Busy week ahead with Passover and Easter being celebrated over the weekend. John and I are making a Seder for 8 on Saturday and our daughter-in-law’s parents have invited us for Easter dinner. It is hard to eat lightly this week!
This dinner is a favorite of ours. The half cup of polenta is made with 3 cups of water, a couple of bay leaves, 2 garlic cloves, a scant teaspoon of salt, and is finished with a teaspoon of butter. This makes a loose, creamy-seeming polenta which acts as a base and almost a sauce for the steamed broccoli and sautéed shrimp. Yum!
This is an easy prep and clean-up dinner. John grilled our little lamb chops to a medium/medium rare perfection. I tried for the first time a package of Bibigo brown rice, red rice, and wild rice mix that you micro-wave for 90 seconds. It comes in a 7.7 oz. package. I used about 1/3 of it in my rice preparation and also added 1/2 cup riced cauliflower. It was very good and certainly easier than preparing three different kinds of rice! The asparagus was simply cooked in a little water.
The only downside to the dinner was that it was too much to eat! I definitely could have been fine with two. I cut forkful of meat off two of them and left the rest for our daughter to nibble on as she prepared her dinner.
I am so happy to be eating vegetables again! While we were away the occasional salad and the tomatoes in pizza sauce were the only vegetables we had pretty much.
The food this week is comfort food such as the meatloaf I made last night, easy things like this Afghani dal, and minimal clean-up dishes while we suffer through jet lag.
Hi, I am back! We were away celebrating our daughter’s birthday for most of March eating everything good and a few clunkers in Italy. Now it is time to start cooking and eating reasonably again! I am looking forward to it!! Every day I will post a picture and explanation of my actual dinner plate. I hope it gives you some ideas about how you can cook your way to a healthy lifestyle. Here is the remainder of this week’s menu.
As I mentioned earlier I am taking a break until the end of March so this will be my last post until then. I may write something occasionally if we have an especially interesting dinner.
Monday’s dinner was like a throwback to childhood with a couple of adult twists. The mac ‘n cheese was from the Kraft blue box. It was definitely sweeter than I remember. I added a bunch of broccoli to it which I dropped in with the boiling noodles when they had two minutes left on their timer. John sautéed up some mushrooms and onion to add. These additions plus some shredded parm helped with the sweetness level. (I am totally adverse to sweet flavors. No one else here commented on it tasting sweet.)
I made the coleslaw myself, shredding cabbage, carrot and onion. The saucy part was a combo of mayonnaise, rice wine vinegar, Dijon mustard, celery seed, and salt.
John, our daughter, and I really enjoyed this retro dinner. It was definitely our kind of comfort food!
A no-egg Sunday! Instead we made delicious Chilean sea bass. Actually John made the fish and I made the vegetables, our usual division of meal prep. He cooked the fish for about 14 minutes in a 400F oven It came out moist and unctuous. I would love to eat it more often but it is so darned expensive.
For my part I steamed new potatoes and glazed some carrots. The potatoes were bigger than usual and took about 25 minutes. I had to add additional water to keep the pan from drying out. The carrots cooked in a little water with a tablespoon of sherry vinegar for fifteen minutes. I took them out of the pan, dumped out the remaining water and made a glaze. This consisted of another tablespoon of sherry vinegar, some minced onion, thyme leaves and a tablespoon of brown sugar. Then I returned the carrots to the pan to glaze them.
We opened a bottle of Imagery White Burgundy to complete our dinner. Sometimes it is fun to have a celebratory dinner for no reason at all!
John and I are a match made in heaven. He likes chicken drumettes and I like the flats when it comes to chicken wings. He likes dark meat and I like white meat. And he likes soup and I like stew. This means whenever I make soup I can take as many vegetables as I like and as little broth as I want and he can have his vegetables swimming around in a bunch of broth. It works out perfectly!
Dinner was a kind of clean out the refrigerator kind of meal. I had four ounces of turkey sausage, some new potatoes, as well as onions, carrots, celery, cabbage, and mushrooms I needed to use. I started by sautéing the mushrooms onions, and half of the sausage pieces in a little oil. Then I added chicken stock and the rest of the vegetables. Towards the end of the cooking I added the rest of the sausage and some parsley. The whole thing took about 25 minutes.
My serving look like stew. Just the way I like it. John’s definitely looked like soup. The best part is that I did not have to feel guilty for eating the majority of the vegetables!
What is easier than a sheet pan dinner?! I cut up carrots, celery, onion, butternut squash, and cabbage. I tossed all the vegetable components in olive oil and salt and then spread them out on a foil-lined sheet pan. They went into a 425F oven for 30 minutes. At the 15 minute mark I added the sausage. I served the vegetables and turkey sausage with two mustards.
Not only is the cooking a snap, the clean-up is minimal too!
John did his usual great job grilling the hamburgers. I added a slice of onion, some lettuce and tomato on mine along with ketchup on top and mayo on the bottom. This is the first time using pretzel rolls and the verdict was six thumbs up. I ate my burger with a knife and fork. It was just too slippery to try to hold it in my hand and it would have been gone too fast! Eating finger or hand-held food with a knife and fork is a great diet tip. If you slow down your eating, you will notice that you are getting full and maybe do not need to vacuum up everything on your plate. I often use this technique with tacos. Two open faced tacos are way more filling than two hand-held ones!
Our daughter had some bacon ends in the freezer and I defrosted a small handful and put them into our salad along with tomatoes. The rest of the salad came from a package. Terrible to say but I am much more likely to eat salad if I don’t have to wash, spin, and cut up the lettuce. It is not economic but it is certainly easier.
Omnivore 