Week Ten

Monday: Comfort food. Sometimes a person just needs comfort food. Meatloaf is often a comfort food, or lasagna, or thick chili. Tonight it was tuna casserole. I know, a midwestern comfort food for sure, but it was definitely the right pick! It was so good. Aside from dropping my phone in the pre-cooked mix the whole thing went perfectly. It is my mom's recipe and she would say the secret to making it great is Johnny's Seafood seasoning.

Tuesday: My favorite minestrone recipe. The recipe comes from a Pasta and Rice cookbook that I love. I have really trimmed down my cookbook selection and this is one I insist on keeping. In fact I would keep it for this recipe alone. I love this recipe. And, unlike almost anything, I follow it to a T. If you would like the actual recipe I would be happy to share it. However, I will say, the key to making it work is the broth. For the broth you soak dried porcini mushrooms in hot water for 30 minutes. Then rinse and drain them (through a cheese cloth or very fine strainer) and the liquid is used for the broth. It makes for outstanding flavor.

Wednesday: I am so glad that I made a big pot of minestrone soup because it was just what everyone needed with being snowed in. Everyone forged the snow to get home and see all of the white. So we enjoyed left over soup and salad with warm biscuits.

Thursday: Lemon chicken, rice, and spinach. I baked the chicken in a dish with high sides so that it would cook well in the juices. Then I seasoned the chicken with typical chicken spices and then squeezed a lemon over the top. To cook I sliced lemon slices and laid them on top. It was very tasty!

Week Nine

The most important meal this week, carrying on a family tradition...green eggs and ham!

Monday-Monday's Monastic Meal. For dinner we had one of my favorite simple dinner's from the skete in California I love to visit. Baked potato, beans, salad, and beets. I cooked up a pot of pinto beans (also in preparation for a meal later in the week) and we ate those plain. I really love beans cooked plain like that. Lucas typically puts some vinegar and hot sauce on them but I like them as is, with a little salt. There isn't much fresh beet around these days so we had to have canned but it was still delicious! Simple, I know, but it is a great meal.

Tuesday-Garden burgers, hash browns, and spinach. One of the key ingredients, we believe, to excellent garden burgers is to add avocado on top in addition to pickles, mayo, mustard, ketchup, lettuce, etc. We like to make our hash browns from fresh potatoes and then cook them up on the stove. I think they taste really great fresh like that but I am having a hard time getting all of the water out of the potato before cooking so that they crisp up best.  I am thinking next time of par-boiling them with a little baking soda and then frying them. That is the same trick to use when making home fries so I am hoping it will work.

Wednesday-I was too sick to eat anything except plain spaghetti. Noodles. Sauce. Cheddar. Glass of milk. That's all.

Thursday-Homemade chili. On accident a few years ago I discovered what I believe makes fabulous chili. At the time, I did not mean to do it but now I do it on purpose every time. A few years back I soaked and cooked some beans to make chili with. I had intended to soak kidney beans but they turned out to be pinto beans. At the time I was concerned about the condition of the chili, almost throwing out the whole idea and cooking refrieds or something, But, it made the best chili. Now I always use pinto beans. It requires a fair amount of chili powder and I suggest cooking them a really long time. What makes it so good is when the beans get really soft and thick. I also add a good bit of tomato, both paste and diced. It was delicious!

Friday-"Pre gymnastics meet" burritos. yum!


Saturday-Lucas and I went out to dinner to a newer restaurant in Corvallis. I HIGHLY recommend it. I was completely wooed. I had a delicious dinner made with all local ingredients and the flavor was a home run. Additionally, our waiter was extremely helpful and he and Lucas and a number of looonnngg conversations about beer; something this restaurant is also known for. If you live in Corvallis or the area I strongly encourage you to go to Les Caves.


Sunday-Sally came home from Beirut with many treasures, some of which were our dinner tonight. yum. She made Lebanese food. It had a fancy name in Arabic that I attempted to pronounce but in the end I just couldn't, so, I am certainly not going to try spelling it. But, it was a delicious meal and we all thoroughly enjoyed it. And, our guests, Jerry and Sharon, brought a pie. It was a mince-meat pie and it was so good; my first!

Week Eight

This week I helped my mom some at my grandparent's house; i miss them so much.


Monday-Linguine stir-fry. This is a spicy twist on a stir-fry that my mom always made. It has chicken, peppers, mushrooms, and snow peas that are cooked and added to linguine. We like to add a generous handful of red pepper flakes. What i think is worth noting about the recipe, for those wanting to take away a good strategy, is the use of cornstarch in the marinade. The marinade is a combination of sherry, soy sauce, and corn starch. The flavor is really nice from the sherry and soy sauce but the corn starch makes it a really nice thick sauce that actually coats the pasta and vegetables. I really enjoy that part.

