Pork shoulders were on sale. I bought one and put it in the freezer. I just didn't feel like eating it. Weeks went by. I let it thaw for days in the fridge, but to be sure it actually cooked all the way, I turned off the oven a few times during the roasting process and covered it. This might be my favorite batch yet. Or maybe that's because I finally served it with yellow rice.
I was interested in making dinner using only one pot. So I pulled out the biggest sauteing pan, found its lid, and, voila, only one dirty dish (besides the three plates). First I cooked the chicken, then, after setting that aside, I made the rice in the same pot. We're back to the super thinly sliced chicken. See that shadow under the rice? The chicken is causing that shadow.
I made a combination of the previous barbecue sauces I'd made before—white vinegar, ketchup, brown sugar, cider vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, hot sauce—and marinated half the leftover pork. Then I made yellow rice with green beans and served it on tostada shells. Easy enough for a Monday.
After thawing a container of leftover turkey, I didn't really know what to do with it. The baby and I headed to the grocery store, found a big stack of tostada shells, and decided that was the way to go. With some yellow rice, everyone was happy.
I didn't feel like baking the pork chops, so I seasoned them with the usual chili powder and grilled them instead. No complaints...
If Tuesday was the bottom of the barrel, I don't know what today was. I had some ground beef, I had the sour cream left from the coffee cake recipe, and that was about it. So, in a skillet, I combined ground beef, sour cream, ketchup, and some other stuff (the ketchup was a last minute addition when I realized I had no other tomato products and that Scrappy would probably want more flavor than the paprika, salt, pepper, etc.). Only my serving was plated with hot sauce and more sour cream. I also ate later so they could make whatever comments they wanted without me around. (Not that the apartment is so large I couldn't hear them if they had...)
I'm getting really tired of pasta. Luckily yellow rice packets have been on sale lately.
The grocery store where I've been shopping recently has mega-cheap cuts of meat. Parts of the animal you've never heard of... And it looks just like the pack next to it that is a part you've heard before. But I take the mystery meat because that price is half as much. What I don't realize if that mega-cheap meat needs to be marinated and beaten--otherwise it really isn't very edible.
The baby is starting to let me eat dinner with everyone else. But not really. Eating doesn't really describe the way LV and I shovel food into our mouths in the hopes that one of us will finish before there's a meltdown.
Big Sunday dinners sound like such a nice idea to me. At the moment though, the only thing I can rely on to cook all day is cheap cuts of beef. At least they turn out well...
I was tired of defrosting and reheating things. It was time to make a real dinner. But a dinner that required very little prep work and activity from me.
Mmm... This is one of those sat-in-the-oven-for-a-really-long-time-at-a-really-low-temperature steaks. Tasty.
Yup, more oven-baked chili pork chops. This time I went for yellow rice and some boring frozen vegetables. LV was happy.
The only pork at the supermarket was a giant family pack with bones. Nothing about the situation said "Foreman Grill" to me. So I went looking for a new recipe online. After seasoning these with salt, pepper, and chili powder, I popped the whole set (eight chops?) in the oven for an hour. We haven't had pork chops from the oven in what feels like years. They went over very well with LV.
The green peppers at the grocery store looked really good this week, so I bought a bunch. I'm sure there are more creative things that could be done with green peppers, but the little pre-cut pieces of steak looked good, hence stir-fry. Well, they looked good before this picture. Here they're kind of colorless and sad. Over yellow rice, though, it wasn't as bland as it looks.
This wasn't the brand of semi-instant yellow rice that I like, so I tried to add more flavor to it. Poultry seasoning does not get me any closer to saffron...
LV, who usually doesn't notice that I didn't bother to trim off the fat, said, "This is really fatty, huh?" I don't think that even begins to describe those cuts...
At the grocery store, Scrappy asked what snow peas were. She said she would eat them. Bing. Snow peas went into the basket along with flank steak and red peppers. Unfortunately, a bag of rice didn't make it in there, so all I had was yellow rice. I guess that's not unfortunate. Yellow rice is good. And Scrappy did eat it all.
