Here is my menu for the week.
Weekly menu
Sunday was chili night, check.
Tonight should be chicken cacciatore, right? It should especially be so since it is Chicken Monday. But we were late getting the chicken to marinate and nobody felt like all the work required to make this fairly complex dish. So what else could we make on the spur of the moment? Pasta! Mmmm, and who doesn’t love pasta. Chicken can wait until tomorrow!
Spaghetti with meat sauce
Brrr.. actually it is not that cold here in Northern California but it is chilly enough to make chili in my Instant Pot! I used a recipe from Jacky+Amy as the basis for my chili. Anyone who espouses the use of fish sauce as a flavor enhancer and corrector is A-OK in my book. I used less liquid than their recipe calls for because I find the Instant Pot tends to make things soupier than you would expect. John suggested we use a little baking soda in the ground beef ala America’s Test Kitchen to keep the meat moist, the addition of a chopped bell pepper and a poblano chile, and we also ground up some tortilla chips to thicken our resulting chili (and to use as a garnish.)
Best drink to have with chili? No doubt it is the Earl Gilmore memorial margarita. That’s three parts tequila, one part Triple Sec and a whole lime squeezed for four servings. No sugar, no pre-mix. Do not drive after having one of these beauties.
Instant Pot Chili with an Earl Gilmore Memorial MargaritaThe reason I have not posted for a week is not because I have not been cooking and eating. It is because I spend 6 days with my very best girl friend. She flew out from South Carolina to Las Vegas and I met her there. Then we went up to our place in Utah for the week. Girls only! We had a wonderful time and now I am home and refreshed and ready for another few weeks of cooking.
Before I left I made a soup of everything that was in the refrigerator. I think an error in preparation came when I combined both beef and chicken stocks because I had some left in both containers. It kind of muddied the taste. John ate it the next night (after I was gone) and put some sausages in it. He said it was much better that way.
Conglomeration soup
I had a menu plan. I posted it in my kitchen and online. Problem is when I got to Wednesday I did not feel like eating fish so I had spaghetti which I always feel like eating. Then Thursday rolled around and I did not feel like cooking at all so I subbed in the grocery store rotisserie chicken. On Friday John wanted steak so, oh well, I threw the menu away!
Spaghetti with meat sauce
Our deli counter had some blue cheese potato salad that we decided to try with our purchased chicken. They were out of cole slaw though, so we bought a packaged kit. OMG I could not believe how sweet the dressing was. I had to use a lot of fish sauce, vinegar, and olive oil to make it edible. My advice is to buy the shredded cabbage and make your own dressing!
Rotisserie chicken with potato salad and cole slaw
The next night we had a dollop of potato salad that I extended by boiling up five small new potatoes and adding it to what was left. I liked it better the second night.
Steak with semi-potato salad and broccoli
Tomorrow night I am planning on using the leftover rotisserie chicken in chicken fried rice along with some hot and sour soup. At least that is my plan as of right now!
John grilled the lamb chops. I nuked the sweet potato which he then finished on the grill. Asparagus on sale. It must be Spring! I added some toasted panko bread crumbs with lemon zest to the asparagus.
Grilled lamb loin chops, sweet potato, and asparagus
I enjoy planning menus for the week, printing them, and hanging them up so family members can see (and I can remember) what is planned for dinner. I use the title Kap’n Mom’s Kitchen – Homade Specials because our family has standards and this is a joke. While traveling we NEVER eat at a place using incorrect spelling (such as Kaptain or homade), dialect which shortens words ( Kap’n), or a family member’s name (Mom, Uncle, etc. also includes Mr. and Mrs.) We once had a terrible meal at Mr. B’s homade cookin’ and learned our lesson. That being said, here is my week’s menu –
This week’s menu
In explanation “traditional chicken” means boneless, skinless chicken breast cooked in the immersion circulator and “big chicken” means a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store. (Our local grocery store advertises its rotisserie chicken as “Big Chicken! Big Flavor!”
As indicated, Monday was Chicken Monday. This satisfying dinner comes in at about 350 calories. That includes some butter in the rutabagas and on the broccoli and 1/4 cup of the packet chicken gravy.
