If you own an Instant Pot, Chickpea Biryani is super fast and super easy. What takes the longest is soaking the rice for 20 minutes! My recipe is an adaptation of a NYTimes Cooking dish, Pressure Cooker Shrimp Biryani. I substituted chickpeas for shrimp.
The pressure cooking time is only 3 minutes and then it has a quick release. So you will be sitting down to dinner in no time at all!
Pressure cooker chickpea biryani and a green salad
Don’t like sitting on a blanket on the ground? Have a kitchen picnic.
For our kitchen picnic we have grilled chicken thighs with BBQ sauce. As accompaniments to John’s grilling, I spice up some baked beans and broccoli salad. We eat at the kitchen counter very informally and enjoy our kitchen picnic!
Grilled BBQ chicken thighs, baked beans, broccoli salad
When I was a kid growing up in New Jersey we used to go the Palace Diner occasionally. (New Jersey is the state for diners!) I would order a California burger. It seemed so exciting to be eating a hamburger in the style of a place as mythical as California to a small town east coast kid in the 60’s. Later I realized that what made it a California burger is that it had fresh vegetation on it! A slice of onion, tomato, lettuce and a smear of mayo must have seemed pretty exotic back in those days.
Anyway, I still love a California burger even if I have been a Californian for the last 25 years. As sides we buy a kit to make coleslaw and some potato salad. Both need some fixing up to make them more palatable. Some celery seed and vinegar for both and some fish sauce to cut the awful sweetness of the coleslaw dressing.
Grilled California burger and store bought cole slaw and potato salad
Here is our weekly menu for our first week in Utah. Our son is joining us for the second week and part of our fun together is planning, shopping, and preparing the next week’s menu together.
Whole wheat spaghetti with olives, capers, tomatoes, breadcrumbs, parsley, and garlic
In the time it takes to boil water and cook spaghetti, I make a delicious vegan sauce for our pasta. Here’s all you need – thinly sliced garlic that you brown up in some olive oil, a can of small dice tomatoes, 12 pitted chopped olives, 2 tablespoons of capers, a handful of chopped parsley, and some toasted panko breadcrumbs. Also the all important cup of pasta water. Cook together the tomatoes, capers, and olives. Add the cooked pasta and enough pasta water to make it sauce-y. Top with parsley, toasted breadcrumbs, and browned garlic. Ta-da! You’re done!!
So back on 10/21/18 my post was about Spicy Thai Basil Eggplant with Tofu. Today on our trip to Utah we stopped at Mojave Thai Cuisine, a really surprising place to find out in the desert. We ordered their medium spicy Thai basil eggplant with Tofu (STBET from now on.) It was such much better than ours. Take a look –
Mojave Thai Cuisine’s Spicy Thai Eggplant with Tofu
Here is ours –
Our STBET
So it looks to me like their tofu was fried separately. While our sauce coated everything, their sauce was more on the bottom of the dish and their vegetables are less cooked. But mostly their sauce was tastier than ours. I need to try more combinations of the sauce ingredients. Sigh. Hopefully someday I will get it right.
Finally, if you are looking for some tasty vegetarian food on the road, look no further than Asian cuisines. They are full of flavor and not full of meat.
We are finishing up bits and pieces before we hit the road tomorrow. We start with eating up all the salad greens with a bunch of tomatoes, a small piece of cucumber, a little feta, and castelvoltrano olives (we always have a jar of these in the refrigerator.) Along with this John makes garlic toast from our last two slices ciabatta bread.
Salad with tomatoes, cucumber, feta, and olives
I have a container of not enough spaghetti sauce so I blanch and peel seven tomatoes and add the juice and pulp minus the seeds to the old sauce. I also add a clove of garlic, some pepper flakes, and oregano and cook the old and new components for about 45 minutes. It turns out pretty fabulous. I love pasta!!!
Spaghetti rigate with homemade sauce
Here is an easy soup to make with your new or leftover veggies. In my case my soup pot is filled with a roughly chopped entire head or stalk of celery. (One piece of celery is a rib. A stalk is a bunch like you buy at the store.) Reserve the leaves for garnish. Then a roughly chopped largish potato or several small ones are added. I have Yukon golds and I do not even peel them. I also stick in a chopped onion and whole garlic cloves (2 or 3). Salt. Use a glug of olive oil to get things sizzling. When the onion wilts add 3 cups of vegetable or chicken stock or enough to cover. Simmer until everything is soft. Whiz it up in a blender when it has cooled down a bit. Correct the seasoning.
You can add some cream to finish or just leave it the way it is and drizzle a little olive oil over the top and garnish with the celery leaves. You can actually do this with pretty much any vegetables you have.
Celery and potato soup
Eat down is in full swing now. We have had this little steak piece moldering away in the freezer for quite a while so it is time to use it. One potato is enough for two people. And this is the third time I am using the asparagus I bought last week – one time with classic chicken, once as a pasta sauce, and tonight cut up so the six spears I have left look more substantial. I make a chimichurri sauce to use up a piece of shallot, leftover parsley, two garlic cloves, and half of an old lemon plus my everyday olive oil.
Steak, grilled potato, asparagus
There is no menu this week since we are half the week in California and half the week in Utah. In California we will be in eat-down mode and in Utah we will be needing to see what we have in the refrigerator and freezer and going to the store. It is a fun problem to have.
Chicken Parmesan is a good eat-down food for us because we get to use up the spaghetti sauce that our daughter made from her copious tomatoes plus we get to eat some lingering salad greens with more tomatoes!
We do not bread and fry our chicken to cut down on calories. Our dish is sauteed chicken breast which we finish under the broiler with some mozzarella. We boil up some whole wheat linguine, and toss together a salad. Except for too many pots and pans to wash, this is a pretty simple but tasty dinner.
Chicken Parmesan with linguine and salad
Omnivore 