childbearing hipster

More Menu Monday

Slight rearrangement of the categories this week.

Meatless Monday was rescheduled for last night, we had quesadillas.

Tonight's meal will be pork chops and rice, a classic old family recipe that involves painstaking effort and long simmering a box of Rice-a-Roni. It is seriously my favorite thing that comes out of a box, and every now and then it calls my name. Also: multicolored cauliflower.

Taco Tuesday has been pre-empted in favor of Takeout Tuesday, because tomorrow afternoon I'm getting an IUD and I wanted to plan for the possibility that I might not feel like standing around a stove.

(Yay! An IUD! I'm terrified and delighted!)

Wednesday is the final Picnic Wednesday of the summer season, and I've got a hankering for big sandwiches on sourdough rolls with lots of salami and Italian dressing, with chips and fruit salad.

Thursday, as it ever was: Roli Roti chicken from the farmer's market, and whatever gorgeous produce catches my eye and demands to be served immediately.

Menu Monday

I go through phases with this meal planning thing, but every now again I recommit myself. This summer I've been mostly planning meals based around what I find at the Thursday evening farmer's market, creating a menu and shopping list and then filling in the blanks at the grocery store.

We decided as a family that there should be certain theme nights, and some of these will change with the seasons. For example, Wednesday is currently picnic night, because we're going to Music in the Park every week. But that'll be over soon and we'll need to switch things up. Something that won't change: we're committed to at least one meatless meal and at least one fish meal. Eventually I'd like to add more vegan selections in there, because it can be really easy to rely on cheese when you're a meat-eater trying to vege out. But not this week.

Meatless Monday: Zucchini Ricotta Cheesecake, arugula and tomato salad, home-baked bread

(update: the cheesecake thing was great, although the zest of one lemon turned out to be overwhelmingly lemony for our tastes. I would cut way back in the future, it was too much like dessert.)

Taco Tuesday: Fish tacos, rice and beans

Picnic Wednesday: Homemade pizzas, vegetables and dip (I've got carrots, celery, tiny French green beans, radishes, cucumbers, summer squash--I'll probably make an aïoli and maybe some other dips, but skip boring old ranch this time around)

Farmer's Market Thursday: This is the day we feast on Roli Roti chicken. It is a great day indeed.

Friday: Still TBD, but a nice Cobb Salad that incorporates leftovers from throughout the week is probably a front-runner.

Saturday: Hosting a camp out in our backyard, so grilled and roasted will be the watchwords of the evening meal.

What's for dinner at your place?

Tortilla Española

Tonight's dinner was an eleventh hour choice based on a few factors:

I have potatoes.
I have a bunch of fresh eggs from a recent visit to check out our friends' chicken setup.
I didn't bother to thaw any meat, so it needed to be Vege Night.

Tortilla seemed obvious. And I figured it would be easy, although I've never made it.

I chose this recipe, but there are a million out there and even though I followed this one I should have taken the advice to make it more eggy, as most of the other recipes I checked out do. But for description of the process, this is great. And it's hard to screw up eggs and potatoes. I used another couple of eggs to make some aïoli and then added a few herbs and spices (celery seed, paprika, lemon zest) to some ordinary Heinz ketchup as another option.

To my utter shock and delight, the kids not only ate it, they devoured it. So much for having leftovers for breakfast, but at least I have my first grand slam home run since I don't know when.

Half-Birthday Soup

Our preschool has a tradition for kids whose birthdays fall during the summer: they schedule a "half-birthday" celebration on a school day so the kid can get the full cupcake passing experience.

Molly knows how to read a calendar, and figured out that today is her half-birthday. I agreed that we would mark the day by allowing her to plan a dinner, subject to my approval, which I would prepare in her honor.  I was surprised by her choice, and gratified because it shows how far she's come with trying new foods and how much my persistence at teaching her about nutrition has paid off.

Her requested menu: Tomato soup, bread, and Caesar salad.

I made bread yesterday--a simple French boule, cut with some whole wheat flour and a little flax meal. The Caesar was part of our farmer's market haul last week--tiny crinkly leaves of gem lettuce and fresh Parmesan, and a homemade dressing with a squirt of anchovy paste (man, was I glad to find that at the local Italian deli/market. I just wasn't sure what to do to add that dash of authenticity to my Caesars, other than plan a whole week around things that had anchovy in them so I could justify opening a can. Turns out they come in jars, too--who knew? I never pay attention to the preserved fish aisle).

Her favorite tomato soup is the kind that comes in a carton, specifically the tomato-roasted red pepper soup. I decided to make it from scratch instead, in my crock pot so I could run around and ignore it all day, and here's my creation. Enjoy.

Molly's Half-Birthday Tomato and Roasted Red Pepper Soup

Place:
28-oz can of tomatoes with liquid
2 cups stock
6 oz jarred roasted red peppers
1/2 lb yellow summer squash, cut into 1" chunks (for extra secret hidden goodness)

into crock pot and cook on low for 5-6 hours.

Puree (I used an immersion blender), and thin with milk or stock as needed. Finish with cream and season to taste.

