Tuesday Dinner - Beets, Beets, Beets!

Tonight's menu:

• Cajun skirt steak with creamed corn
• Roasted beets with horseradish creme fraiche

This beet salad was amazing. Thank you, CSA (more on that later), for forcing us to try new recipes with foods we might not have otherwise eaten!

Wednesday Farmer's Market - Delightful Dessert

Today was the season opening of our town farmer's market, so of course Matt and I had to go see what was available! Plenty, as it turned out, but we restrained ourselves to only buying these few "necessities"...and a block of cheese.

In addition to the edibles, we also purchased an investment item: this lovely tomato plant!

Our gardening skills are admittedly limited, but we were told this reliable Jet Star variety would be easy to manage. And what could be better than eating our own home-grown tomatoes later this summer? More posts on that adventure to come.

In the meantime, we arrived home with our bounty and promptly got to work cooking. Rather than labor over an intensive dinner, we ate leftovers so we could focus on the most important meal of the day. Dessert. Starring...rhubarb!

I have never cooked rhubarb before in my life, but I've eaten it and I know I love it. So when I saw this bundle I couldn't resist picking it up. I was also recently inspired by this post on Simply Breakfast and really wanted to try some kind of fruity tart-like thing.

This was the result. I followed this Smitten Kitchen recipe for rustic rhubarb tarts, and it was great. Crispy, super tangy, just slightly sweet, and delicious with a little Breyer's vanilla ice cream. Side note - Breyer's has been my favorite kind of ice cream for as long as I can remember. Why, aside from the taste? The ingredient list: milk, cream, sugar, vanilla. No artificial crap!

I was happy to discover that rhubarb is not at all hard to cook. And these made-from-scratch tarts were so good, I'm just sad it's the end of rhubarb season. But there will be much more farmer's market enjoyment over the next few months. I can't wait!

Sunday Breakfast - Making Do

This morning we were both craving Belgian waffles. You know, some big, warm, homemade, delicious waffles covered in maple syrup and fresh fruit. Unfortunately we do not have a waffle maker and the only fresh fruit we have in the house consists of a bag of apples.

We considered braving the Sunday morning brunch crowd and going out to Denny's or some other similar breakfast establishment. But then I remembered we had frozen whole-wheat waffles and frozen blueberries (purchased for smoothies). Surely we could make some kind of Belgian-waffle substitute with that, right?

Yes we could, and while the waffles didn't have that fluffy texture and the blueberries would have been much better fresh instead of frozen and thawed in a bowl of warm water, this was still a tasty breakfast that satisfied our waffle craving. For now. But don't be surprised if a waffle iron finds its way into our life sometime in the near future...

Wednesday Dinner - Everything But the Kitchen Sink

Tonight's menu:

• Randomness in a bowl

This was a very unusual dinner for us. We had no planned menus, have not gone on a grocery run recently, and had pretty much no energy to do anything fancy (and, maybe more importantly, no money to order takeout). So we assessed the state of our pantry and found the following items:

• Ground beef
• New potatoes
• Celery
• Carrots
• Frozen corn
• Red cabbage
• Canned diced tomatoes
  

We chopped all the veggies up and spread them out in layers in a baking dish. We mixed the meat with soy sauce, worcestershire, chili powder, and cumin and spread it over the top. Then we baked the whole thing for 1.5 hours at around 350 degrees F.

I have to admit I was skeptical about this dish. We had no recipe to follow, no plan, and we were just using a random assortment of items. Turns out it was delicious! Putting the meat on top allowed its juices to drip down onto the veggies while it cooked, which gave everything a really nice flavor. And while this wasn't the most exciting gourmet dinner I can think of, it was cheap, easy, and healthy to boot, with no added oil. I'm glad to know such a dish is possible and I'll definitely remember it next time we're feeling tired and uninspired.

Bonus: it was just as good for lunch the next day!

