Meg's Meal Planning

celebrate

Father’s Day Lunch

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What a beautiful day it ended up being for Father’s Day! Just like Mother’s Day Brunch, my husband and I hosted our families to celebrate our dads! This time we had 9 guests: my parents, two brothers, grandparents, uncle, and my mother and father in-law! Unfortunately, the early afternoon was super humid, so we all stayed inside, but it ended up working out nicely. We fit some extra chairs around our kitchen table and set the food up like a buffet.  Everyone served themselves! Here’s the menu.

Appetizers

  • Greek dip – This was a big hit!
  • Pineapple salsa
  • Pepperoni and broccoli bread- My Nannie makes the best stuffed bread! I’ve never attempted to make broccoli bread before, but I can make pepperoni bread. Of course, it never comes out as good as hers!

Pepperoni Bread

Ingredients 

  • Store-prepared pizza dough
  • 1 package of thinly sliced pepperoni
  • 1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese

Steps

  1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees
  2. Roll out dough on a sprayed cookie sheet
  3. When preparing, deal with the dough in thirds. Lay sliced pepperoni and cheese down on the top 1/3 of the dough, leaving enough dough to fold over the pepperoni and cheese
  4. Roll dough over the pepperoni and cheese and top with another layer. Now fold over the remaining dough on top of the second layer. Tuck excess dough in to seal pepperoni and cheese inside
  5. Bake for 30 minutes

 

 

Main dish

  • Pulled pork – My amazing hubby got up at 5:30 a.m. to put this in the crock pot! What a keeper!
  • Cornbread
  • Baked beans
  • Coleslaw – I was going to make the McCarrick Family Coleslaw (It’s amazing, my family loves it!), but my mom offered to buy coleslaw from a local restaurant-Shady Glen. When someone offers to bring you coleslaw from there, you don’t say no!
  • Baked squash and zucchini – We originally planned to grill them, but since it was supposed to rain, we decided to cook them in the oven.
    • For the veggies, we sliced them about an inch thick, layed them on a baking dish, drizzeled them with olive oil, seasoned with salt and pepper and baked at 350 degrees for 40 minutes

 

Dessert

 

  
I love when our families get together. We had a great day and some delicious food!

Mother’s Day Brunch recap

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We had such a wonderful time celebrating Mother’s Day with our families. We are so blessed and fortunate to be able to celebrate with both our parents.  Two out of three of my brothers came home too, sadly my youngest brother, sister, and brother in-law were unable to make it.  So that left us with 8 people.  The menu came out great! There were a few variations and a few extra desserts – but you can never have too many of those!

For the orginal menu, you can click here to view it.

I ended up following a very similar recipe to the egg muffins I posted about a few weeks ago (click here for recipe). Except I didn’t add any ham or scallions this time, just cherry tomatoes, spinach, and zucchini. They were a big hit! And it worked out really well because I put them out as soon as they were ready, so they served as almost an appetizer, along with the gluten free banana bread.

I also didn’t end up serving spinach salad since spinach was going into the egg muffins. I thought that might be overkill, so instead I made almond green beans.  Again, I knew I didn’t want something that would take up precious oven real estate, so these green beans worked out well on the stovetop.

I had a ricotta cheesecake, but ended up buying it along with a fruit tart from a local grocery store, Highland Park Market. But I did make black bean brownies.  Please, before you knock them, you must try them! I’ll post about them later this week, so be on the look out for the healthist brownies you will ever eat!

Overall the day turned out great! And I’m so happy to be able to do this for our hard-working moms!