Chana dal is a mixture of dried split chickpeas, spices, onion, ginger, garlic and a spicy tomato broth. I make it in the Instant Pot which renders the dal cooked but not mushy in 18 minutes without soaking. Google Chana dal Instant Pot for a recipe that sounds good to you.
I served this over Power Greens and my 50/50 mixture of rice and riced cauliflower with some cilantro garnish and a squirt of sriracha in the rice.
For my Breakfast for Dinner (BFD) this Sunday I decided on a simple scrambled egg and put most of my effort into making a hash. I started by frying one small dice potato and added onion and broccoli after the potato had a head start. Deciding that it wasn’t enough food for my BFD I cooked up a Beyond Breakfast Sausage patty, chopped it up and added it to the hash. Now my dinner had some heft!
A note about the sausage—To me this BBSausage patty did not taste like meat or vegetables. It also had a peculiar smell. I much prefer patties that taste like vegetables rather than trying to imitate meat.
This is our last night in Utah so we are in eat-down mode. We are using the rest of the fennel, thyme, and lemon to make a salad, and the leftover mashed potato to make a few potato puffs. John grilled some perfectly medium rare burgers and charred our ciabatta rolls. This was way too much bread for me so I ate my burger with a knife and fork. I just wanted to present the picture the way normal people would eat it!
Utah fry sauce is ubiquitous in these parts. It is merely a combination of mayonnaise and ketchup. No fancying up by adding tabasco and pickles which would have turned it in Thousand Island dressing. When I was a kid on the East Coast we used to call this Russian dressing. Maybe because it was red? LOL, I just read that in Germany this dressing is called American dressing so I guess not!
The eponymous Kenwood shrimp from the now defunct Kenwood Restaurant is my company shrimp preparation. Once you have everything chopped up and all the components assembled it takes less than a half hour to make.
Luckily I like to chop up vegetables. I also like to play around with recipes. Mostly I follow along diligently but today I doubled the pinch of cayenne pepper because my guys like things spicy and after I had served the dish John went back to the portion of sauce left in the pan and added a half cup of clam juice so we could all have more sauce. (So 1 cup cream and 1/2 cup clam juice for more sauce.)
Here’s the recipe –
And the hits keep coming this Thanksgiving week! So far this vacation week with our son we have made skirt steak tacos, seared scallops, grilled ribeye steak, and now roasted Chilean sea bass. What a yummy week fitting of Thanksgiving when we are thankful for our family and the bounty of our great country.
Wednesday’s dinner was quick and easy to make. The potato puffs (tater tots) went in the oven first and the fish followed with 15 minutes to go. Both cooked at 400F so we needed the potatoes to cook a little longer since the package calls for 450F. I started the broccoli after the fish was in the oven for 5 minutes. Using a delicious fish like Chilean sea bass is all it takes to make a dinner special.
Since I am writing this on Thanksgiving morning, Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you will take time out from your busy day today to relax, enjoy your family and guests, and be thankful.
Since we did not have a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, we did not have traditional leftovers. I know Turkey Day leftovers are great until they aren’t. We finished up our leftovers the day after Thanksgiving after a run to the grocery store to pick up a couple of additional items.
We had some of the braised leeks, mushrooms, and asparagus left over but not quite enough so I added some Brussels sprouts. We had enough mashed potatoes but I felt I needed to cut down on my butter and cream intake so I got one new potato which I microwaved and gave half to the guys in their mash and half to me after a quick trip to the grill. Finally since we had no protein leftover we bought a ribeye steak that John expertly grilled.
So really this dinner wasn’t a lot of work but it was a little more than heating up a plate of leftover turkey and sides. It tasted like a whole new addition to our week’s menu.
I will bet that this does not look like your Thanksgiving plate! But with the exception of mashed potatoes all these foods were available in some form to the Pilgrims. According to Wikipedia, Atlantic scallops were being gathered from the cold Atlantic waters as early as the 1500s. Asparagus was brought over from Europe in the 1600s, and wild leeks and mushrooms were abundant. Only the potato, a new world vegetable from South America, had not yet made it to Pilgrim-land.
Why did we celebrate on Monday? Because that is when the local grocery store has fresh scallops. You do not want to keep your scallops hanging around from Monday to Thursday.
But why not go the traditional turkey route? First, no one here is a big turkey fan, second, this dinner is super delicious, third, our son makes it, and fourth, all of the above.
Happy Thanksgiving!
On Saturday we spent the whole day in the car getting to St. George, Utah. Then the first order of business was to pick up sushi for dinner and buy the fixings for Sunday’s dinner.
Our son brought along some of his blend of taco seasoning and made a delicious dinner for us of skirt steak tacos and I rustled up a salad to complete our Sunday supper.
Cooking an all-in-one dinner is a bonus for the cook, the diners, and the clean-up crew. Here is a picture of my sheet pan as it came out of the oven.
The cook (me) has merely to chop up the vegetables cutting them in sizes that will make them cooked through all at the same time. I used a plastic bag to toss the vegetables in oil and salt. The sheet tray cooked at 400F for 28 minutes.
The diners (John and me) have a stunning, colorful plate. Roasted vegetables are the tastiest way to eat vegetables. The roasting process brings out their natural sweetness. The only garnish we used was mustard.
Finally the clean-up crew (John) has only to discard the aluminum foil from the sheet pan and load two plates, some cooking utensils, and two forks and two knives in the dishwasher.
Seriously, a sheet pan dinner is a win-win-win for both of us.
This is the third time we have made this shrimp recipe by Jet Tila.
https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/kung-pao-shrimp-7112947
The first time was with shrimp and it turned out well. The second time we tried it with pork and it bombed out. So shrimp seems to be a better choice for us since once again it turned out quite delicious. We happened to have cashews on hand and they are really a better choice than peanuts which we used the first time.
The most vital part of the recipe is to have all the components ready when you heat up the pan. The cooking goes very fast and there is no time to chop something up or look for an ingredient.
Omnivore 