One Grocery Bag, 3 Great Meals

This week I made:
Chicken Turkey Meatball & Vegetable Soup, Every Day with Rachael Ray January/February 2014
Chicken Turkey & Broccoli Stromboli, Every Day with Rachael Ray January/February 2014
Asian Chicken Turkey Lettuce Cups, Every Day with Rachael Ray January/February 2014

These three recipes were grouped as 3 great meals that could be made with one grocery bag. It kind of seems like most three meals could probably fit in one bag, but I guess this is special because you should be able to pass through the express lane since it's just 10 unique items (although I feel like 2 cans would count as 2 items for express lane purposes. And the express line doesn't let you get your Monopoly tickets to participate in this year's edition of the frustratingly-never-even-win-$2 promotion).

The shopping list:

We had an incredibly cold, windy, snowy, rainy day on Thursday, so it was great to follow up with a warm bowl of soup.

This soup was very fast and easy. A lot of the seasoning just comes from the Italian-style canned tomatoes. The onion and carrot are sauteed a little first, but then the broccoli, orzo, and meatballs are just cooked in the broth so it simmers for a little while. I don't usually use Italian-style tomatoes, but it's nice to think that with that and some random vegetables you could make a soup almost any time. I guess that sprinkling in some Italian seasoning isn't the time-consuming step, though :-P And don't seasoned tomatoes probably have more sodium or something bad like that? Oh well.

For Valentine's Day we ate in and I made stromboli:

I don't know if this is really a stromboli though. I guess it's more like a calzone except it's log-shaped. A stromboli (according to Google) seems more like a roll. Like a cinnamon roll with salami and cheese instead of cinnamon. But this one was just closed up (and barely... I didn't do a good job rolling out the dough and so it got a lot of hole) as a tube, not a pinwheel. The filling was onion, broccoli, ground turkey, and cheese, and it was topped with more Italian-style tomatoes. So... a lot more of the same flavors as the previous dish. But I guess if it tasted good the first time, it's not bad to have it a second time? I used a pillsbury can of whole wheat pizza dough, and it tasted better than I expected it to.

On Monday we finished up the trio of meals with these lettuce cups:

The problem is that butter lettuce really doesn't want to make cups. This was the super messiest meal to eat. It tasted fine, although it wasn't anything too extremely compelling.