There are a couple of new things on our menu this week. We are taking our classic chicken dinner and turning into a Chicken Marsala dinner by changing up the sauce. On Tuesday we are trying the classic Roman dish, Cacio e Pepe. When we were in Rome in March I had this for lunch one day and it was great! Finally on Sunday we are trying one of our daughter’s recipes, Mujaddara with Spiced Yogurt.
Weekly menu
Kudos to us! We actually planned, prepared, and ate our exact weekly menu. It is not too often that such precision on our part takes place. As a result not only did we have some tasty meals but I lost a couple of pounds!
Sunday’s dinner is egg salad sandwiches and leftover salads. Obviously this is not a great strain to make. By having these minimal cooking meals, though, our air conditioning has not come on for two days. Yay!
If you want some easy peeling perfectly cooked eggs, follow the instructions over at Serious Eats. The key is to take the eggs straight from the refrigerator and put them into boiling water. Then simmer them for 11 minutes. The shock of the hot water on the cold eggs makes the skin pull away from the egg. Peel under running water starting at the fat end of the egg.
Egg salad on dark rye with potato/zucchini salad and cole slaw
Tonight’s grilled chicken thighs are the best that John has ever made. They are juicy and cooked through and have a great BBQ sauce char. Yum! I cannot even begin to describe how great these are.
Grilled chicken thighs with BBQ sauce, cole slaw, olive potato/zucchini salad
We make our own salads this week. The kit for cole slaw that we bought a week or so ago had a dressing so sweet that it rattled our teeth! We needed to use a lot of fish sauce to tame it down. So our own salad is a much better idea. I also take some leftover zucchini and add it to the potato salad. Doing this makes the potato salad a little weird but I do not like to waste food!
We are closing in on the last day of our menu. Amazingly we have managed to cook everything on our list. Hopefully we can follow through for a perfect week tomorrow.
Summer U.S. cooking, a hamburger off the grill and a fresh salad made with vegetables from the garden or the farmer’s market. John grills the perfect medium rare hamburger …
Hamburger with onion on a whole wheat bun
and I prepare a fresh vegetable concoction.
It has been really hot for over a week now. I am attempting to find different dishes to make for dinner that will not heat up the kitchen. Today’s attempt, Salade Niçoise. This is more of an assemblage of various components rather than an integrated dish. I have no idea why it is famous.
Salade Niçoise
Key components are tuna, hard-boiled eggs, haricot verts, and potatoes. My least favorite ingredient was the tuna. I bought fancy Italian oil-packed tuna but it was pretty meh. Honestly I would have been happier with a bunch of chickpeas instead. The eggs came out the best, no green around the edges and just cooked through. I managed to get the shells off without destroying the eggs!
It was not a very exciting dinner but John seemed to like it so maybe I am just too picky!
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
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!
”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.
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!
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!
Omnivore 