I hope someone besides me enjoys these posts, but in the end, I still believe they’ll make an interesting read someday when we are long past this bleak era in history. If they bore you, please don’t tell me, but maybe check out my other posts. As promised, I have started meal planning. And per my usual, I frequently ditch the plan because I have a whim. But, I feel less stressed knowing that I do have a plan. Unfortunately, not having my old neighbors, who I gave many leftovers to, may be harder to get used to. Currently, I want to smoke meat over the weekend, but I have no idea how we would even begin to consume all the leftovers we have in the fridge. Don’t worry; we are going to give it a shot. So, on to this week in my food history:
Thursday (9/10) – I was supposed to make pork shoulder steaks, but it was another of those days where we just decided we didn’t have to cook since we didn’t have the kid. Also, the pork was not completely thawed, and cooking it while partially frozen is just wrong. We ended up eating leftovers and well…ice cream. There are no rules when we don’t have to be role models.
Friday (9/11) – Since I hadn’t cooked the pork shoulder steaks and they were thawed, I decided to make stir fried rice for dinner and cook up the pork steaks. I cut them up for the husband and I to throw into our rice. It was good. The kid got vegetarian, and we got meat. I’ll call that a win.
Saturday (9/12) – We started the day with cloud eggs. It is a recipe I found on Food Network Kitchen, but I’ve also seen it on Pinterest. I’m not sure I whipped the eggs enough. I have found that with my stand mixer, you need more content in it to get a really good whisk. I only did 3 eggs, as we were not super hungry and it was an experiment. In the future, if doing that little, I might try to do it by hand. But in what was a total shock, the kid said she really liked it. I then decided to make homemade marinara (see my post ) in the afternoon. Dinner had been planned to be homemade ramen, but it was warm out, and I had that beautiful marinara. So we had stuffed shells. I used a ricotta, parmesan and asiago blend for the filling. Everyone ate it, so I felt pretty good.
Sunday (9/13) – I made an apple puffy oven pancake for breakfast. My older girls used to love this dish as a weekend treat. It came out very pretty and was delicious. The little breaditarian absolutely loved it. The husband and I totally just snacked on leftovers and such for dinner after dropping the kid off at her mother’s house for the night.
Monday (9/14) – I made a curried cauliflower and chickpea dump dinner recipe from Food Network Kitchen. The recipe called for spinach, and I didn’t have any, but the dish came out alright without it. It turns out I don’t hate curry, I have just hated every curry dish I tried in the past? That’s my best guess. Or it’s been long enough and my tastebuds have changed, because I really liked the spice. The kid even ate a decent portion, though at first she tried to tell me it was spicy. After I explained there was no heat component, she kept eating. I think she’s still learning the difference between spicy, as in heat, and flavorful.
Tuesday (9/15) – I made beef stroganoff in the instant pot. The recipe can be found here, although this time I used fresh mushrooms because I had them. The only adjustment is to sauté the mushrooms with the beef so you can get a good amount of the liquid out of them. It was delicious and a good thing too since I made enough for two entire meals and then some.
Wednesday (9/16) – I took the curried cauliflower chickpea dump and reheated it stove top with some added butter, more red onion, peas and carrots, a little more curry, some milk, and sour cream. It was much better this way. It really reminded me of Korma, which is one of my favorite Indian dishes. It could have used some chicken, but hey, vegetarian dinner nights are a thing around here.
This week, I enjoyed cooking again. I may not be making some of the extravagant dishes again yet, but I am enjoying it. And I have a million more things I want to make. First, I have to figure out how to scale them down a bit, as I haven’t gotten to know my neighbors at the new place well enough to start plying them with food…but I’ll figure that out.
Foodie's Delimma 