Friday Breakfast - Healthy Style

So I don't normally post about breakfast, because to be honest I don't normally eat it. At least, I don't eat it before leaving the house. I usually grab some kind of breakfast-like-snack (Luna bar, bagel, etc.) during the morning hours of my work day, but I rarely manage to make myself any kind of breakfast worth posting to a food blog.

Lately, however, Matt and I have been making smoothies in the morning. He developed this recipe and I love it both for how good it tastes and how good it makes me feel. Having two full servings of fruit and some protein in the AM will really kick-start your day! Here's the recipe we use.

Add these ingredients to the blender first:

• Big pinch of flax seeds
• Handful of whole almonds
• 1/2 a carrot, cut into pieces
• 1 banana broken into pieces
• 1 cup (ish) of frozen fruit -- we like to use a mixed berry blend, because it's delicious and cheap

Add vanilla soymilk to about halfway up your pile of fruit. Then add fruit juice (we use organic pomegranate juice) to the top of the fruit pile. Blend and drink! This does tend to make a runnier smoothie, so if you like yours thick-as-a-milkshake, add less liquid or more fruit. Breakfast that's healthy and tastes like dessert...definitely a winner!

Tuesday Dinner - Pizza, Pizza!

Tonight's menu:

• Green pizza with arugula, broccoli, and pesto

Our diet has been seriously lacking in green veggies lately, so this recipe Matt found on EatingWell.com was exactly what we needed. Plus we had a bunch of arugula that needed to be used up. We knew it would be infinitely better with fresh, homemade pizza dough, so Matt found a recipe for that as well on simplyrecipes.com.

We followed the pizza dough instructions up until the putting-the-toppings-on step. Then we switched back over to the green pizza recipe, which called for baking the dough first and then putting toppings on. Since we had so much dough, we decided to make two pizzas. They were identical except that we put some leftover marinara sauce on one (another thing we had hanging around the fridge waiting to get used up).

Both pizzas were amazing. Crispy crust, melty cheese, great flavor (mostly thanks to the copious amounts of pesto we slathered onto the dough). But most importantly, they didn't leave us with that heavy, greasy feeling we get from eating takeout pizza. This tasted light, fresh and healthy. Which it was!

One note: this was not a quick dinner. Making the dough meant we had to let it rise for almost 2 hours, so I wouldn't recommend this if you're in a hurry. On the other hand, there isn't too much actual work involved, just time...might be a great dinner for a night when you have a lot of stuff to do around the house.

Wednesday Dinner - Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Tonight's menu:

• Tricolor Penne Pasta with Chicken
• Buttered Green Peas
• Oven-warmed Baguette

Ok, so there's really nothing Irish about the dinner we had today...but there is a big spot of bright green on the plate! I had forgotten how much I like green peas. They're not something I ate much of growing up. We had them at Thanksgiving and Christmas and that was about it. I don't know why, but as a result they always seemed like holiday-only food to me. So I'm happy to have rediscovered them as an adult. They are just satisfying, especially with heaps of butter melted into them.

The real highlight of tonight's dinner, though, was this pasta dish from foodnetwork.com. It has three different kinds of lettuce and is so full of healthiness it doesn't seem like it should taste good. Sundried tomatoes, garlic, endive, radicchio, arugula, basil, and chicken all went into this colorful, tasty mixture. We used leftover chicken from our Sunday roast (yes, we roasted another chicken this past Sunday. I failed to post on it because it was exactly the same as the one we did last week). Using leftover chicken made the meal a little cheaper and easier to cook, and not having to deal with raw chicken is always a bonus. This would also be a great vegetarian dish if the chicken were replaced with garbanzo beans, tofu, or just omitted altogether.

My only complaint about this dish was that we didn't add enough Parmesan. We got a nice block of good, aged Parmesan cheese (no tasteless crap in a green can here) and shredded it just before serving and it was amazing. There is no substitute for freshly shredded Parmesan. But the point is that next time we make this dish, I will be added a giant heap of Parmesan to it instead of the little spoonful I sprinkled on top. It's just too good!

