Weekend Ritual

I'm taking a break from wrapping Christmas gifts this morning...  As much as I love thinking of friends and family during this time of year, my eyes need a little break from seeing red and white!

Last Sunday, it came to me while we were elbow deep into our ritual of what we call "food processing".  I HAVE to document this "thing we do"!  I want it to go down in our family history so that our son's children can see how strange (not to mention anal) their grandparents are!  Ha!

So, every weekend, we shop for and bring home a gob of meat!  Between the commissary and Sam's Club, we do pretty well with bringin' home a good amount.  This weekend, we have chicken breasts, pork chops, pork loins, and rib eyes.  But they don't just get thrown in the freezer when we get home--they get "processed", as we call it.

We divide and conquer--Brian was in charge of the chicken station.  He rinses and filets them, and gets his marinade ready.

I was in charge of the pork station.

Here are a couple of our favorite marinade recipes:

Curried Mustard Pork Chops

• pork
• 1/2 cup brown mustard
• 1/4 cup white wine
• 1 Tbl olive oil
• 1 Tbl curry powder
• green onion
• lots of garlic
• lots of red pepper flakes
• salt and pepper

For the chicken, this is our tried and true, which we somehow haven't gotten tired of yet:

Yogurt Marinated Chicken

• chicken
• greek yogurt
• onion (pureed)
• garlic (pureed)
• ginger (pureed)
• 2 Tbl lemon juice
• drizzle of olive oil
• 1 Tbl garam masala (and we also add turmeric and curry)
• salt and pepper

This week's loot yielded 8 separate bags of meat, which will probably last us a good 2 1/2 weeks with leftovers included!  The best benefit to all this hard work is that during our busy week nights, all we have to do is pull a bag of meat in the morning, grill at night, along with some veggies, and dinner is done!  That's worth the couple hours of "food processing"!