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!.
Stuffed red bell peppers is a dish I make about once a month. Growing up my mother always made them with green bell peppers but I find that riper peppers are easier on my digestion. I make a fairly thick meat sauce and use half of it for the peppers and save the rest for a pasta dinner. After microwaving the pepper shells for around 5 minutes, I add cooked rice to the sauce and then stuff the peppers with it. I top the stuffed peppers with a little plain tomato sauce from a can. The peppers bake in a 350F oven for 40 minutes. Then we enjoy our stuffed pepper dinner and have enough leftovers for a couple of lunches.
On Sunday we decided to get some takeout Chinese food but it was not to be. Our favorite restaurant had decided to use this weekend to renovate their kitchen! What to do? We opted for pizza. Make a phone call and pizza arrives at our doorstep in 1/2 hour.
Seriously it is nowhere near as good as Italian pizza or my hometown pizza from the Jersey shore but it’s pretty okay and so easy!
On to Monday! Today is Memorial Day and John is grilling hamburgers and I have made Texas caviar as a salad. Texas caviar is a two bean salad, black beans and black-eyed peas. All cut to about the same size as the beans are carrots, bell pepper, tomatoes, scallion, corn, celery, and onion. It has a vinaigrette dressing spiked with a few shakes of sriracha or Tabasco and a sprinkling of cilantro.
Finally on Tuesday we had tilapia tacos and Southwest bean salad. We used stand-up taco shells, oven baked tilapia, salsa verde, onions, cabbage, and mango. The Southwest bean salad was a repurposing of the Texas caviar. The Southwest flavor came from adding chipotle powder.
So that is our long weekend plus Tuesday dining. Wednesday I will make stuffed peppers and then we are having a family celebration on Thursday for the graduation from high school of our granddaughter.
Looks like this is going to be a no-cook weekend! We headed up to Sonoma County and enjoyed an olive oil tasting at the Olive Press which is in the Jacuzzi Winery and then some wine sipping at Imagery Winery. We settled on a late lunch at the Yeti Restaurant which serves Himalayan and Indian food. I chose prawns and basil curry and John had Rogen Josh lamb. We shared some basmati rice and naan.
Both dishes were yummy. I especially liked sopping up the curry sauce with the naan.
Omnivore 