Additional note - The leftovers of the pasta dish make an excellent cold pasta salad for lunch the next day. Double win!

Sunday Dinner - The Whole Bird

Tonight's menu:

• A whole, roasted chicken!
• Butternut squash gratin
• Biscuits

This meal was another inspiration from my coworker, Richard. He mentioned to me the other day that it was chick-ordering time. Naturally this made me curious, so I asked him to explain. Apparently, in addition to raising geese and ducks for their excellent eggs, his family also raises chickens for meat. Consequently, they eat chicken a lot, and one of their standard ways to get good use out of the entire bird is to roast it. They usually roast one or two chickens over the weekend, and use the leftovers to make a variety of meals throughout the week. This is not only economical, it's convenient and eco-friendly, as they generally make soup stock out of the bones.

So I thought, why not try it out? Obviously, not being chicken owners, we had to purchase the bird. We did get a local Vermont chicken though, so at least we tried to be green about it. Once again I do not have the original recipe source, but it was a good one. We made a paste out of mashed garlic (about 6 cloves) and kosher salt, and rubbed half of this all over the inside of the chicken. Then we mixed the rest of the paste with softened butter and rubbed that all over the outside of the chicken. We stuffed the chicken with two whole lemons (pricked with a fork so the juices could come out) and roasted it at 400 degrees for a little over an hour. Since we now have a meat thermometer, we were able to do a perfect roast by temperature rather than our usual method of slicing bits off until we're sure it's done. Our thermometer has a handy guide showing the temperature for different meats, so when it hit the "poultry" reading we knew we were good! Here's the uncarved fowl in all its glory:


Our second dish was a butternut gratin. We chose this recipe just because it looked good, but as it turns out winter squash are on sale at the co-op, so it was cheap as well! We followed the recipe from Care2.com exactly, and it turned out perfect. Sweet and savory, with a hint of cheese but not loaded down with it like so many gratin dishes are. The cumin is really what made the dish great. It's not a spice I would probably have thought to add on my own, but it was very good. Definitely recommended!


And then, after all that hard work making two dishes out of local foods, all from scratch...we cheated and made biscuits from a can. And you know what? They were absolutely freakin' perfect. Sometimes you just need that artificial butter flavor to round out a meal.

Tuesday Dinner - F Words

Tonight's menu:

• Fiery fajitas
• Friendly fruit salad

We're finally back to our planned dinners! My compulsively-organized librarian personality is much happier. This menu was one I came up with and again, I have no idea where the recipes came from. Which is ok, because we ended up not really using them anyway. Once we got all the ingredients, we realized we didn't like the cooking instructions so we made our own. It was...well, not great, but better than it would have been if we had followed the instructions blindly. Of that I am sure. The recipe called for broiling the chicken and broiling the veggies separately. I don't know about you, but in my mind that is just not the right way to make fajitas. They have to be cooked in a skillet! Over flames! You gotta hear that sizzle!

Anyway, what we ended up doing was very simple. We bought red, green, and yellow bell peppers, sliced them up with a sweet onion and some chopped garlic. We also sliced two chicken breasts and seasoned them with chili powder, salt, pepper, and our favorite Jane's Krazy Mixed Up Salt. Then we and sauteed it all together in our amazing new Calphalon stainless steel stir fry pan (a wedding gift from our dear friend Patrick...thanks Pat!). This tasty mixture was served on warm flour tortillas with Monterey Jack cheese and sour cream.

It would have been perfect, except the seasoning wasn't quite fiery enough for us. Even I, who don't like super spicy food, found these to be a little bland. I think next time maybe we'll throw some diced Jalapeno in for good measure. If you have any other good fajita-seasoning suggestions, please let us know!

