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01 December 2008
What's for dinner?→[More:]
Making my grocery list now. Might as well have the head-spinning experience of craving something else everytime one of you posts your dinner plans.
Probably sausages (stuffed with jalapenos and cheese) that we buy fresh at the grocery store, along with either rice or pasta. It's our go-to dinner on Mondays (as MuddDude works late and I hate to cook).
Later on this week, we're going to try making our first ever crock-pot stew. We bought stew meat and broth and some vegetables (we could have made the broth ourselves, but we didn't have time this weekend).
I need to practice tortellini alla panna for xmas dinner, but not this week. My MIL is 100% Italian but she's put me in charge of The Sauces once I proved able. One of my kids loves the white and the other the red. Exclusively. I usually make a red meat sauce and an alfredo but wanted to try the alla panna sauce this time.
All of which has nothing to do with the question. The Spousal Unit indicates that we are having turkey stir fry w/peanuts.
Cheese and crackers, which is my default when I don't have to feed anybody else. Tonight, the cheese is a very sharp cheddar, and the crackers are Dr. Kracker.
We're having slow-cooker beef stew. I borrowed a slow cooker from a friend to see if I want one. I think it'll taste okay but I miss tending to a pot, stirring it, tasting it and just sort of nursing it along. With the slow cooker you just put everything in and forget about it. I'm not sure it's for me. Anyway that's what we're having. No mushrooms in the stew as I loathe the very sight of them.
I got fed lunch at a surprise meeting today, so it's turkey leftovers, same as thanksgiving. Sliced turkey with extra sharp cheddar ad SKIN ON mashed potatoes with lots of butter.
I'm going to make a pork roast with garlic and rosemary, roasted potatoes, and brussels sprouts (sauteed WITH BACON). The pork roast and the sprouts are both new recipes out of the new revised ed. of the glorious How to Cook Everything.
Beef tacos with homemade guacamole and store-bought refried beans. And with really good cheddar cheese made by students at the local university, which I got free through work (yay, free cheese!). I had thought about some sort of salad but it's not happening; I'm tired.
(And actually they're bison tacos, as the free-range non-hormone ground bison is less expensive than the free-range non-hormone ground beef at the supermarket.)
But right now I'm in the "Everything's chopped and cooked and ready to be heated up, but ikkyu's not home yet, so I'm going to sit on the couch with a glass of wine and my cat and my laptop and chill" mode.
I went out to dinner with family for my dad's birthday but I think everyone was disappointed in the food. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't as good as we were hoping for.
I had brussel sprouts with walnuts and cranberries which were too hard and to salty, and then slightly undercooked ravioli with butternut squash and some really bland mushrooms. Oh well. Dessert was much better: key lime pie.
People came over tonight to work on a class project, so I made garlicky lentils, white lentils with cardamom and cloves, goat-meat onion curry in the crockpot, and saag paneer. The curry was AMAZING except I put too much water in and it was kind of weirdly liquidy but aside from that...OMNOMNOM WOULD EAT AGAIN. And will. For a while, I think. I have a lot of food left over.
V. was out, and I didn't feel like cooking, so I made ramen, stirred an egg into it just before it was finished, tossed into a bowl with some chopped veggies, and grated feta on top of that. This is one of my go-to 10-minute quickies when I either have no groceries, or can't be arsed to arrange them into real food.
I made my chicken noodle stew.
We got a rotisserie chicken last night and boiled the carcass in the pressure cooker. I took half the stock and all of the leftover pulled meat and added about 12 cups of water, half a coarsely chopped clove of garlic, two big chopped carrots, half a bag of frozen peas, 3 largish chopped red potatoes, and various spices (ginger, tarragon, sage, oregano, and black pepper).
Just before it was all the way done, I added half a bag of multicolored spiral pasta.
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
photo by ethylene
