Quick Dinner Wins

This past weekend was again one of those where I had places to be on Sunday in addition to my regular meal prep duties.  Fortunately, we still had quite a few lunches in the fridge from last week, so a couple of slow cooker dishes filled the gap.  But one of the things I’ve learned in our Paleo journey is that there’s nothing more depressing than food boredom.  Since I hadn’t had time to really try any new and exciting dishes this week, I decided to see if I could pull off some quick weeknight meals and share them with those of you who struggle to dedicate 6-9 hours of your weekend to cooking.

Here are a couple of those wins:

• Honey Glazed Salmon with Orange and Ginger from Laughing Spatula – let me just say “Wow”.  I had picked up some salmon this weekend when scoping out the seafood counter looking for lobster specials.  I really didn’t know what I was going to do with it at the time, and just picked up some asparagus to go with it, because there’s something about asparagus with seafood…   Anyway, I had made a special treat for E.J. and Brendon on sunday in the form of a Double Chocolate Orange Torte, and had another really good navel orange sitting on the counter that needed to be used.  On the way home on Monday I searched “Paleo Orange Salmon” and picked this one out of the long list of hits.  To make it a one-pan dinner, I trimmed the asparagus and just laid it on top of the sliced oranges around the salmon and let the lovely juices mingle.  Yum!  This is definitely a must-try, and was seriously a 30 minute meal with very easy cleanup (quite rare in the Paleo world)
• Steak with Chimichurri Sauce from Paleo Hacks – I used flank steak instead of skirt steak, but this chimichurri turned out really well and made for a really quick weeknight meal.  Over the weekend, I cooked some beets in the slow cooker and had them available in the fridge already, so all there was left to do was caramelize some onions on the stovetop, have E.J. grill the steaks, and throw everything in the blender for the sauce.  Dinner was served in about 20 minutes.  Can’t ‘beet’ that! (I’m sorry, couldn’t resist)
• Pork Loin with Blueberry Sauce from PaleoLeap – I’ve posted this one previously, but it’s another really good quick weeknight win.  I think you could even substitute cherries, blackberries, peaches, or any other pork-friendly fruit and end up with a lovely meal within 30-45 minutes.  If you’re looking for a way to amp-up a pork loin, this is it!

Et voila!