The fruit salad is one of my secret weapons. Against myself. You see, I have something to admit. Something I'm embarrassed to share. Here goes...I don't like fruit. At least, I don't like fruit by itself. Give me a banana and I will turn up my nose. Hand me a freshly picked apple and I will hand it right off to someone who will truly appreciate it. I just don't like eating fruit plain. But put fruit in a dish, any dish, and I love it. Pies, cobblers, fruit smoothies, fruit salads, fruit preserves, even meats with fruit sauces...any way you can cook fruit or combine it with other things makes me happy.

So, to trick me into eating a full serving of fruit tonight, we had fruit salad. And it was amazing, even though it's still winter and none of the fruit was in season, at least not here in New Hampshire. It contained apples, bananas, grapes, cantaloupe, and pineapple chopped up and smothered in a sauce made of plain yogurt, honey, and fresh-squeezed lime juice. We added a dash of cinnamon to the sauce, stirred everything together and let it sit for a while. So incredibly good. We have a ton left over, which is great because fruit salad gets better when it sits and all the fruit can soak up the dressing. This will be excellent for lunch tomorrow. Big servings of fruit two days in a row! No one would ever guess I'm not into fruit....ssshhhhh.

Sunday Dinner - Birthday Style

Tonight's menu:

• Shrimp and veggie linguine
• Garlic bread

This dinner was a special birthday treat, made by Matt! I got to sit back and relax while he planned and created this delicious meal...a wonderful way to spend my birthday evening. He used two recipes to make it, combining elements from each. One was from Allrecipes.com and he pulled some inspiration from this Ezine article as well. I don't know exactly what he did since I wasn't in the kitchen, but the final dish included shrimp, broccoli, cherry tomatoes, and spinach all sauteed in garlic, shallots, and butter, then mixed into the pasta. The flavors and colors were marvelous, and the dish was light and healthy to boot.

The garlic bread was a bake-at-home frozen garlic baguette. We usually make our garlic bread with a fresh baguette covered in melted butter and minced garlic, but since Matt was cooking by himself he opted to go the easy route. It actually worked really well with the pasta dish, which already had a lot of garlic. The pre-made garlic bread is usually more salty than garlicky, and I think our usual garlic-intense version would have been a little overpowering. As it was, the bread was a perfect complement to a light and savory dinner. Happy birthday to me!

After-School Snack

Really it was after work, but the cheese, cracker and apple combo made me think of snacks I used to eat after walking home from school in 5th grade. This is the adult version: the crackers are Rosemary and Olive Oil Triscuits (so good!), the cheese is a local Vermont maple-smoked cheddar we picked up at the co-op, and the apple is a delicious locally grown...well, I forget which variety it was, but they're all great.

We had a late dinner last night (more on that in a bit) so I made us this little plate to keep us from grumbling at each other...something we both tend to do when we get too hungry. Gotta keep those stomachs full and happy!

Thursday Dinner - Burgers 'n Fries

Tonight's menu:

• Smoked gouda hamburgers
• Beer-battered potato wedges
• Carolina coleslaw

This was another completely unplanned dinner...so unplanned that we forgot some key ingredients at the grocery store (lettuce, tomato, canola oil) and ended up with slightly different burgers than we had anticipated. Due to the lack of forethought I have no real recipes for these dishes, we kind of just made them up. It's a way of cooking I'm not generally comfortable with, but tonight it worked!

The burgers consisted of ground beef, diced smoked gouda cheese, diced onions, minced garlic, Worcestershire, soy sauce, salt, and pepper in whatever proportions seemed good in Matt's head. He cooked them in a skillet and we served them on toasted buns, without much in the way of accoutrements. Fortunately the burgers were so tasty it didn't seem like they were missing anything.

Matt also handled the fries, which were amazing. He peeled a potato, sliced it, and battered it with a mixture of flour, garlic powder, onion powder, cajun seasoning, paprika, salt, pepper, and beer. Those were also pan-fried in lots of oil and they came out perfect: crispy crunchy on the outside, soft and hot on the inside. Way better than any fries I've ever eaten out.