“Traditional” chicken dinner – 1/2 boneless skinless chicken breast, 1 cup each of mashed rutabagas and broccoli with butter, and 1/4 cup packet gravy
My mother always made beef stew in a pressure cooker so I have never been afraid of them even though I ended up cooking in one until it was dry and all the food was burnt up inside. I have always owned a pressure cooker and used it sometimes for beef stew or stuffed cabbage. When the Instant Pot came out I was interested in its ease of use and cleanup. It is also much quieter than the hissing pot that used to be on my stovetop.
In the Instant Pot that I got for Christmas we have made lamb chili (good, but a little watery), white and brown rice (worked perfectly), meat sauce for spaghetti (needs work), and now beef stew. The beef stew came out really really tasty.
Beef stew made in an Instant Pot
We bought a small boneless chuck steak that John cut up and browned using the Sauté function. He also browned the mushrooms. We loaded in carrots, onions, garlic, celery, and small new potatoes. We added a can of diced tomatoes, a cup of red wine, and enough beef stock so that it was visible but not covering everything. The Pot did its Pressure Cook thing for 18 minutes and then we let the pressure fall of its own accord. John thickened the gravy with a potato starch slurry and we adjusted the seasoning with my secret weapon, fish sauce.
The meat texture was amazingly soft and full of flavor. The stew was so good that we ate practically the whole thing!
I tried to improve on two dishes this week. I wanted to make them easier or better. I had mixed results.
I decided to make my tomato and ground beef spaghetti sauce in the Instant Pot. Recipes I read said you could get that hours of simmering taste in about 15 minutes. I browned the 12 oz. of ground beef I had. I figured I would make enough for two meals. The recipe said I was supposed to use 2lbs. but that seemed like too much to me. I sautéed onions and garlic, added oregano, fresh basil and parsley as well as pepper flakes and tomato paste. For liquid I added 2 cans of diced tomatoes and a cup of chicken sauce enhanced with some fish sauce for umami. The sauce came out okay but was missing a robust meat flavor. That was probably the result of not enough meat. If I am going to tinker with the recipe I need to keep the proportions consistent.
Spaghetti with meat sauce
I also redid the spicy Thai basil with eggplant and tofu. I threw out the leftover globe eggplant and found Chinese eggplant at Whole Foods. It worked much better. The whole dish was less bitter although I might have overdone the soy sauce a bit.
Spicy Thai basil eggplant with tofu served with brown rice
Until recently we have eaten lunch at the Kenwood Restaurant when we were wine tasting in the Sonoma Valley. The food was good but the clientele seemed to be getting older and older – not really a sustainable business plan. The last time we were in the area we noticed that the restaurant had closed. Sadly we are left with only a copy of their wonderful shrimp dish, Shrimp in a saffron Pernod sauce.
Recipe for shrimp with saffron in Pernod sauce
Mostly what is required here is skill and patience in chopping things up. We had this covered since I love to chop things up. John loves to cook stuff.
The sauce cooking on the stove with collard greens and corn in the foreground
An additional ingredient which we needed was rice. Instant Pot was to the rescue. We used the Pot with a ratio of just a tad over 1:1 rice to water. Since we were rinsing the rice there was plenty of water. Heat up the Pot, pressure cook for 10 minutes, let the pressure drop naturally and voila, rice done. I also prepared some collard greens and corn as a side dish.
The shrimp cooked with the finely chopped vegetables in the Pernod sauce over the rice was quite delicious!
Shrimp in a saffron Pernod sauce over rice with collard greens and corn
Having had quite a bit of animal protein last week, I started out this week with a vegetarian and a vegan dish. Actually the pasta was only vegetarian because I added some fish sauce and grated some parmesan cheese on it so the pasta could definitely be vegan as well.
Since I was making a quick sauce I started with a jar of spaghetti sauce and enhanced it. To the plain sauce I added parsley and basil, red wine, and pepper flakes. It tasted too sweet to me so I added some fish sauce to give it a more savory flavor.
Spaghetti with tomato sauce
The second dish was our attempt to replicate our favorite Thai dish, Spicy Basil Eggplant with Tofu. It is really pretty easy to make. You stir fry the components and then you add the sauce and it’s done. Our problems with it came from too spicy fresno chiles and using globe eggplant instead of Chinese or Japanese eggplants. We are going to have a redo later in the week and in the meantime I will find the correct types of eggplant.
Spicy Thai basil eggplant with tofu and brown rice
Omnivore 