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!