I took on the coleslaw as a personal challenge. I hate mayonnaise-based coleslaw. I actually kind of dislike mayonnaise in general, but that's another issue. So I did a quick Google-search for "coleslaw without mayonnaise" and came across this Chowhound thread...apparently I'm not the only one! It seems this oil-instead-of-mayo coleslaw is referred to as "Carolina slaw" and the thread had lots of suggestions for ingredients. I didn't follow any of the recipes exactly, but pulled from several. Our final salad had red and green cabbage, sweet onion, canola oil (the tiny bit that was left in the bottle), toasted sesame oil, apple cider vinegar, pepper, and tons of Jane's Krazy Mixed-Up Salt. The sesame oil and Jane's salt completely made the coleslaw. The only coleslaw I've ever liked better is from the Salt Lick, our favorite Texas barbecue joint. I've tried in vain to find the Salt Lick's coleslaw recipe online and to recreate it myself. Somehow I just can't get that special barbecue-side-dish flavor.

On a side note, Jane's Krazy Mixed-Up Salt is a random seasoning I learned about from my mom. She always had it around and added it to everything...I never realized, until I started cooking, how great it is for giving a bland dish that little something extra to make it pop.

Sunday Dinner - Valentine's Day Edition

Tonight's menu:

• Pan-fried tilapia with beurre blanc
• Roasted asparagus
• Warm baguette slices with butter

This was an unusual dinner for us, in that we didn't plan the menu well in advance. Normally we plan a week or two's worth of menus at a time and then grocery shop every few days to get fresh produce for our planned dinners. However, this past week has been a little crazy and Matt was on call all weekend, so we didn't plan much of anything. We were at our local co-op grocery this afternoon and grabbed some fish fillets, white wine, asparagus, and shallots...surely, we thought, we could make a good meal with that?

Yes, as it turns out, we could. We simply sprinkled the tilapia with salt and pepper and fried it in butter in a skillet. The beurre blanc recipe was from our much-used 400 Sauces cookbook, which we picked up for $5 on the clearance rack at Borders. It's a very easy recipe; just saute some diced shallots in 3 tablespoons each dry white wine (we like chardonnay) and white wine vinegar until the liquid is reduced by about half. Then turn the heat off and let the whole thing cool a bit, stir in 1/2 cup unsalted butter, and season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice. Delicious!

The asparagus was cooked using our favorite method. Trim off the ends and put the whole bunch in a baking dish, coat with about a tablespoon of oil (we normally use olive oil, but we ran out today so we used Canola oil instead...it tasted fine), and sprinkle with salt, pepper, and a lot of minced garlic. Roast at 400 degrees F for about 15-20 minutes and they're done. We also threw a store-bought baguette into the oven, wrapped in aluminum foil, to heat up while the asparagus was roasting.

The whole dinner took us about 20 minutes to make, was relatively healthy (except for the entire stick of butter we used...) and tasted amazing. Plus the shallots turned a lovely shade of pink, a perfect Valentine's day surprise!

Also, I just have to say something about my Valentine's day/birthday gift, because my very clever husband got me something for the blog! It's an awesome Lowel photography light to make our food pictures clearer and brighter. I took tonight's picture with it...still getting the hang of using the reflector, plus I'm using my G1 phone camera to take the picture (my digital camera broke a few months ago) so the pics still aren't perfect, but they're getting better. Thanks Matt!

Sunday Dinner - Superbowl Edition

Tonight's menu:

• Oven-baked wings with classic hot sauce
• Oven-baked wings with garlic-teriyaki sauce (not pictured)
• Cold leftover take-out pizza
• Chips with corn and black bean salsa
• Ranch and blue cheese dipping sauces...because we're serious about wings

So let me start out by saying that Matt and I don't really care much about football. In fact, we didn't even know who was playing in the super bowl until we sat down to start watching the game, at which point we decided to root for the Saints (a good choice, as it turns out) because we had actually been to New Orleans...clearly we are not real football fans. But we decided to watch the super bowl because it seemed like a great excuse to eat a lot of really unhealthy, completely indigestible, and absolutely delicious food.

