Lazy day.
Easy dinner.
Half package of Rana’s cheese tortellini with sauteed broccoli florets, carrots and red bell pepper.
Sauce of Presidente Garlic & Herb spreadable cheese, heavy cream, pasta water, and a mixture of dried herbs (parsley, oregano, basil, savory, and thyme). Grated Parm-Reg on top.
Wine. And Sound of Music on the TV.
Bloody Bull
Cold rainy weather had me craving a bowl of hot and spicy shrimp gumbo, my favorite muffaletta salad salad and warm baguette and butter.
A quickly thrown together dinner of sausage, chicken, peppers, onions, and sun-dried tomatoes. I added some dry vermouth in lieu of white wine to make it a bit more saucy.
We enjoyed another outstanding dinner at Il Nido in Marlboro, NJ. Besides the always awesome charcuterie board, we enjoyed steak tartare with pickled onion, cornichon, sous vide egg yolk, truffle and toasted pretzel; an awesome cannelloni stuffed with duck confit and butternut squash puree. It was like elevated comfort food. We also enjoyed a crispy skinned branzino and an excellent linguine with clam sauce.It all went great with an excellent Amarone and cabernet.
Austrian pork and cabbage stew - multiple layers of potatoes, pork, carrots and savoy cabbage
(everything uncooked/raw) are spiced with plenty of ground caraway seeds and cooked for several hours in the oven with some chicken broth to give nice comfort food for a cold (Californian) night.
Steelhead trout filet topped with chunky tartar sauce and toasted panko crumbs and roasted. I made this with haddock last summer and have no idea why I waited so long to make it again - so easy and so very good! Salad of mixed chicories, radish, purple daikon. Would have been so much better if I’d put in the avocado but I ran out of steam.
Finally, I took a picture 
. Umm… halfway through…
Tonight we had what in our house is broadly known as “cutlets” - patties that could be formed of ground meat or vegetables. There are other names too for specific versions.
Two kinds. Mixed vegetables, paneer, and rice for the vegetarian version - this was repurposed mixed vegetable pulao I made a couple of days ago. Ground chicken with aromatics and spices for the other one - this is called kaccha kabab (“raw” kabab - as opposed to shami kabab, which is made with cooked meat).
This is one of my grandmother’s (many) signature dishes, and whenever she visited any of her kids the ingredients were kept ready for her to make a batch before she left. Of course, turned out she left a little something out of the recipe she told each DIL… until they discussed what “additional” ingredients they saw her put in when she made it in their kitchens 
Aaahhh grandma. Such a one-of-a-kind personality.
We had toast on the side, and butternut squash soup to round out the meal.
I made all-American chili, corn pudding muffins (sour cream and a can of creamed corn in prepared Jiffy mix), and green salad with clementine-shallot vinaigrette.
Spent a half day at work. And yes, I’m putting those 4 hours back into my PTO bank for rollover!
After some errands, a brown meal was formulated: roasted chicken thighs seasoned with olive oil and a locally made bread-dipping herb mix (Dip Me Daddio from Hubba Hubba Foods in York, Maine) that works on chicken, finished with a white wine butter sauce.
Alongside was leftover Israeli couscous and roasted Brussels sprouts in Spicewalla’s Honey and Herb seasoning rub. Similar enough as not to overpower the blend used on the chicken.
And there was wine…'cause I’m on vacay.
Vacay is yay . Cheers 
I was going to say yay - vacay! Oh well - great minds @emglow101. I hope you have a wonderful vacay.
Last night we had leftover bbq i brought home from the Sat. dinner party, tonight the BF cooked. Lucca’s Alfredo sauce pulled from the freezer, the last of it (sob), with minced mushrooms, giant baked Italian sausage meatballs to go with, and a little green salad.
i love that jiffy corn pudding! been eons…
Oh what a week and it’s only Monday!
Finished up Christmas shopping yesterday and made it out alive. Dinner was easy: rigatoni vodka with chicken and underwhelming Trader Joe’s foccacia which tasted like straight up sourdough and nothing like an Italian foccacia.
Tonight was a couple of vodka and club soda + cranberry juice while finishing the Christmas dinner menu*. Oh, there was food too: a sandwich with barbecue grilled chicken, caramelized onion, and sharp cheddar. Fries thrown into the air fryer.
*Why so late you are wondering? The plan was to go out Christmas Eve to one of our favorite restaurants (two Xmas Eves in a row, last year notwithstanding due to Covid) and then be super lazy and order Chinese on Christmas. We did this the last year grandma was alive and she was so happy!
Anyway, I call the restaurant to see when they are closing. I was told a very early time which will make it not possible. Good for them. Seriously. My backup restaurant (okay, a bar) was even earlier. So now we will do Chinese on Christmas Eve and cook Christmas Day.
I hope there’s booze under the tree!
Pasta with butternut squash, turkey breast, rosemary and poppy seeds with an orange juice based sauce
DIY traditions borne from necessity can be super festive!
Most of our adult lives my husband and I have had to travel to visit family for Christmas. The night before we travelled, we declared a virtual Christmas Eve and dined on some kind of cuisine that wasn’t available at our destination. We still do this sometimes now even when we spend the holiday at home, because there’s no time to cook a traditional-ish (Slovak heritage) Christmas Eve meal if you have work that day. Pivoting can be fun.
I feel like I deserve a medal for starting and finishing Christmas shopping late last night.
I realized that I have been so caught up in very time sensitive and important things that I had been putting things into carts but had not actually made any purchases 
Fixed that last night - it was almost 4 am when I finished, but I was done!
So, on to that medal I deserved…
One of my favorite takeout meals - tandoori chicken (THIS is the tandoori chicken by which all others are measured), butter chicken (THIS is the butter chicken… you get the idea ), naan (now it’s not me but my nephews who insist THIS is the naan…). We also had reshmi kabab aka malai kabab, but something was off with that today, it’s usually MUCH better.
Quite a feast! And enough for at least a second meal in the freezer.
(Just musing… I have never understood why tandoori chicken in the US is so uniformly bad. It’s not even the same dish. I order it, I eat it, and while I am eating it I wonder how it is that no one has actually brought the actual dish over in so many decades. Sigh.)
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we did Sichuan for Thxgiving, and i think we’re just doing a bunch of different things for the next 4 nights (i’ll be at my sister’s helping with boarding 10,000 dogs). I’ve ordered a couple of pork chops and a steak from Snake River, some pastrami and great bread from Zingerman’s, other snacky things from there too. We’ll probably also do sashimi that my sister will slice up one of the days.
Enjoy your lazy day! (well, enjoy all of it!)
That tandoori chicken sure looks fabulous!
