Uh oh, I am getting behind with my posts again! It must be due to unexciting dinners. On Sunday instead of our usual eggs we used up the rest of our Costco rotisserie chicken. This week’s chicken yielded two dinners and two lunches. Quite a bargain for $4.99!
This week has a couple of events. Sunday the 16th is Father’s Day and I am trying to come up with food that will let John relax instead of cook. But it also needs to be something that the grandkids will eat so it is currently up in the air until I hear back about whether they like ribs. The other event is that I am having cataract surgery on Wednesday so I want to make something light for Tuesday and then we will just get take-out on Wednesday.
Because our menu has adjusted due to the screaming hot weather, some groceries got used and some didn’t, there was takeout and repurposing of dishes.
It is a beautiful evening here in NorCal. No humidity and temperatures in the low 70s. A nice night for grilling some burgers and having a salad that incorporates leftovers. We start off with chips and guacamole. I thought we were using the avocados in some tofu bowls but it never happened. And I know that all of us love guacamole.
Along with our Mexican starter and an all-American grilled hamburger we are having leftover Middle Eastern parsley salad or tabbouleh. Since there is not enough for a portion for each of us, I am going out to my herb garden and clipping some additional parsley, mint, oregano, plus whizzing up some salad greens. Additional garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, and salt should give us enough.
Hopefully next week we will be able to stick to our menu. If not? I will try to follow the saying of “waste it, want not.”
After giving up on cooking Wednesday and ordering take-out, on Thursday we tried a new recipe found by our daughter for an Asian chicken salad. Earlier in the day we had bought a rotisserie chicken at Costco and I had shredded up one breast so part of the work was already done.
It turned out really well. The recipe calls for cooking the chicken but it is much easier if you use an already cooked one. The rice noodles are boiled in the recipe but I just soaked mine in hot water. It also calls for quite a bit of sugar but I suggest you start with a third of the amount and then add more to get it to your sweetness tolerance.
We will definitely make this again. Hopefully I will write down the amounts of sugar and other modifications I made and edit and publish the recipe again. But until then—-
https://thewoksoflife.com/vietnamese-rice-noodle-salad-chicken/
California is experiencing a heat dome which means that it was in the upper 90s on June 4, 2024. The last thing I wanted to do was make the house hotter by using the stove or oven. I opted for a dinner of store bought hummus and pita with a homemade Middle Eastern parsley salad, tabbouleh.
Making the salad is a little prep intensive but a food processor lightens the load. Here is the recipe I use.
Last week our favorite brand of pasta, Barilla, was on sale for $1.27/lb. Since I love pasta we bought the 4 boxes allowed and cooked up 6 ounces that were sauced with the ground beef and tomato sauce I made last week for our stuffed peppers.
As an aside, since grocery prices have increased, it is important to flex your economic power by stretching your proteins. I took 1 pound of ground beef and used half of it to make 8 stuffed pepper halves which were a dinner and two lunches. The other half pound was used for this spaghetti sauce. Actually if I had added another can of tomatoes I probably could have squeaked out another pasta meal.
Tonight everyone got into the dinner prep. John was in charge of the chicken, daughter wanted to try a new black bean recipe, and I made the salad.
Boneless, skinless chicken thighs were on sale this week for $1.97/lb. so I suggested we make a chicken dinner reminiscent of cooking chicken on the grill. John seasoned the chicken thighs simply with salt, pepper, and garlic powder. He cooked them at 425F in the middle of the oven for 20 minutes. At this point he brushed them with BBQ sauce and put them back in the oven a little closer to the heating element for another five minutes. The chicken thighs were cooked through but still juicy and had the outdoorsy flavor of the BBQ sauce.
The taco beans were simply two cans of drained black beans with cut up scallions, 3/4 cup water and a packet of taco seasoning. They were quite tasty and went well with the chicken. I put together a Buffalo inspired salad mix with some added scallions and cherry tomatoes.
This is the first week this year where we are confronted with temperatures in the upper 90s. Starting Tuesday it is going to be hot especially in the late afternoon. We try to avoid using the air conditioning and are usually pretty successful by opening the house up in the morning when it is cool, using fans, and making dinner without using the oven. Most of our dishes planned for mid-week when it will be the hottest will be either no-cook salads, Instant Pot, or grilling outside.
Happy June 1st! Here in Northern California it starts getting light around 5 AM and the temperature will vary from lows in the 50s to highs near 100 this week. It will be our first taste of summer. To celebrate the summer we had a dinner of seared scallops, mashed potatoes, and asparagus.
John did a great job searing the scallops while I heated up the leftover potatoes from yesterday, cooked the asparagus, and made a sriracha tartar sauce. I think the dinner took 10 minutes in total to prepare. Scallops are one of my favorite proteins so it always seems like an occasion when we have them.
I have to admit that the flank steak got a little more medium than medium-rare. Nonetheless it was super tasty. I had scored two packets of mashed potato mix at Grocery Outlet for $.50 so I mixed that up with some water, milk, butter, and sour cream. I probably would not buy the dehydrated potatoes again since the texture was not really potato-like. But $.50 for two packets is hard to pass up. We also had some steamed broccoli with fried onions.
To complete our dinner John opened one of our “good” bottles of wine, a Ledson 2015 Malbec. It was lovely!.
Omnivore 