Hi everyone, hope you’re having a great weekend. LLD and I are driving up to DC today for dental appointments tomorrow morning. We have a date tonight, and I’ll be breaking my dry January run. This month will have various travel and dinner commitments so there won’t be as much cooking as usual. Here’s what we ate this week:
Mon: chicken with potatoes, red onion, feta, lemon, and dill (last month’s COTM), cucumber salad
Tues: turmeric shrimp with shallots and chilies; rice, cabbage salad
Wed: soyrizo and black bean stew, tortilla chips
Thurs: carry out
Fri: pasta puttenesca
Sat: UNC v Duke meant we needed to stay home (it gets very busy on our street). LLD made salmon tacos.
Sun: hot date in the big city!
I baked a very disappointing cake from the baking book of the months, Snacking Bakes. Made up for it by taking a friend out for cake for her birthday. Daffodils are trying to come up in our neighborhood, and I worry that for the third year in a row they’re trying too early and we’ll miss them again this year.
Actuals for the past week, cooking for 2 in MN. Where we’ve not been able to fully enjoy the mid-winter thaw (40-50 degrees F. out) due to health - a nasty cold with cough for me, slow recovery from back strain for my husband. Menu planning helped a lot, with a couple of larger batch recipes supplemented by commercially frozen mains making many reheat & eat meals.
Mon: Crispy pollack fish strips w/ tartar sauce, grain bowl w sweet potatoes and craisins, both commercial from freezer. Fresh pear w cottage cheese.
Tues: Spicy (but not too) Shrimp w corn and black beans. Naan. Fresh pineapple, red grapes. This is a very quick and easy main dish. I double the lime juice (bottled is fine), and use 2 T. dried cilantro leaf instead of fresh.
Wed: Pork chili w sweet potato and beans, using cocoa, cumin and chili spices. Beer bread. Red grapes.
Thurs: A family favorite - Chicken Livers w onion & mushrooms in wine sauce, over rice, From Dinner a Day cookbook. Peas topped with cashews.
Fri: Reheat Chicken Livers w onion & mushrooms in wine sauce, over rice, Peas topped with cashews.
Sat: Pizza (commercial frozen)
Sun today: Surimi crab & cheese spread on crackers, Salmon, sweet potato puffs
Hi friends, grumpily cooking… again… I’m firmly in an anti-cooking mood right now, but squaring my shoulders and pushing on.
Sun: I made the Tex-mex kasha (NYT) for my lunches this week, as it didn’t happen last week. The recipe was vague and I’ve added some comments on it.
Dinner tonight was haddock with garlic butter bread crumbs (based on this ) and hasselback potatoes (Ree Drummond). Both were misses, properly cooked but super bland.
Fri: if I feel like cooking, it will be this dish called “Asapao” which is, according to Cooking Light circa 2007, a “stewlike dish… popular in Puerto Rico and Cuba.” Chicken, rice, tomatoes, peppers, roasted red peppers, and Manchego cheese.
Believe it or not, takeout is also a cause for battles around here. We find it hard to agree on what and where - and DH has this odd perception that we all need to eat from the same restaurant. I need more food truck festivals to disabuse him of that notion!
@Truman I forget where you exactly you are in the GBA, but could something like WeCo help? My friends lean on them for a couple of meals a week. (There’s also other specialty stuff, but I don’t think specialty is the point here, just normal but I didn’t cook it.)
Y’know, I had/have kind of the same notion, but my mom and my SIL were both strong proponents of ordering from multiple places if everyone doesn’t feel like eating the same thing. As long as there aren’t multiple delivery charges, it really doesn’t matter, and I’ve finally come around.
It wasn’t just a mental block, but also that I mostly plan to share dishes, whereas as they are both solo vegetarians in their family units so used to order their own solo meals regardless of where we ordered from.
That said, my SIL has come around to my POV now, because when we all order from a single place, we will skew the overall order vegetarian and add a couple of meat/seafood supplements, so she gets a more diverse meal, vs ordering by herself. Especially true for chinese and italian.
We tried WECO a few years ago, but their dishes never really grabbed us - even dishes that sounded fantastic were never as good as we wanted them to be, if that makes sense. And now, it’s not an option because they can’t do GF for me. (I’ve asked, and the risk of cross-contact isn’t something they can manage.)
Our family is definitely a work in progress, and I suspect the same for most families!
Best wishes to your family; it sounds like you are making progress. I’ve been in the non-cooking mood for long periods of time. Our son makes his own food so when I’m not feeling it to cook, we do Trader Joes meals for the parents with the occasional take out. Not the healthiest for sure or the most enticing, but better than repeatedly continuing to ask DH why he won’t/can’t cook now 3.5 years since his job ended.
You know, I should give Trader Joe’s another try. I’ve found some good options there in the past, but it’s not one of the stores I regularly (or even irregularly!) shop at - seems worth a try. Even one night a week would help.
We do the Trader Joes spanokopita and my husband likes some of the other frozen stuff. It’s a 3 minute drive from our house in Somerville to the Assembly Row location, where my husband also likes to pick up cheap drinkable wine and where our son’s favorite chicken nuggets and frozen brown rice are located. So an easy alternative for us. Not so wonderful in several ways but we all need that one or two or three nights a week just turning on the oven or the microwave!
There’s a lot of surprising stuff that makes for easy meals, and I think they are very good about marking things as GF. Every so often I’ll do a scan of the freezer section (prepared as well as seafood / meat) for quick bites.
This week I’m cooking from the pantry and stringing leftovers together with side dishes:
Monday: Salmon with lentils
Tuesday: Salmon with lentils leftovers with Moroccan beet and carrot salad
Wednesday: Beet and carrot salad leftovers with a pomegranate barley salad
Thursday: Pomegranate barley salad leftovers with roast winter squash
Friday: Pizza night out (can’t wait)
Saturday: Pasta of some sort with this recipe for oregano-hazlenut pesto and leftover roast squash
Sunday: Not my turn to cook and happy to turn over the reigns.
I have celiac disease, so the potential for cross-contamination (or cross-contact) with gluten would rule that out for me. But I’m glad they disclose/warn, not everyone does!
Last week’s freezer clean-out worked well. I enjoyed the extra hour off each day (thanks to heat-and-serve dinners), and our freezers are more functional with some breathing room.
We’re ready for some freshly home-cooked meals this week. Cooking for two adults in the PNW:
SAT: The New York Times version of bangers and mash (gift link). Baby garden peas for the veg (just like the photo).
SUN: Leftover chicken and orzo.
MON: New England style chowder with salmon and halibut. Homemade biscuits or crackers.
TUE: Hot wings on the grill. Veggie sticks.
WED: Valentines Day! Steak on the grill. Potatoes of some sort. Caesar salad. Odette Williams’ Chocolatey Chocolate Cake - whipped cream and strawberries optional.
THUR: Spaghetti with zucchini-beef meatballs in red sauce.
The chicken and orzo is a very solid recipe; be prepared to add more lemon zest and/or juice than called for to boost flavor (depending on your taste). I often add more herbs than called for as well!
