Exactly What I Want To Eat

 I am slow to acquire cookbooks, although I do read a lot of cookbooks. I want cookbooks that I really use a lot. After checking out Dinner: Changing the Game by Melissa Clark from the library over and over, I bought a used copy this winter. 

Summer Vegetable Salad with Tapenade

No exaggeration, I have cooked 1-2 recipes from Dinner every week since then.

I love the concept: each recipe is meant to be dinner and she suggests side dishes if you want some ideas. Very few of the recipes require time ahead of time for marinating or something. Most of her technique is unfussy or flexible where it's unusual, and she's not bossy or snobby. Most of the food I've made has been delicious and creative and very more-ish. Melissa Clark's pantry is pretty similar to my pantry, apparently, and she has new combinations and suggestions that we have loved. Only a few dishes were just average or more work than I care to do for supper. 

Chilled Cucumber & Corn Soup 

The suggested Avocado Toasts to go with the soup

Some of our favorites are Coriander Seed Chicken with Caramelized Brussel Sprouts. . . Roasted Carrots with Walnuts, Feta, and Dill. . . Fresh Corn Cakes with Tomatoes and Fried Sage. . . Watermelon Gazpacho with Avocado. . . Mediterranean Tuna & Olive Spread. . . 

According to her website, Melissa Clark has over 3 dozen published cookbooks. I'm amazed. How does she have the time and talent to produce such excellent, diverse recipes? I'm a huge fan!

What's your go-to cookbook these days? 

The Week in Suppers: end of April, pandemic-style

Monday: baked Boston blue fish using Aunt Maggie's recipe; lemony mashed potatoes (recipe below); green salad; oatmeal jam bars made with spiced grape butter)

Tuesday: Pierogies sauteed with radish tops + garlic, German red cabbage, sourdough crackers with cream cheese + pepper jam
Notes: I do not boil frozen commercial pierogies anymore.  Just thaw them for an hour or few at room temperature, then saute until they get some nicely browned edges and are hot through.  I like to saute them with onions and apples, but here I had some radish tops and was short on onions.  So I improvised!

Wednesday: polenta & eggs from Smitten Kitchen Everyday, French bread + olive oil, sauteed kale with garlic & lime, black bean brownies + the last little bit of mint choc chip ice cream
Notes: It took almost 30 minutes to bake the eggs when the recipe implied it would take only a few minutes. No evening commitments tonight, so it didn't matter.  Flavor was worth it, though!
Also, if you chop the kale stems very thinly and put them in the hot pan for 5-10 minutes by themselves with the lid on, they will be tender enough to eat with the sauteed leaves.  It's a small thing I do to cut down on food waste.

Thawing for supper.

Thursday: chicken tikka masala in the slow cooker from Stock the Crock with swiss chard as well; turmeric brown rice; nigella seed naan; pear chutney; pickled lemons
Notes: If I'm making a saucy stew with a flavorful sauce, I usually bulk it up with vegetables to capture the sauce.
Also, I mixed the nigella seed directly into the naan dough this time because it kept falling off when I sprinkled it on top in previous batches.  Success!
I'm working on using my little jars of canned goodness.  Hence the spiced grape butter on Monday, pepper jam on Tuesday, and chutney here.

Friday: pepperoni/onion pizza, fancy mushroom pizza with white sauce and truffle oil, radish top and green olive pizza; chips!!! frozen peaches
Notes: The fancy mushrooms are from a local farm who normally sells to restaurants. My husband gave me truffle oil and truffle salt for Christmas - I am totally hooked. I tried to recreate a mushroom pizza from a local restaurant I love and I'm very pleased with my version - except that I forgot to put salt in the dough when I mixed it up which shows the state of my brain these days.

Saturday: take-out Chinese!
Notes: We rarely buy take-out or go to restaurants as a family, but we wanted to support our favorite local Chinese place. It was a total treat - a break from the heavy-duty cooking I do and so delicious.