Later in the summer I would make this with fresh tomatoes, and possibly roast them first in order to bring out the sweetness (I actually dropped a bit of brown sugar into my soup to offset the tang of the canned tomatoes, although the sweetness of the peppers and squash does some of the work there, and the cream does most of the rest of it). I didn't season my soup at all but for a little pepper, as the stock I used was made from an already heavily-seasoned roast chicken, and left out onions for the same reason--had I used commercial stock or stock made from a totally unseasoned bird, I probably would have wanted the flavor of onion.

I chose yellow squash because they'd hide nicely and because I didn't want to have to peel them, but zucchini would work fine too.

A nice touch was that by thinning and finishing the soup with cold milk and cream, I brought it down almost to a temperature where the girls could eat it right away, saving myself the trouble of having to wipe up splatters of blown-on soup.

This made enough so that everyone had two bowls, and I was able to freeze about half of it for a future meal.

The half-birthday girl approved.

Happy Birthday to Me!

Dinner: New York Strips à la Dug, potato-cauliflower Dauphinois à la Jamie Oliver (less nutmeg next time, it was a tad noggy, but still delish) and sautéed Bright Lights chard with lemon.

Also, homemade strawberry ice cream.

Oh, we could have gone out, but that meal would have cost us forty bucks a head not counting booze, and when I eat, I always count the booze. I can't see a thing wrong with making my own birthday dinner.

During dinner I leaned over a couple times to crank the ice cream maker, and it occurred to Molly that "You can make anything by yourself if you just have the ingredients, you don't have to go out and buy it already made".

Wait till I bust out the pasta maker. It's going to blow her mind.

Dinner, Thursday, Lazy Woman Style

Two new things tonight!

Number one: Cream of Zucchini Soup. I was just chatting with some friends about zucchini and its ubiquity and how by the end of the summer you won't answer the door when a zucchini-growing friend knocks, but right now, it seems perfectly cool to eat it every day.

I thrifted a neat-looking crockpot cookbook the other day and this recipe was the first one that jumped out at me as I flipped through it. So super easy: a pound each of zucchini and peeled potatoes, cut into 1" pieces, a chopped onion and a couple cloves of garlic (sauteed in butter before adding them to the crock) and four cups of vegetable stock. Four or five hours on low, and then you can puree it right in the crock if you happen to have bought a stick blender at a garage sale last weekend. Add a half cup of cream and season to taste before serving, which you can do hot or cold. I've already tasted it and I think the kids will go for it.

 

(as with most of my crockpot dishes, half of this will be packaged for freezing, before the cream is added, so it can make for a quick lunch or emergency dinner within the next couple of weeks. I have a big crockpot, might as well make the most of it!)

Number two: Ice cream! Well, frozen yogurt anyway, because the yogurt needed to get used up. I also thrifted a $7 ice cream maker. I was kind of looking for an electric, but this is a Donvier manual model which is better, because shouldn't we have to work for our food at least a little bit? And this isn't really work, it's just cranking it once in a while and remembering that the inner cylinder has to be pre-frozen before you can make anything. I was going to make strawberry frozen yogurt, but in a fridge mixup the newer strawberries got eaten before the older ones, and the older ones didn't make it. Nobody likes fuzzy frozen yogurt. 

Top Chef 4/16: "Tailgating"

You know, seriously: what is it with this season? None of the chefs are particularly compelling. The jerks aren't jerky enough, the hot guys aren't hot enough, and nobody has cooked anything that makes me go "Oooh, I want that". I can't even really remember anything anyone's made, and I can remember a few dishes from each previous season. And the elimination competitions have been giant catering affairs, no serious high-end cooking. And how heavy are the edits this season? It's worse than it's ever been.

This week's Quickfire was about pairing dishes with beer. My immediate thought: carbonnade! It's an amazing Belgian stew of beef, onions, and a good sturdy beer (Chimay, Newcastle, even Guinness works). But it's not a quick dish, especially if you're thinking you'd hand-make some egg noodles to serve it over.

So in the interest of time, I'd do frites. Not just regular potatoes, but sweet potato fries as well. And I'd whip up a couple of fun dipping sauces. Yes, the idea is wholesale ripped from Frjtz in San Francisco, but my personal judges would be pretty happy to get the yum without the long-ass drive.

The Elimination Challenge was to prepare food for a tailgating party (again, dude, with the giant catering affair that has little connection with haute cuisine!). And I'd make five-spice chicken wings with cilantro dipping sauce, because they're AWESOME and I haven't made them in a while and man, I need to put that on my next menu plan. I do half of them without the cayenne, so the kids can handle them.

I'd serve a little slaw of some sort, with a rice-wine vinaigrette (one of my dirty pantry secrets is this wok oil that is flavored with ginger, garlic, and other seasonings--I love giving ordinary salad a bit of an Asian twist using this instead of olive or vegetable oil in a dressing).

And of course, I'd pair it with some Tsing Tao.