Also, I found this recipe for baked wings that supposedly taste like deep-fried, an assertion we felt we needed to personally test. So we bought 5 pounds of wings and underwent the 8-hour drying process, and while it was a lot of work, it was so worth it. These wings were amazing. So tender they were falling off the bones, but still crispy on the outside. And we didn't even do it right, we stopped drying them and started baking after only 6 hours!

Matt made two kinds of sauce for the wings: a classic hot sauce, consisting of Frank's Red Hot Sauce (it has to be Frank's. Trust me.), melted butter, and a dash of Worcestershire. The other sauce was one he just concocted out of his head (he's so good at creating sauces and marinades). Its ingredients were soy sauce, brown sugar, garlic, ginger (freshly minced ginger root, not powder), sesame oil, and orange juice. I would share the proportions, but I'm pretty sure Matt just keeps adding and tasting until it's delicious.

The other dishes were just things we had around that seemed like they fit into the football-food theme. Ironically, we actually bought celery stick and carrots in a half-assed attempt to add something healthy, but we were so excited about the wings that we forgot to serve the veggies. In any case, it was a great game and we certainly enjoyed it to the fullest!

Note: If reproducing this meal at home, we recommend taking an antacid before eating. Seriously, you will thank yourself later.

Wednesday Dinner - Tart of Gold

Tonight's menu:

• Venus' Onion and Goat Cheese Tart (recipe from Care2.com)
  
• There was supposed to be a salad too, but I was lazy...

I cooked dinner by myself tonight because Matt was working most of the evening. This was our weekly vegetarian night...I try to make sure we eat a vegetarian dinner at least once a week, for various reasons ranging from eco-friendliness to cost. Honestly, a lot of the values behind vegetarian/veganism are ones I agree with, I just can't hack it without meat all the time. But I figure eating vegetarian some of the time is better than none of the time!

So, we had planned to have this dish tonight, which turned out to be convenient since it was super easy to make without a cooking partner. Although I didn't remember this when we planned the menu, apparently the recipe was posted several years ago as a Valentine's day dish...so, good timing! It's called Venus' tart because it contains two supposed aphrodisiacs: eggs and onions. Why anyone would consider onions an aphrodisiac, I do not know. The breath factor isn't quite as bad as garlic, but it's still not my idea of a romance-inspiring food.

In any case, the dish was fantastic. Three kinds of onion flavor (including leeks, which I love), goat cheese, and tomato. Yum! And the added bonus of using almost no oil made it an extra-healthy dinner. We will definitely be making this one again.

Sunday breakfast - Goose egg!

This week we got to try out a new food for breakfast: a goose egg. My coworker, Richard, gave us this egg from one of his geese. Richard is a huge cooking inspiration for me, since he grows or raises most of his own food and cooks everything from scratch. Someday, when our living situation is a little more permanent, I hope to become more self-sufficient in the food arena. But in the meantime I'm dependent on Richard and the local farmers to keep my diet interesting.

Goose eggs are about three times the size of chicken eggs. Here you can see it next to a typical large brown egg. Not a jumbo, just your regular old chicken egg. It looks so wimpy compared to the goose egg!

We decided to scramble the egg so we could really get the flavor of it...I wanted to know exactly what a goose egg tastes like. We scrambled it in butter and ate it with nothing extra...not even salt and pepper. It was awesome! It tasted a whole lot like a chicken egg, but it was definitely a little richer and had more flavor than a chicken egg, at least the ones I usually eat.

Thank you Richard for giving us this egg. You made our weekend!

Saturday Dinner: Fish Tacos

Tonight's menu:

• Beer-battered fish tacos
• Tomato and avocado salsa
• Rice and black beans

Wow, this was a great meal! The fish tacos were better than I've ever had in a restaurant. That's one thing I love about cooking; you can have the same food you would get in a restaurant (a great steak, hamburger, fish tacos) but for half the cost and you can cook it to suit your tastes perfectly. Why eat out?!

