Vegan linguine with breadcrumbs, tomatoes, olives, and capers. 7/25/18

Posted on July 26, 2018 by Beebamom

For tonight’s dinner we decide to do a first and second course. Our first course is cucumber and tomato salad with onion and an Italian dressing. We added some feta which you would omit if you want a totally vegan rather than a vegetarian dinner.

Tomato and cucumber salad with onion and feta

One of the positives about serving courses is that it slows you down when you are eating. Instead of shoveling a whole plate down at once you have to stop, get up, and plate the next course. This gives your brain a little while to think about what you just ate and how hungry you still are.

For our main course we have prepared whole wheat linguine with a tomato, olive, and caper sauce. As garnish instead of cheese there are garlic toasted breadcrumbs, toasted garlic chips, and parsley. This is a really delicious dish based on a recipe from the NY Times Cooking site. We have put it into our dinner rotation in the vegetarian category.

Whole wheat linguine with a tomato, olive, and caper sauce garnished with toasted breadcrumbs

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Pacific cod with mustard cream sauce. 7/24/18

Posted on July 25, 2018 by Beebamom

I do not usually shop at Whole Foods because it is pretty expensive but today I am glad I did. In the fresh fish case we find some really nice looking Pacific cod. We turn around to the frozen case and find two great pieces of Coho salmon. Then we pick up some oil packed tuna from Italy in a glass jar. It is definitely our day for fish!

Pacific cod with a mustard cream and corn sauce, rice, and chard

John bakes the cod in the oven for about 13 minutes and makes the sauce. I reheat some leftover rice from our Chinese take-out on Sunday. Those little brown things on top of the chard are toasted garlic slices that I added just a touch of sugar and salt to.  The chard itself is stripped from its tough center stem, cut into ribbons, and just quickly sauteed

Growing up we never ate fish. Never. My father could not stand the smell of fish and we did not even have canned tuna. Our cat lived his life never having fishy cat food. Needless to say it is not in my cooking repertoire. I am so glad that John is willing to give it a try.

Best part? We have left over sauce with which we are going to adorn some lobster tails in the future!

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“The Classic”. 7/23/18

Posted on July 24, 2018 by Beebamom

”The Classic” is our go-to Monday chicken dish. It is basically a chicken breast, a starch, and a green vegetable. If I were to ask my kids what we eat on Mondays they would answer without any hesitation, chicken. I used to let my daughter run wild with whatever spices she wanted to put on the chicken. As far as she was concerned, the more the merrier.

This Monday’s classic is a sous vide chicken breast, an Instant Pot butternut squash, and snow peas with a prepared packet of chicken gravy. I do enjoy using all my gizmos. Originally we were supposed to have rutabagas instead of butternut squash but they were sold out (or more likely had rotted out) at our local grocery store.

Chicken breast, butternut squash and snow peas

I know it seems kind of boring but preparing “the classic” is a good, grounding no-brainer for Monday. It gets the week started off on a positive foot from a stay-on-your-diet point of view.

Kitchen Tip: To make the butternut squash in the Instant Pot, I peeled and cubed the squash, added a cup and a half of water to the pot, put the squash cubes in a steamer basket, and cooked it at high pressure for 15 minutes (I wanted to make sure the squash was soft for mashing. I think 10 or 12 minutes would have been sufficient.) I let the pressure go down naturally because we were busy doing other things but I think you could vent it right away. I added a pat of butter and used my stick blender to get them to their creamy state.

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Weekend and menu. 7/21 & 22/18

Posted on July 23, 2018 by Beebamom

Not too much cooking this weekend. I took a container of spaghetti sauce that I had made previously out of the freezer to have with whole wheat spaghetti on Saturday. Since it was a little shy of enough I added a can of petite diced tomatoes. I like the Hunt’s brand of these. They taste less tinny.

Whole wheat spaghetti with sauce

We went over to our son’s house on Sunday. He treated us to some bagels with cream cheese and lox and he had also made a chicken liver pate. So good! On the way home we noticed a wildfire in the hills. It is so dry here and it will not be raining until probably. November so it looks like another scary season of fire. When we got home we decided on Chinese take-out for dinner.

Wildfire in the hills

This morning (Monday) John and I write up a menu for the week. We are trying to follow our 2 vegetarian, 2 seafood, 2 poultry, 1 red meat plan. However we still think of Sunday as kind of wildcard day. Here is our menu for the week –

Menu for the week starting July 23, 2018

I really like having this menu hanging in the kitchen. Both John and I take a look at it first thing in the morning so we can plan what needs to be done. Today we buy our groceries for many of the dinners except for the fish. Already one thing has gone wrong. There are no rutabagas at the store! We decide to substitute butternut squash instead. Gotta be flexible!

 

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Vegetarian Philly. 7/20/18

Posted on July 21, 2018 by Beebamom

There’s a place here in town where we frequently go for lunch with the kids and grandkids. It has delicious hamburgers and crispy fries. But the thing I always order is their vegetarian Philly. It is like a Philly cheesesteak except without the steak part. Mushrooms make a great substitute.