Lemony Mashed Potatoes
I got the recipe from Jennifer, who got it from Melissa Clark.  I don't really consider it a salad, and this is how I make it.

Boil until very tender:
2 1/2 -3 lbs. chopped potatoes with skin on

While they are cooking, mix together in bowl:
zest & juice of 1 lemon
1/3 c. olive oil
2 Tbsp. mayo
1 Tbsp. grainy mustard
1 tsp. dried rosemary
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. freshly ground pepper
1/2 c. sliced scallions

Drain potatoes. Gently pour hot potatoes on mixture and mash with a potato masher until thoroughly mixed.  Serve immediately while hot or let sit and serve at room temperature.

Our Family Trip to Seattle and ONP

Back in June, we went on a family trip that we had been anticipating for a long time.  My husband and I had been saving money for years, funneling money into a savings account whenever we could, sometimes only $50 a month, sometimes nothing for a while. We wanted to take this trip before Genevieve started a job (that could happen very soon, friends! she just turned 14!) and after Phoebe was independent of diapers and naps and strollers and such. This summer was that perfect window.  Let's look at our trip through the thrift lens.

We chose Olympic National Park just west of Seattle because it looked like "Acadia of the west" according to my husband, and last summer, we had a super-successful family trip to Acadia in Maine. Our family does well with a location that allows slowing down and deep playing and gets us out in nature, so we lean towards national and state parks for vacations right now.

The kids adored flying on a big airplane to get to Seattle (my husband and I tried not to dwell on the environmental cost of the flying).  We booked our flights months ahead of time on Spirit Airlines - we only paid for two checked bags.  We did not pick our seats or take carry-ons.  Instead, we each had a personal item - a backpack filled with snacks and entertainment - and I chose all Air BnB houses in Washington that had washing machines so we could take limited clothing and shoes in our two checked bags. We flew out on a Tuesday, and home on a Wednesday, the cheapest days to fly, and the Wednesday happened to be July Fourth, so we got a free, beautiful fireworks show when our plane took off from Seattle at 10pm. It was perhaps not the smartest choice to fly a red-eye flight against the time change from West to East Coast, but we suffered through the first day back with coffee and early bedtimes, and then we were fine.

Because my husband travels a lot for work, he had saved up his rental car points.  We were able to rent a car in Seattle for 10 days for a little over a hundred bucks. Before we rented the car, we got around Seattle by bus and by Uber, which thrilled the kids.

We chose our activities in Seattle and Olympic National Park carefully, considering what really sounded fun and interesting to us. Some of the activities cost a lot of money, but that's what the savings were for!  We went on the Great Wheel of Seattle and on an under-the-streets walking tour; we explored the Klondike Gold Rush Museum (a national park - free!), and watched boats and migrating salmon at the Ballard Locks (also free!). We stayed with dear friends in Seattle, such a treat. We had to take a ferry to continue our drive to ONP and thoroughly enjoyed the wind, the wake, the novelty of the ferry from top to bottom. We loved the Forks Timber Museum and Makah Museum, but eschewed the (expensive) hot springs at Sol Duc for looking like a regular old swimming pool. We hiked and hiked and hiked - stopping to play in the water, pose in the trees, and just generally luxuriate in the crisp air and gorgeous sky and mountain views.

I had done some brainstorming ahead of time for meals that I could easily source from any grocery store that would be nourishing, cheap, and relatively easy to make, especially with the unknown kitchens in the AirBnBs I had booked.

This is what I did:
Breakfast 1: eggs, toast with butter/honey, fried mushrooms or oranges, coffee, milk
Breakfast 2: peanut butter/honey toast, bananas, coffee, milk
(We rotated between these two breakfasts)
Lunches: all eaten on the go from our backpacks around Seattle or ONP: bread, cheese, sardines (sometimes), pickles, granola bars, apples, seltzer
Dinner 1: jarred spaghetti sauce, spaghetti, steamed fresh broccoli
Dinner 2: grilled salmon with lemon, baked potatoes + butter, lettuce + croutons + olive oil & balsamic
Dinner 3: grilled kielbasa, pierogies sauteed with onion, (frozen) peas
Dinner 4: pasta + canned white beans + frozen spinach + garlic, roasted fresh cauliflower
Dinner 5: grocery store fried chicken, mashed fresh potatoes, sauteed fresh (local!) spinach with lemon + butter

We did eat four meals out when it was otherwise not possible to cook (travel days) or there was a really cool local place we wanted to try, and we also had some ice cream snacks and espresso and such along the way.

