Monday Night Dinners

On Mondays I find myself realizing it's another week and something will need thrown together for dinner. At this point I may or may not have gone grocery shopping recently. I thought I'd share some things I keep on hand that make last-minute meals easy.

1: frozen Brussels sprouts: for a frozen veggie we really like the texture after roasting
2: Chicken sausage: You can keep it in the freezer. It's already cooked and defrosts nicely and doesn't gross me out like some pre-cooked meats. It's obviously way better for you than pork sausage and they have great flavors like maple apple and spinach/mozzarella.
3: Cous Cous/Quinoa: the perfect side for a salad or with meat and can be seasoned hundreds of ways
4: Chickpeas: I keep a couple cans on hand. They're great to just rinse and throw onto a salad for protein or mix with veggies, or add them to tabouleh like I did in the above photo.

The sausage/Brussels combo we had last night was really, really good. I only used EVOO and salt/pepper on the Brussels. The tabouleh I had made Sunday is a great leftover to use as a side dish more than once. For mine, I did the following: 1 1/4 cups whole wheat cous cous and added half cup boiling water, almost a third cup lemon juice, and roughly 6 Tbls of EVOO. Then stirred in chickpeas, cucumbers, tomatoes, salt/pepper, and dried parsley b/c I didn't have fresh. To freshen it up on the second day (it gets dry) I drizzled some balsamic vinegar. Mmm...I could eat meals like this almost every night and it only took like 20 minutes to get ready.

I think I'll have the leftovers for lunch. :)