It has been unrelentingly hot here so a sandwich and a salad seems like a good choice for dinner. Our Philly consists of sauteed crimini mushrooms, onions, zucchini, poblano chiles, and red bell pepper. The cheese is ultra thin Swiss. We bought a baguette for our shrimp dinner on Thursday and use that for our sandwich roll. A little basil finishes it off.

Vegetarian Philly wth a cucumber and tomato salad

I always pull out some of the bread in the center of a roll. It gives a place for the fixings to go, the dressings to soak into, and makes the whole sandwich taste more of its components rather than just bread.

Our daughter’s tomatoes have begun to ripen and they are delicious. I add some Italian dressing to a combination of tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, and feta cheese. It is the essence of summer!

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Shrimp Scampi. 7/19/18

Posted on July 20, 2018 by Beebamom

Tonight John is making a recipe from America’s Test Kitchen, shrimp scampi. In our house we have a division of labor when it comes to cooking. John is in charge of all red meat, poultry, fish, and shellfish. I am in charge of all things vegetable. Of course this does not mean the we do not help each other out with components of each other’s dishes. John is an expert garlic peeler and chopper-upper and I have been known to brown meat. My assignment for tonight is toasting bread and preparing green beans.

Shrimp scampi with Frenched green beans

John makes a stock out of the shrimp shells to use in the sauce. He simmers the shrimp briefly and sets them aside while he makes the garlic sauce. I chop up the parsley. The green beans are a sticking point between us. John does not mind big honking green beans but I find them unpalatable. My mom always Frenched our green beans which is to cut them longitudinally and take the string off the string bean. I have a gadget that does just that. So I made big green beans for John and I have the thin ones in the picture for myself.

Dinner is yummy and the bread is especially good at soaking up the sauce.

 

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Another try at 3 Cup Chicken. 7/18/18

Posted on July 19, 2018 by Beebamom

This is the third attempt at 3 Cup Chicken and we are still not getting it to taste the way we are hoping for. So I think we going to put this recipe in the back of the binder or maybe in the recycle bin. It just ends up tasting like an American attempt at Chinese food – all soy sauce and sesame oil. I need to find a better recipe.

3 cup chicken with rice and broccoli

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Portuguese tapas. 7/17/18

Posted on July 18, 2018 by Beebamom

Today is our actual anniversary day. Forty-six years ago John and I hopped in my ‘67 Pontiac Tempest and eloped. Pretty exciting!  Back in the day you did not marry out of your religion very much and John and I were doing that big time! So we decided if we can’t please everyone, we might as well please ourselves. Forty-six years later I guess we proved all the nay-sayers wrong!

Anyway, we drove up to Wine Country and had our anniversary lunch at a Portuguese tapas place. We love to try all sorts of different things and eating at this restaurant gave us the opportunity to sample a bunch of stuff.

Ceviche, goat stew, crispy potatoes, and pork sliders

We also tried some octopus salad, tripe, and shishito peppers. It was great fun. For dessert we ordered two small Dixie cup sized ice creams-salted olive oil  and piri piri chocolate.

Olive oil and chocolate piri piri ice creams

 

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Hot times! Soup and sandwich. 7/16/18

Posted on July 17, 2018 by Beebamom

Just too hot to cook? A light, no cook dinner is just what you need. For our hot night  dinner we made a slightly different version of gazpacho than last week. Since we had no fresh tomatoes or salsa I used canned. I also added onion, cucumber, garlic, bell pepper, sherry vinegar, and olive oil to the blender and whizzed it up. The lack of fresh tomatoes was noticeable. I will not make it like this again.

Gazpacho

Our accompanying sandwich was an open faced tuna salad. Due to my many years (lifetime!) of dieting I never eat a sandwich with two pieces of bread. I use lettuce as my lid. Toasting the bottom piece of bread makes it stiff enough to be held with your thumb on the bottom and the rest of your fingers on top of the lettuce. In my tuna salad I have mayo, yellow mustard, parsley, relish,capers, and a dash of salt and pepper.

Open-faced tuna salad sandwich

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Make it yourself! 7/15/18

Posted on July 16, 2018 by Beebamom

Sometimes doing the easiest thing may be expedient but it is often not the best. Last night for Wildcard Sunday we bought some prepared ribs at the grocery store and a bag of shredded cabbage with a dressing to make cole slaw.

John heated up the baby back ribs in the microwave and we were treat to mostly bones with very little meat for a pretty steep price. The cole slaw dressing was so sweet that we had to do significant fixing to make it edible. In addition I also made another Greek cucumber salad which I think John is getting sick of.

Grocery store ribs, pre-packaged cole slaw, and Greek cucumber salad with feta

My suggestion is “Do it yourself!” and if it seems like too much work or trouble then choose something else instead! A simple egg dish, a thrown together soup, or a tuna salad sandwich is much more satisfying than an expensive disappointment.

This morning we sat down and created our menu for the week. It includes two chicken meals, two seafood meals, two vegetarian meals, and one celebration lunch since Tuesday is our actual anniversary. A trip to the grocery store is imminent. No shortcuts this week!!

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