It’s Sunday and you have been cooking all week. Give yourself a break! Sunday supper around here is an everyone-make-your-own-eggs dinner. John always makes himself an omelet and I make a variety of egg dinners. This week I am doing the basics – scrambled eggs, rye toast, microwaved veggie patty, and a simple salad. After dinner I usually will have an apple. So try a simple dinner that is healthy and delicious.
Wonder of wonders this past week we actually ate exactly what we planned! This week coming up we have two special event dinners, Purim with its triangular food, and St. Patrick’s Day with its soda bread.
I marinated the tofu in a nuoc cham sauce for about two hours. Nuoc cham is a Vietnamese sauce and is basically fish sauce, sugar, and lime juice. With John manning our large fry pan, I cut the vegetables up in the order he wanted to cook them – mushrooms, onions, ginger, garlic, carrots, celery, broccoli, and snow peas. The tofu went in about the same time as the snow peas.
Our dinner dish turned out well although it was a little tofu heavy. I used a whole package of extra firm tofu because I never know what to do with leftover tofu. John ate his over rice with some sriracha. I put my veg and tofu over cauliflower rice.
This dish which luckily I made in the morning has a lot of components. First I needed to make the farro. I used an oven method where 1.5 cups of farro cook in a covered dish with 2 1/3 cups of water and some salt. The oven temperature is 375F and it cooks for an hour.
During the hour of cooking I spent time cutting up and sautéing vegetables to put in the farro. I used onion, garlic, mushrooms, and broccoli stems. I mixed the vegetables in with the cooked farro.
I also made a spicy tomato sauce from a couple of cans of diced tomatoes and one can of spicy tomatoes with chiles (Rotel.) Before putting the tomatoes in the sauce I sautéed onions, garlic, bell pepper scraps, and tomato paste and then deglazed the pan with red wine.
I put some of the sauce in the farro mixture and in the bottom of a baking dish. I filled the halved peppers with the farro mixture and then put a dollop of sauce on each stuffed pepper. As dinner approached I baked the peppers in a 350F oven in a covered dish for 30 minutes. When I checked them the peppers were stiff pretty hard so I upped the temperature to 425F and let them cook for another 20 minutes.
John and I each had two pepper halves and we have two leftover. They should make a nice lunch. I am glad that we will get another meal out of this dish because it was a lot of work!
Sesame shrimp or salmon bowls are fast becoming the number one choice for dinner at our house. There is really very little cooking involved, make some rice or heat up some leftover rice and quickly cook the shrimp. Everything else is cut up and assemble.The dressing for the salad is mostly soy sauce with a little neutral oil and a few drops of sesame oil. My mini-prep makes short work of the garlic, ginger, and scallions that go in the dressing. In tonight’s bowl I added edamame which was a nice contrasting texture. On top is a sprinkling of furikake. We like the kind that has dried shrimp in it. I buy it through Amazon.
I had frozen a portion of arrabiata sauce from a dinner a couple of weeks ago. It was not enough for our dinner but it was a good base to start from. There were already onions, garlic, and mushrooms in it. I added a can of Rotel (spicy tomatoes with chiles) and the rest of a bag of kale I had. It turned out really well. Not only was it delicious but all the vegetable additions made a really hearty portion, Yay! for a giant bowl of food (GBOF)!
Note: For a vegan/vegetarian preparation omit parmesan cheese.
In addition to the salmon we had French green beans that were blanched, a hard boiled egg, kale, olives, and cherry tomatoes. I made a mustard sauce to dress the salad. It is about equal parts, horseradish mustard, whole grain mustard, plain yogurt, Skinny Girl buttermilk dressing, and a splash of water to thin it out.
I also has some new potatoes that I boiled but, in a Chopped-like moment, I neglected to get them on the plate and no one noticed. John and I ate them afterward for a potato dessert. ( For readers from other countries, Chopped is an American TV program where contestant chefs try to make a dish out of four disparate ingredients. Forgetting to get an ingredient on the plate is a common, usually eliminating, mistake.)
I am actually a little embarrassed to post this dinner since I took every shortcut imaginable to prepare it! The chicken comes from a pre-pulled pack of Costco rotisserie chicken. The gravy was made from a packet of McCormack’s powdered chicken gravy mix (just add water!) The butternut squash was already peeled and chunked from Trader Joe’s. I did have to cut up the Brussels sprouts.
The vegetables were shaken together with some olive oil and salt in a plastic bag and then put on an aluminum foil lined sheet pan that was sprayed with olive oil spray. The vegetables cooked for about 20 minutes in a 425F oven. John made up the gravy and then gently heated the chicken through.
There is no question that you pay more for the convenience. But a quick, tasty, and easy dinner with little clean-up can be worth sometimes. Plus it is much cheaper than take-out or dining out!
No posts over the weekend due to eating leftovers on Saturday and going out to dinner with the whole family in celebration of our granddaughter’s 16th birthday
Kind of quiet food week coming up. I decided I always eat too much when I make a giant pot of food. It always turns into a giant bowl of food for me. So I am having more portioned entrees this week. We are going on a cruise next month and I need to have some wiggle room weight-wise!
We used to make this dish as lentils, turkey sausage, and carrots but decided to up the vegetable ante to include celery, mushrooms, and kale to make it more nutritious and filling. I start my lentil stew by sautéing the turkey sausage in a little olive oil and then removing the slightly browned pieces and adding the mushrooms, onions, and garlic to the oil which is now flavored by the sausage. Once they are cooked I add the lentils and the rest of the vegetables with chicken stock to cover. Towards the end of cooking I add the turkey sausage back in. Along with salt I used chipotle powder, smoked paprika, and sriracha to season and spice things up. I was aiming for a spicy, smoky outcome.
The lentils need about 20-30 minutes to become tender. I served it over raw kale but it would be good over rice or even just as is.
Omnivore 