the oven beforehand and just threw them into the skillet once I was adding the other vegetables. This turned out so good and one of my favorite meals from the week. It gave me some chipotle vibes, but healthier and much cheaper!

This whole thing really showed me how easy it is to mix up your dinner recipes and that these Pinterest recipes did not take up that much time. I think I want to start incorporating at least one new recipe a week to help me branch out what I cook. I also found that I really like cauliflower and I want to incorporate it into more of our meals. All of these recipes took me less than an hour from start to finish to cook which is typically how long it takes me to cook one of our normal meals.