Meal Plans and Easter Dinner Musings

Well, our CSA has decided to start delivering to us TWICE a week
but I don’t think they are aware of the fact yet.

As much as I love strawberries and green beans
I can’t go through that much in a week
and uh
I’ve only paid for half of what theyre sending me.

So I guess I need to be a good person and call them to let them know theyre delivering to use twice in a week.

I now have more lettuce than I know what to do with
(four heads!)
and even though I made a dent in the green beans last night
I’m back up to my orginal bumper crop in the refrigerator.

Siiiiiiigh.

I did use some strawberries last night though.
I diced them up and ate them with some panna cotta.

I’ve been playing around with recipes for panna cotta
and like the one I’m working with now.

It’s from Cook’s Illustrated
just a simple vanilla one
but I’d like to take it up another notch and make it a strawberry panna cotta
served with some candied fruit
and a berry coulis.

Goodness knows I have enough strawberries now.

With all of this food in my fridge
I need to stay on top and FOLLOW my meal plans.

I’m usually pretty good about sticking to them
but need to really use up food this week.

Here’s the list so far:

Thursday: Shredded Rasperry-Chipotle Chicken over green leaf salad with walnut oil and parmesan vinaigrette
Friday: Red Potato Soup and Mustard Greans
Saturday: Hot Paprika Chicken Breasts with Collard Greens and Golden Raisins

Sunday: Prime New York Strip Steak with Creamed Spinach and Potato Gratin
Monday: Braised Oxtails over Polenta
Tuesday: Roast Chicken with Mashed Carrots, Roasted Brussel Sprouts and Garden Salads (sometimes I like to do a big meal in the middle of the week for no reason)
Wednesday: Chicken Salad Croissant Sandwiches with pickles and potato chips (easy peasy)
Thursday: Friend’s birthday dinner!
Friday: Veg. leftovers
Saturday: Lentil Soup with Cornbread

Still no idea what the Easter meal is looking like.

Husband will be on call at the hospital all night on Saturday
so he will be a useless lump sleeping in bed on Easter Sunday.

Boo.
Maybe I will make ham just to spite him.

I love a spiral sliced ham with super tender lima beans and my grandmother’s recipe for ‘Pineapple’ (pineapple chunks in thickend syrup).
It brings back sweet memories.

Husband
on the other hand
does not like spiral sliced ham
so we usually do a leg of lamb
(HA i typed lamp. I love lamp)
prime rib
or a red meat that we both can agree on.

I should just say NYAH to him this year and do it
or just hop on over to my aunt’s house and eat dinner there
while husband sleeps the day away.

She’ll probably be making ham anyways. heh.

Of Cabbages and… Cabbages.

Between two jobs, two blogs, two dogs, and one husband, I just don’t get around here enough.

I’ve started Twittering
along with the rest of the world
and have been trying to document what I make for dinner ever day.

I would do lunch too
but taking a picture of a Lean Cuisine every day would be a little depressing.

So instead
I take bad iPhone pictures of my dinner
none of which want to post to my entry
so I’m going to stop trying.

Last night dinner involved white rice
something I try to eat in moderation
but I’m ashamed to admit that dinner tonight also involved white rice.

BUT
there are no photographs, not even on Twitter
so we can all pretend like it never happened.

It was red beans and rice with tomatoes and balsamic vinegar if you’re wondering.
Complete white trash cooking
but delicious.

Brown up some 80/20 ground chuck
season with garlic and good ol’ Lawry’s seasoned salt
dump in a can of red beans with a little bit of water
let reduce for a few minutes
and spoon over white rice.

Top with sliced tomatoes and balsamic vinegar and then go sit out on your front lawn with a wife beater on.

Tasty as it is
I think it could be better.

I was thinking about the tomatoes today
and how they are my favorite part of the dish.
Right now
tomatoes obviously are not at their peak
but perhaps I could elevate this dish to a slightly higher socioeconomic status by making a tomato confit and a reducing the balsamic vinegar down to a glaze.

Then
maybe replace the ground beef with braised beef
(oxtails, perhaps? I like this dish a little bit on the fattier side since it tastes like sawdust if a low fat cut of meat is used)
and use long simmered red beans instead of my salted friends out of a can.

Ideas, ideas.
I probably will just stick to my regular recipe until I finally get so ashamed of it I’m forced into making something better.
This probably won’t happen for a while.

