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.