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!

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.

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!