In other news
on Friday at Restaurant Job
Chef said that we would be taking part in Outstanding In the Field.

My face nearly cracked in two because I smiled so big
and Sous Chef was ecstatic as well.

Chef said he would need our help
and we both told him we would be there in full force.

Its not until September
but I’m still so stupidly excited.

It will be fun to work at such an amazing event.
I’m trying to do my part to eat more local food
although I’ve been taking baby steps.

We did join a CSA for our fruits and vegetables though
and its been an adventure.

Our first delivery in January looked like this:

and our weekly deliveries have been some variation on that theme so far.

We’re getting greenbeans and lettuces now though
which make me happy.

I’ve meant to photograph our deliveries every week
but that hasn’t happened.

Those personal failures aside
joining the CSA was a wonderful decision.
The farm is a little bit spotty on regular delivery
but its nothing that messes with meal planning too much.

Food is fresh and unblemished/unbruised for the most part
and it averages out to about 20$ a week
a great price for the load of food that arrives at our front door every Wednesday(ish).

However
I might PAY someone to take all the cabbage we’ve been getting.

I’ve forced unwanted heads on people at Job 1, Job 2, and the next person in line is going to be the guy panhandling on the street.

Guy: “Homeless, hungry, anything will help“
Me: “HERE! Take a head of cabbage!”
Guy: “What am I supposed to do with this?“
Me: “I DONT KNOW. I’ve been asking myself the SAME DAMNED THING.”

Husband started looking at me with a pained expression
when week after week
he would open up our box and find one
or even TWO
heads of cabbage in it.

I finally called the farm and asked them just to leave it out of our box
not replace it with anything else
just leave the blasted cabbage in someone ELSE’S delivery.

I think I’ve done everything legal in Texas to a head of cabbage now.
Next, I think I am just going to candy it or stick it in my ice cream maker and see what happens.

I can’t imagine that would be anything good
but you never know.

Daring Baker’s Challenges – September and October

This is my second month doing the Daring Baker’s Challenge.

The first month was muddled up by Ike, but hey, I DID manage to get two dips for the crackers done:

A spicy olive and caper tapenade
and a dried fruit compote
both vegan.
I never did get to the crackers
so we’ve eaten the dips with Triscuits.

I have a feeling they would have been better with September’s challenge
which was lavash crackers.

Still, Triscuits performed admirably.

They dips are are both out of Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison.

October’s challenge was “Pizza Napoletana” from Peter Reinhart’s “The Bread Baker’s Apprentice.”

I already have a go-to pizza recipe
so I was not too thrilled about this
especially since I was hoping for a sweet challenge
but I gave it a go.

Maybe my go wasn’t good enough
because while everyone else who made this recipe raved about it
I was not impressed.

I’m pretty sure I have only myself to blame
and I’m sure I will try this recipe again
because I do like thin crust pizza.

Mine was just TOO thin
and didn’t crisp up in the middle.

I got busy baking before I started taking pictures
so no mise en place for you.

Also it was dark outside
and the lighting in my tiny kitchen is pretty bad
so the pictures are what they are.
SIGH.

On with the show.

Dough in the mixer:

Properly pulled away from the sides
and still attached to the bottom
per the instructions:

Blob ready for splitting:

Asexual reproduction, RIGHT ON MY COUNTERTOP:

I put them in the fridge for an overnight rise
and the next day Husband took them out and flattened two for me for dinner that night
(maybe I can blame the less than impressive pizza’s on his hand in the whole thing…)

The rested there for two hours
and then it was time to stretch them out.
We were supposed to toss them
but that was not happening with this dough.

Instead I carefully stretched it
and no matter how hard I tried
it still had holes

I pinched them shut
and no one was the wiser
except for all you people on the internet now.

We’re old fashioned here in our household
so it was just reg’lar pepperoni pizzas

I shredded ball mozzarella on top of the sauce
for which I used a recipe from Cook’s Illustrated.

(Note to self: try to find pepperoni without so much dye in it. Probably not good for the health to eat this much red dye.)

I previously cranked up my oven to 550F
(or so I THOUGHT!)
and my pizza stone had been in there for at least half an hour too.

After about 8 minutes in the oven
THIS emerged

The outer crust was great
it was just too thin in the middle
with no crunch.

I think next time I will just have to make them thicker in the middle.

Pizza No. 2 came out the same way as the first
so for kicks I threw my oven thermometer in the oven to see if it was really reaching 550F.