Fun with pipe-cleaners while we wait for food; the backpacks eased the tedium at other times, not just the flights

We ate every last scrap except a half-jar of peanut butter before we boarded the plane, and the security people threw our peanut butter away because it was classified as a liquid and thus illegal to take on the plane. Peanut butter as a liquid!

My plane buddy after the red-eye flight, 3:30am in our bodies when the plane landed.

Overall, this trip was a huge success. We did not actually use all of our vacation savings, and we have immediately started building it up again.  I was worried that Phoebe was still too little to benefit much from the trip, but oh my goodness, if you ask her, she will still tell you about the Great Wheel over the ocean and about nurse logs in the Hoh Rainforest and when she rode in the canoe with Mommy and Daddy while Genevieve and Ben had a kayak.  She was perfectly behaved and occupied on the 6-hour flights (another worry of mine), and occasionally she and I stayed at the AirBnB in the afternoon so she could catch up on her naps and mama could, whew, do her introverted thing. Now that I've actually sorted through my photos, I'm going to make a photo book to go with the travel journal we kept - using a coupon for a free book, of course!

The Big Kids Cook Supper

Have you ever broken down the skills that go into cooking a good meal?  There's planning ahead to decide what to cook, matching that up to what's in the pantry and planning how and when to get other ingredients.  Then you have to decide what recipes, or else have some back-pocket knowledge of food if you're not using recipes.  And will the people you're feeding like what you're planning?  Is it balanced - protein, carb, veg/fruit? Then you have to time the whole shebang to be done at the same time, preferably the time your people are expecting to eat.  Wow! That's a lot of skills!

So obviously, this is a big step for kids to produce a meal.  Over the years, however, I've taught them some individual recipes and they've made one-off desserts.  Also, since I stopped making breakfast for everyone, Ben and Genevieve have gotten more experience with what it takes to prepare a meal if they feel like eating something other than cereal. 

Ben and Genevieve take turns cooking dinner on Saturday evenings.  Early in the week, I discuss the menu with them and help them make a plan.  I shop for any ingredients they need.

On Saturday, I leave the kitchen in the late afternoon and park myself somewhere in the house with a project that can be interrupted.  They come and consult with me if they need to (usually do), and I don't have to sit on my hands and bite my tongue watching them cook. They do fine! They do things differently from me! It's mean to expect them to be tidy and efficient when they're beginners!

Some of Ben's menus:  

vegetarian chili, cornbread, and pickles

Singapore street noodles (with Dad's help)

dhal, rice, greens in peanut sauce

Some of Genevieve's menus: 

chicken corn noodle soup, pimento cheese + crackers, cranberry applesauce

taco salad

waffles, creamed spinach, pickles, and waffles with ice cream and magic shell

Ben says he likes seeing us eat the food he made.  Genevieve says she likes being able to choose the menu.  It's really nice for me to get a break from cooking supper, and it's wonderful for them to be acquiring life skills. High fives all around!

Sunday Dinner: Amish Church Dinner

I have been editing a cookbook written by an Amish woman, and among other useful, fascinating ideas I picked up from her is the Amish church dinner.  The Amish meet in each others' homes for church services and eat Sunday dinner together afterwards.
This is the menu:

homemade bread + butter
jam
church spread (peanut butter, marshmallow creme, and corn syrup)
homemade pickles and pickled beets
2 kinds of sliced cheese
cold meat
coffee
garden (mint) tea

homemade pie

Aren't the Amish ladies clever to plan for a meal that is easy to transport and can satisfactorily feed a crowd? I welcome the simplicity of this meal, the ease of getting this on the table after church. In the winter, I like a cozy Sunday dinner that is baking all morning long while we're at church, but now, in hot weather, no one wants that heat and heavy food.  So we're going Amish for Sunday dinners in the hot weather!