We followed the fish recipe exactly and it was delicious. Crispy on the outside, flaky on the inside, and with that slight flavor of beer which, when combined with seafood, makes me think of a beach vacation.

The salsa was absolutely amazing...there is nothing better than homemade salsa. We left out the cilantro because we aren't huge fans and for some reason it's really hard to find up here in New England. We also added garlic because we are of the opinion that garlic makes just about anything better. It was so good we both wanted to eat the salsa straight out of the bowl. We will definitely be making it again.

The rice and beans were plain and simple...just some basmati rice, cooked in our new favorite way, with a can of black beans thrown in for extra protein and flavor. And yes, we did use canned beans. Back in the co-op days (more to come on that later) we would have cooked the beans from scratch along with the rest of the meal. But that is, frankly, way too much work for us now that we're only cooking for two people. Sometimes canned food just makes more sense. It's a little more expensive, but worth it to save a couple hours of cooking time.

The only problem with this meal was the sorry-excuse-for-a-tortilla we had to use. Back in Texas, really good tortillas were easy to come by. Apparently that is not the case here, and we had to use these flavorless, mealy, floppy things. I'm thinking we're going to have to start making our own tortillas. If anyone knows of a good tortilla recipe, post it in the comments please!

Wednesday Dinner - Chicken Satay

Tonight's menu:

• Sauteed chicken with peanut dipping sauce
• Cucumber salad
• Basmati rice

This dinner was extremely satisfying. The chicken is based on a Thai dish, but we used a recipe from my files that called for sauteeing the chicken rather than grilling it (since grilling is rather unpleasant in 20-degree weather). Unfortunately, I don't know where the recipe came from so I can't give proper attribution. If you've seen it somewhere, let me know!

The ingredients (for 4 servings) are:

• 1.5 lbs chicken cutlets
• 1 tsp Asian chili sauce
• 1 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tbsp rice vinegar
• 2 tsp lime juice
• 2 tsp brown sugar
• 1/2 cup creamy peanut butter
• 1/4 cup hot water

Cooking it was very simple. We just sauteed the chicken in oil until it was browned on both sides and cooked through. Then we mixed all the other ingredients together for the dipping sauce, and it was done! The cucumbers were just sliced and mixed with a little rice vinegar, lime juice, and brown sugar. A fast, easy, and delicious meal.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention the rice. Normally I wouldn't even comment on cooking plain rice but tonight we discovered a new method that was so great we were both raving about the rice...just the rice! The instructions, from startcooking.com, involve adding some butter to the rice as it's cooking, and the butter makes a huge difference. The rice came out creamy and wonderful. If you've never cooked rice this way, I definitely suggest trying it.

A quick note: I really liked the peanut dipping sauce, but Matt thought it was too rich and too peanut-y. I'm thinking this could be toned down some by thinning it with extra water. It was a little thick for a dipping sauce, so maybe we'll try that next time.

Sunday Dinner - Finger Food

Tonight's Menu:

• Homemade chicken tenders
• Carrot and cucumber slices
  
• Homemade honey mustard dipping sauce

Today's dinner was a fast, easy comfort-food meal because we spent the whole day cleaning and were too tired to do anything more elaborate. However, even though it's not exactly gourmet fare, this was a tasty and satisfying dinner...all the more so because we got to eat with our hands and pretend to be kids for a while.

The big upside to this meal was that we got our fast-food fix without actually buying fast food, thus upping the health factor considerably and lowering the total cost. Win-win! For the chicken tenders, we dipped them in flour, then beaten egg, then a breading of cornmeal mixed with garlic powder, salt, and pepper. We baked the tenders instead of frying them, which meant there was almost no added oil, just enough to coat the baking pan.

The best part of this meal was definitely the honey mustard. I've never made this condiment before, I've only had store-bought prepared versions. I will never go back. This was a simple mixture of sour cream (reduced-fat organic...we always get organic dairy products), dijon mustard, and local New Hampshire wildflower honey. It was so much better than the pre-packaged stuff, and with the added bonus of not having weird color or flavor additives. I highly recommend making your own honey mustard!

