I am so behind on blogging! I still haven’t even posted all the fun from Mexico. Life has been so busy and I’ll admit my cooking adventures these days are nowhere near as impressive as they were when we were all locked up. But I am enjoying being somewhere between the lockdown and total freedom in our area. They’ve lifted most mask mandates, but we still wear ours for most places. We still don’t go a lot of extra places for now. I’m not sure if that is out of continued caution or just that we got used to different things.
For our big Sunday meal this week, I made jambalaya. My husband loves this dish and I’ve developed a pretty good recipe that combines all the things we both love about it and leaves out some that we don’t, like green bell pepper. Green bell pepper upsets my stomach, so I used red, yellow, and orange instead. The color is a little mono-chromatic, but the flavors are just amazing. Also, we were basically able to eat this for dinner and lunch all week.
I’m really trying to do leftover Mondays these days. We build up such leftovers and I want to make sure they get eaten. This week, we also needed to cook up some brats we had, so I did those and the myriad of leftover sides and orzo we had left from last week for the veggie girl.
We had my oldest and her crew over this week. I had found a recipe that has mini potatoes, peas, and shrimp in a creamy sauce. I made a version of it substituting hearts of palm for the shrimp in addition to the original version. I also fried some okra. My okra came out a little weird because I only had yellow cornmeal and I normally make it with white. But it still tasted good, and my Mel was thrilled as it’s one of her favorite foods.
Check what you are buying with hearts of palm. I didn’t realize the can said “salad mix” and basically there were multiple cutting styles. Next time, I’ll get the spears and chop them myself for more even cuts. The youngest did not like them at all, but said the thinner slices were less offensive. For the meaty version, I would definitely make a few changes. I would just use normal yellow gold potatoes and cut them to the desired bite sizes. And I would add more garlic. But overall, not a bad dish.
Over the next few months, you’ll probably see 1-2 major effort dishes each week. Work is getting busy, and I have some big plans for enjoying the summer. We’re sticking with that live it up while you can motto until something new gets in the way.
Foodie's Delimma 