Top Chef 4/9: "Elements" (Better Late Than Never)

Between being busy and not being particularly compelled by this season yet, I am only just now getting around to watching last week's episode. When will these people get interesting? Whither the Marcels and Stephen Asprinios of yesteryear?

The quickfire challenge this week was the famous blindfolded palate test, this time pitting ingredients of high and low quality against each other and asking the chefs to determine which is which.

I'd fail so miserably at this one. I'm just not experienced enough with high end ingredients. But every night is a sort of blind palate test in our house, because I'm constantly putting things in front of my family and just expecting them to get it over with.

The elimination challenge required each group of chefs to create a dish that represents one of the four elements: earth, air, fire, water.

Do you think I could get away with making one of those flowerpot puddings? What better to represent earth? And while doing a dessert on Top Chef is always a little risky, it's so high concept that it just might take me all the way (if you keep in mind that my judges are four feet tall).

Top Chef 4/2: "Film Food"

Guest chef Daniel Boulud...some day I'd like to find out what his famously expensive burger tastes like, and hey, guess what? I can try and make the db burger myself! And it will probably still cost me $27!

A problem with my cooking, though, is that my techniques are strictly amateursville. And this episode's Quickfire is all about techniques. They've got a basket full of vegetables and thirty minutes to show off. That's not enough time to dust off my pristine copy of Jacques Pépin's Complete Techniques and finally crack it open for the first time, nor is it time to finally get around to taking one of those Culinary Institute weekend knife skills courses I've always thought about trying.

Here's something I can do though, that's kind of fun: I can dice the hell out of an avocado. I'm fresh out so I can't take a picture to show you, but let me explain: Take a sharp chef's knife and use it to bisect the avocado, rotating the fruit around the pit. Pull it apart, pop the pit out, and with the tip of your knife, gently make cuts vertically through the flesh of each avocado half about a centimeter apart without cutting all the way through the skin. Then make the same type of cut through the avocado flesh horizontally. When you're done cutting, use a thin metal soupspoon and scoop the flesh out, careful to keep the dice intact.

Rinse the spoon off and it is great to de-seed a cucumber: peel it, cut it in half lengthwise, and then run the tip of the spoon down the center of the avocado, scooping the seeds and pulp out. Now you can chop the cucumber as you wish.

Obviously, these are the two skills required to make one of our favorite summer meals: chunky gazpacho.

Along with the avocado and the cucumbers, I seed and dice a few fresh tomatoes, some red onion, as much cilantro as I can get my hands on, and a couple of cans of rinsed beans (black beans, chickpeas, cannellini beans, what have you). A little vegetable juice to thin it out and a ton of lime juice, there you have it. It's even better the second time around, so make a huge batch. Daniel Boulud would be impressed by the way the flavors blend on day two, I'm just sure of it. My judges at home are getting antsy for gazpacho season already.

The elimination challenge? Pick a movie, then evoke it with food. The answer to this is obvious: I have Pixar-obsessed young children.  Ratatouille is the only thing that could impress them.  I've never actually made it before, as it happens, so that might be a real-life challenge to set for myself.

For what it's worth, I can't muster up any energy to care about any of this season's chefs.

Top Chef 3/26: "Block Party"

Quickfire: Rick Bayless presides over this one, where the cheftestants are asked to take tacos uptown.

I myself have been aspiring to the dizzy heights of the carne asada tacos at Three Brothers in East Palo Alto, but for this I might have to pull out a different idea. I did a terrific fish taco a while back, with red snapper, and I'd revisit that for this challenge, searing the fish and flaking it into locally made tortillas, and topping it with shredded cabbage, chopped red onion, and a cilantro-lime aioli. My judges would all approve, although the smaller judges would pick it apart and eat it with a fork, and those vegetables wouldn't get equal love alongside that fish. Richard deserved his win though, because that shaved-jicama-tortilla idea was brilliant.

(This challenge really just reminds me that I've never gotten around to really learning to cook Mexican food. I'm an expert eater of it, but I need to kneel at the feet of my Aunt Bobbi and learn to make tamales, empañadas, sopapillas. My excellent guacamole is one thing, my heavy reliance on the lowly bean burro is another.)

But what of the block party challenge? The cheftestants had to run in teams around a neighborhood borrowing ingredients from random houses with which they had to prepare food for a block party for the neighborhood's residents.

Lucky me, I stock up on BOGO's at Safeway and giant bags of bulk stuff at Costco, and my pantry is loaded for bear. It wouldn't be the first time I found myself feeding a crowd on short notice. If I were put to the test tonight, a giant vat of chili (four or five kinds of beans and a little ground beef), fleshed out with macaroni, and a few pans of corn bread would be my contribution, along with a big-ass green salad (there is never not a few bags of salad in my fridge, it's my major food group) with a quick homemade vinaigrette and some fruit salad (right this minute, that would include strawberries, fresh pineapple, tangerine slices, blueberries and apples) would finish it out, and there is always beer around here. I think the Budweiser cans have little Budweiser can babies in the cooler when nobody's looking. 

Would Rick Bayless like my chili? Eh. Molly likes it, and she's a way tougher critic.