Weekend Breakfast - French Toast

We had another mutual Saturday morning off work, and we took advantage of it to the fullest! Matt cooked again and this week he decided to do a classic breakfast: French toast, bacon (thus fulfilling our bacon-and-egg requirement), and fruit.

For the French toast, he modified a recipe from one of my favorite standard cookbooks, Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking School Cookbook. It's a very simple recipe, calling only for eggs, sugar, salt, milk, and of course bread. Matt added cinnamon to the mix and fried the toast in lots of melted butter, which in my opinion makes anything taste amazing. Of course we topped it with real Vermont maple syrup, made at the ranch where our friend Ryan used to work.

The addition of fruit (pineapple and blueberries) was an attempt to add some semblance of healthiness to our meal. This was probably completely negated by the fact that we each ate four pieces of bacon...actually, I ate five. But some fruit is better than no fruit, right?

Daily Dinner - A Meal in a Tomato

Tonight's menu:

• Stuffed tomatoes with golden crumb topping
• Steamed green beans

This meal was so easy to make! There was a good deal of chopping and prep work, but then the food basically cooked itself. And I love a dish whose ingredients are a meal in themselves. This tomato dish included vegetables, grains, and protein and in one pretty, round little package. Fun!

The one thing I had trouble with (and of course I opted to try it instead of letting Matt do the dirty work) was hollowing out the tomatoes. I did get firm tomatoes as called for in the recipe, but it was still tricky to scoop out the insides without ripping through the tomato wall. The recipe suggested using a melon baller, which we do not own (kind of ironic I suppose, given my nickname). Maybe I'll get one and try that next time.

I will also say that this recipe had a little too much "golden crumb topping" for my taste. Not that I don't love toasted bread crumbs with olive oil, garlic, and parmesan...I most certainly do! But it kind of overpowered the stuffing, which was really good. I think if we make this dish again I'll cut the bread crumbs in half. After all, they're meant to be a topping, not the whole dish.

All in all, we rate this a 3.5 star meal...great idea, tasted good, but needs a little tweaking.

Weekend Breakfast - Heavenly Skillet

On the weekends, we tend to skip the fancy dinners in exchange for delicious breakfasts. Since our weekday mornings tend to be rushed, these leisurely meals are a nice change of pace. They almost always involve eggs and bacon, but the other ingredients tend to vary according to our moods.

This Saturday Matt opted to do a skillet, adding potatoes, onions, red bell pepper, garlic, and cheese to the egg and bacon combo. Rather than using a recipe, he just chopped everything up and fried it all together until it looked good, then melted the cheese on top. I'm an always-follow-a-recipe kind of girl, but Matt is great at just throwing together a bunch of ingredients to make a terrific dish.

As an aside, cooking me breakfast is one of the ways Matt won my love. I don't know if it's true that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, but I can tell you the way to a woman's heart is to bring her a home-cooked breakfast in bed!

Daily Dinner - Asian-Inspired Take on a Classic

Tonight's menu:

• Asian "Salisbury" steak on a bed of wilted watercress
• Brown rice with red bell pepper garnish

It drives me crazy when recipes give a "total time" of, say, 30 minutes but then half the ingredients listed need some kind of preparation (chopping, slicing, peeling, etc.) that isn't included in the given time. So a dish that is supposed to take 30 minutes to make ends up taking 45. This was one of those dishes, but fortunately with two of us cooking we can split up the tasks and it goes much faster. We got this one finished about 40 minutes from the time we walked in the door. Not bad, and certainly a manageable amount of time for a weeknight dinner.

The recipe itself was pretty good, but the sauce was a little sweet for my taste. We added some garlic to the steak, because we are of the opinion that garlic makes everything better. And it did.

Also, these instructions from Steve Pavlina's blog are our favorite method for cooking brown rice. It comes out perfect every time!