My version, today, was BLTs on storebought bread with popcorn. Homemade ice cream (Jeni's black coffee) and pretzels for dessert.  I'll share more iterations as we have them.  My only conundrum is what we're going to eat for Sunday supper, which was always popcorn and sandwich-y scraps and leftovers.

Red Hammer Soup

The inspiration for this soup comes directly from Rebecca, who served me a hot virgin bloody mary this winter.  It was fantastic, sipped directly out of pretty china cups, with chicken-salad sandwiches and chips.

 I have never liked this name for a drink, even though I do really love the drink (tomato juice anything, really), so I did a little sleuthing.  Back in 1942, a bloody mary was called a red hammer.  So that's what I'm renaming this splendidly versatile soup.

Red hammer soup brightens up a winter menu as a soup, yes, or an appetizer cup, or even just a vegetable to go next to pesto and pasta and green salad, as we had it here.

 Essentially, make any virgin bloody mary and heat it up: now it's a red hammer, ok?  This is how I make mine, although the measurements are guesses.  I add the seasonings, taste, and adjust.

Red Hammers
Heat together:
1 quart tomato-soup base* (see recipe here)
2 tsp. Worcestershire
1/2 tsp. celery seed
1/4 tsp. Tabasco (or add individually if you have spice-adverse eaters)

Serve hot to sip in mugs, or in bowls garnished with chilled, diced shrimp or chopped celery and onion.
Other ideas of add-ins or garnishes: squeeze of fresh lime juice, minced parsley, Old Bay seasoning, oyster crackers

*I think you could absolutely start with something other than homemade tomato-soup base.  I'm using what I have.  Try pureeing fresh or canned tomatoes, or use tomato juice or V8.

Sunday Dinner: Honey-Baked Chicken and Braised Broccoli

I read about Anna's birthday feast, but my library didn't have the same Susan Herrmann Loomis cookbook she used so I settled for In a French Kitchen.  I glanced through it quickly Saturday night - the prose includes everyday details of French kitchens (fascinating!) and the recipes seem very doable.  My eye landed on Braised Broccoli and with no trouble at all, I added it to our Sunday dinner.

menu:
honey-baked chicken (More with Less)
baked potatoes
braised broccoli (In a French Kitchen)

Saturday:
thaw chicken

Sunday morning:
scrub potatoes, put in oven on timed bake
cut up chicken, mix sauce, put in oven on timed bake
cut up broccoli/onions/garlic and put in pan with lid

Sunday noon:
set table
cook broccoli

This was an excellent, easy Sunday dinner.  I'll be doing this one again!

Braised Broccoli
Put in wide shallow skillet with lid:
about 1 lb. broccoli, cut in bite-sized pieces, tender stems included
3 Tbsp. minced sweet onion or scallions
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/3 cup water

Sprinkle over:
2 Tbsp. olive oil
1/4 tsp. dried thyme
salt
fresh-ground pepper

Cover and cook on med-high for 10 minutes.  Lift lid and stir. Continue to cook without lid, stirring occasionally, until liquid evaporates and contents are sizzling, hopefully even getting a little browned, maybe 5 minutes.  Serve hot or room temperature.

Baby Meals

These are rice + toppings meals that I carried out recently to families with new babies (we have a raft of new babies at church - fun!).  I was pleased with the efficient way of carrying the meal and how pretty it looked.

This is Korean beef, rice, tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, with a sprinkling of my very own cilantro over the veggies.  There was eclair dessert to go along, too.

This is rice and teriyaki pork, with toasted coconut sprinkled over it, beside purple cabbage slaw with lime and cilantro, plus fresh pineapple.  There were mocha drops to go along, too.