Days 9 & 10 - Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut

Today's menu:

• Whole-wheat toast with peanut butter and banana slices
• Sushi (veggie and fish only, no cream cheese or other fun ingredients, and no soy sauce)
• Carrots and hummus
• Thai beef salad

Tuesday we allowed ourselves to have peanuts again, which was not altogether exciting. Neither of us has a peanut allergy, but we also don't eat them as much as we eat, say, wheat or dairy. So it wasn't that big of a deal. We did incorporate peanuts into two meals though, just because we could.

Wednesday we ate almost the exact same thing as Tuesday (substituting leftover pasta from Monday instead of sushi for lunch). We were going to reintroduce eggs on Wednesday, but we were just too tired to cook anything. So we didn't.

However, there is nothing better left over than this Thai beef salad. It was amazing the first night we had it, and equally amazing the second. Plus, as a leftover, it was much faster to prepare! Our only complaint about this dish was how long it took us to make it. The prep work is almost all active: chopping, measuring, mixing, etc. Which means we couldn't just set one thing to cook and prep other things in the meantime. But the effort was totally worth it. This dish was truly fantastic.

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.

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.

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!