The answer was HELL NO.
It was only about 450F
so this probably did not help my uncripsy pizza.

The moisture content from the ball mozzarella probably didn’t help either.

Again
I think the unsuccess of these pizzas rests entirely on my shoulders
and not on the recipe itself.

I’ll be revisiting it again
with a lower moisture content cheese
thicker crusts
and aiming for a much hotter oven temperature.

Goodness knows the recipe made four other balls of pizza
so I’ve got enough practice dough to last me a while.

Ike and Other Windfalls

Friday, September 12th found our household in a mostly normal state.

I had off from work and my husband had no class or rotations to attend.
Dire hurricane warnings were being blasted from every device capable of communication in Houston
and every store in a 20 mile radius was out of ice.

We know
because we looked.

We werent looking for ice for our food
but for our fishtank.

We have a 150 gallon salt-water fish tank
and if there is no power in the house
the chiller for the fish tank
doesn’t work
and we could end up with 150 gallons of tropical fish soup.

I’m all about bulk cooking
but that’s not what I usually have in mind.

Husband and I were not too concerned about the whole thing
we laughed at the non-event for Houston that was Rita
and our lawn got a nice sprinkle from Gustav.

We figured we would be without power for a few hours
and then life would go on.

Since we couldn’t find ice
we filled up plastic baggies with water
and put them in our outside freezer to freeze.

We brought in our patio furniture and decorations and crowded them into the living room.

Then we settled in to wait for the storm.

I started on making pork for tortas ahogadas.

My dinner that night was not any delicious pork
instead I grabbed something out of the freezer to eat.

THAT’S RIGHT.

I ate a Hot Pocket.

I was trying to empty out my freezer before the hurricane arrived…
Hot Pocket by Hot Pocket.

The power went out at 11:30 pm
after the pork finished cooking
although I still could have kept trucking with my gas stove.

Our house was pretty dark.
See Exhibit A:

I moved the pot o’pork to the freezer for safekeeping
and was happy I did not start making birote (the bread) for the tortas ahogadas.
My stove is gas powered
my oven however
is not.

The next morning we surveyed the damage
and there was not too much to our house

Lost a little tree
which almost took out the AC unit.
It’s running fine now
albeit a bit noisy.

We did not get power back for 6 days
and lost almost all of our perishable food.

For 5 days
we stayed with friends who got their power back within 24 hours
and we transported as much of our frozen food over to their house as we could.

We had over 250$ worth of steak in our freezer
which partially thawed
and was the cause for much sadness.

We managed to save a lot of chicken
and the tasty pork was brought over promptly and used for nachos one night
(I didn’t want to use it that way
but the grocery stores were circus-like so I ‘made do’)
and then for carnitas another night.

My refrigerator and freezer and still not fully stocked yet
and I’ve managed to run out of non-perishables too
due to bringing them all over to our friends’ house so I could cook for them.

Usually I do my fun baking and slow cooking on the weekends
along with all grocery shopping for the week
but Mr. Ike has thrown a wrench into things
along with the fact that my weekends are pretty busy now.

I managed to land a part-time job at a restaurant here in Houston and I couldn’t be more thrilled.

The reviews on it are wonderful
and the chef’s intimidatinly creative and good so I feel like getting all Julie Andrews on you and singing
I must have done something gooooooood.

It’s hard work
I worked in retail for a long long time
so I can deal with the standing up for long periods of time
but its keeping all of the orders straight which makes me a bit cross-eyed.

I get orders called to me without being able to see a ticket
so I better be able to keep 7 orders of salads or desserts in order without missing one.

It’s difficult
but I enjoy it
and I’m learning alot.
I’m proud that I’m in there and I already have a lot of food and technique knowledge
I just need to work on my plating
and balancing flavors.

I’m a slave to recipes
something I’m trying to come away from
but one thing at a time right?

For now
I’ll worry about restocking my larders
and not forgetting anyone’s orders on the weekends.

My Favorite Fruit is a Patient Fruit

I made my first ever lemon tart not too long ago and it turned out wonderfully
even though I DID manage to use granulated sugar instead of powdered sugar in the pate sucree.

Let’s just say the crust was a tad bit crunchy.

This recipe is from Dorie Greenspan’s Baking From My Home to Yours.

I chose this recipe as the first one to make out of this book because I had never made a lemon tart before
and I had a giant bag of lemons left over from making lemon ice cream and chicken piccata
(on separate occasions).