Tuesday-Enchiladas. Yum. Need i say more. Sadly, they were only yum on that day and since then just the thought of them makes me quite ill. However, that night they didn't. The inside of the enchiladas had chicken, corn (fresh from this past summer, so good), black beans, green chilies, cheese, and some spices. The shells were filled and then doused in enchilada sauce, cheese and sour cream, with a few olives on top also. They were tasty but i do think they could have had more...flavor maybe. Or even some sour cream on the inside to make them a little creamier maybe. Something wasn't quite right and I think they could use some tweaking. Any ideas?

Wednesday-So begins the left over brigade. As you may notice we now have had a number of meals in a row and the fridge is exploding with food. We had to do TWO nights of leftovers to try and take care of that problem.

Friday-Mushrooms, feta, roasted red pepper, fresh tomato, and canadian bacon....a pizza from American Dream. It was amazing.

Saturday-Left over pizza of course!

Sunday-While lying in bed I decided that it would be nice to have a simple Sunday dinner this week. I am feeling pretty worn out. How about JUST soup, salad, and bread. No big deal. Next time I want a simple meal it will not be soup, salad, and bread. SO MUCH CHOPPING! I made a new soup, "Hearty Minestrone" from my cooks illustrated cookbook. Lucas loved it but I wasn't crazy about it. Lucas loved it for some key ingredients that just happen to also be ingredients that I am generally not that excited about eating in soup: zucchini and cabbage. It also had the regular carrot, celery, onion trifold. That part was nice. It also had white beans, which I love. Ultimately what I believe is most worth noting is that the soup called for V8 juice. The book explains how that gives it a more consistent tomato flavor and I would agree. In fact, next time I would add more. I really liked it and importantly, so did Lucas who cannot stand V8 juice. It has inspired me to think about using V8 in other dishes where I want to enhance a tomato flavor. Good idea!

Week Seven

Monday: left overs!

Tuesday: Lentil soup. I made a big pot of lentil soup. Lentils are hard to screw up but I have a particular lentil soup flavor that I favor. First I cooked garlic, onion, celery and carrot. Then I added the lentils and let them cook in the vegetables and oil. Next I added a generous amount of red wine and let that cook. I added some chopped tomatoes-canned or fresh depending on the time of year, and let that cook until it seemed time to add water. I added about twice as much water as there was lentils. Next I added a heaping amount of red pepper flakes, coriander seed, a large amount of cumin, garlic salt, salt, pepper and just a few rubs of nutmeg. Then I let it cook and added any additional spices at the end after it cooks. It is delicious and has a nice middle eastern flavor. We like to eat it as soup, with hummus in a wrap, on rice...lots of options!


Wednesday: Shake and Bake and I helped. I had a craving. Lucas had shake and bake eggplant, which he thoroughly enjoyed, and I had chicken. It absolutely met the need.


Thursday: GARDEN BURGERS! There are two types of garden burgers we advocate for in this house (other than home made): Dr. Praeger, and Gardenburger-Sun Dried Tomato. We love to doctor them up with toasted Kaiser rolls, all the yummy fixin's and pickle. On this night we also had homemade hash-browns and salad. A perfect dinner.


Friday: Today was Charlotte's first train ride. We rode the train to Oregon City to pay a visit to the fam. We had a meat and potato kind of night and that was perfect for me as potato is one of the few foods most delighting me right now. The baked potato was warm and extra tasty. Nice to have something I can depend on.


Saturday: Yarn Crawler's chicken. It's a traditional dish, as of this Saturday. Mom, Sarah, and I participated, partly, in Portland's City wide yarn crawl. We had a great time visiting some yarn shops, some more yarny than others, and making some additional stops for lunch and book buying at Powells. Upon our arrival home we were exhausted and in definite need of nourishment, well that isn't technically true given that we were actually stuffed on Coney Island milk shakes (big yum!). All that said, mom made some tasty baked chicken with rice, asparagus, and salad. My favorite was the rice. This is a rice dish that I always love and highly recommend. It is white rice, beef consomme soup, french onion soup and mushroom all baked together.


Sunday: Andy turned 22 last week! That is so old. We play a game in Charlottesville that whenever someone has a birthday you go around the table and share what happened when you were that age (whatever the age is). It turns out that 22 was a very big year for everyone and I am sure it will be for Andy also. To celebrate we had spaghetti and salad, It was all very warm and comfort food-y. The salad was the most exceptional part: spinach, cabbage, artichoke hearts, and carrot with a simple oil and vinegar dressing. Very nice. Happy Birthday Andy!