Working on getting the lemon curd up to temperature the night before.

Baked crust and patient raspberries.

Waiting quietly… and deliciously.

Del Monte helps me unmold.

Yes, there are two open cookbooks on my counter.
My favorite thing to do while cooking is to get out
oh five or so cookbooks in addition to the one I actually need
and open the superfluous books to different sections that have nothing to do with what I’m actually cooking.

Husband will usually start to nose around in the kitchen before I start cooking
so its pretty entertaining to watch his eyebrows furrow as he tries to divine what I am putting together
that would require recipes for candied walnuts, pasta puttanesca, pork loin sous vide, and pickled watermelon rinds.

I get my kicks where I can.

Many sticks of butter later, the lemon curd transformed into a silky filling.

Everyone on board.

It didn’t last long, even with a very crunchy crust.

I can’t believe I goofed up the crust for this recipe.

Usually I have my mise en place ready and I check a recipe three of four times
so I am not sure how I got off track here.

The Pie Crust Curse strikes again.
At least the crust didn’t go out a window this time
or end up as a sad crumbly pile in the garbage-disposal side of the sink.

I think I got only a teeny sliver of this tart.
Next time I think I will make it in teeny tart pans for easier carrying-off abilities.
Husband tends to eat all the sweets before I get a chance to take them with lunches later on in the week.

I’m sure my waistline is thanking him for this, no matter what my tastebuds are saying.

Getting to It

I have immersed myself in cooking for the past six years.

I have notebooks strewn around the house
cookbooks underfoot in every possible room
and a tablet in my desk drawer at work
scribbled on when I have a few minutes
recording my last try in the kitchen
and was a dish worthy of producing again–
an “ask for” meal I call them.

If someone isn’t asking for it
it’s probably not all that great.

Granted, that “someone” asking for the meal is usually my husband
because the dogs don’t count.

They ask for things like onion peelings
staring silently 
standing at the edge of the kitchen,
lying down if they sense that mom will be in the forbidden room for a while.

They know not to come in while I’m in there
a tiny kitchen in a tiny house
has no room for two dogs snuffling around in while I am juggling hot pans.

All bets are off as soon as I step out of the kitchen however.
They snuffle hoover up any microscopic object that may have dropped.

Onion peels are sought after as much as a morsel of ground beef;
they are not picky eaters.

Most of the time I put a baby-gate up to keep them from going in
because my biggest culinary fear
is to watch my guests pucker up their mouths
and then politely extract a crimped dog hair from their half-chewed food.

I have always been interested in food
and started seriously cooking when I was 18.

I accumulated a few cookbooks
and subscribed to (many) cooking magazines.

Last year I gave myself a goal of following one new recipe a week
since it didn’t make sense to have years of back-issues of Gourmet, Saveur,  Cook’s Illustrated, Food + Wine, (ad infinitum)
or to have any of the cookbooks I somehow kept collecting
if I wasn’t putting them to good use.

I got off to a rough start
but by December I had 52 new recipes under my belt.

Last year saw the introduction of cakes, icings and candy
flank steak, skirt steak, and chicken thighs
prime rib roasts, oxtails, and simple pastry crusts.

This year I gave myself the same goal
and threw in another one.

This year I shall conquer bread and pie crusts.
52 recipes shall be followed
and I shall not swear (too much) while making them.

Never in my life has bread cooperated with me.
My mother and grandmother had no problem turning out beautiful loaves
hand-kneaded and loved upon
but mine looked like something out of the Yeast Lagoon
and bread baking generally induced a level of terror in me that was unhealthy for one’s well-being.

Pie crusts just made me angry.
Every time.
Pull away here, crack here, and there it now goes, through the window.

I am proud to say that my bread skills are coming along.

Its almost July
I’ve completed 52 new recipes
but only have 17 or so yeast breads under my belt
and the pie crusts remain untouched.

Summer should be the perfect time for making fruit pies
but I recently got an ice cream maker
(like cookbooks, my small appliance collection is growing)
and that is quite distracting.

There have been more ice cream bowls in our house than pie plates
and I should get to fixing that.

All in good time.  

Maybe I will proclaim December as Pie Month in our household.
30 days, 30 pies…
and a whole angry household of pied-out residents.

Maybe I should just get to it.
We’ll see.
The ice cream maker might work its magic once more.