This time the meatloaf tasted better to me. I forgot to throw in all the Italian seasonings (they got sprinkled on top) and I used only beef. It was still not as dry as what I think meatloaf should taste (which is really a good thing), but I enjoyed it. And everyone ate carrots. Success!
That blob on the side? Leftover mashed potatoes from Chicken Delicious. They looked really good before I microwaved them. Then they turned to soup.
I hadn't planned to make oven-fried porkchops, but the idea of breading the pork and eating it with applesauce hit LV hard on the train ride home, so we went to the store, bought some applesauce, and then threw newly-breaded porkchops in the oven. For the breading, I got to use some more of the fresh thyme and rosemary that's still in the fridge.
I didn't feel like making any side other than broccoli. A healthy dash of garlic salt before boiling might have elevated the broccoli might have to "as good as the pork."
My mom once told me, rather out of the blue, that one of the most bland things she'd ever eaten was the stir-fry I made her when she had come to visit me in New York. That particular stir-fry had been the specialty of someone who thought no seasoning should ever interfere with the smell or taste of meat. I didn't know any better. My mom would have been much happier with this stir-fry--it required not only the three tablespoons of soy sauce she didn't get to have with her bland stir-fry, but also fresh ginger, garlic, white wine, and some spicy elements.
I couldn't believe it had been a week since my last post, so I decided to take a picture of my fridge to sort of show that I haven't been eating McDonald's and ordering pizza for a week.
1. CHICKEN QUESADILLAS The night before I made the Veal with Lemon-Capers sauce, I made chicken the way we used to at the old place: salt, pepper, olive oil. If we'd had some Project Runway to yell at and more Heineken, I would have thought it was 100 degrees outside. Three days later, the leftover chicken was marinated with chipotle sauce, chopped and thrown into the tortillas that are labeled in the photo. I assumed we had cheese when I decided to start making quesadillas. We had a lot of Kraft American singles...
2. SPAGHETTI & MEATBALLS It was pretty, but I didn't make the sauce or the meatballs. There's a recipe for homemade pasta in my cookbook, but I certainly didn't feel like doing anything but pouring from boxes, jars and containers that night.
3. CHICKEN DELICIOUS We ordered a roasted chicken (the tinfoil) from what LV thought would be the new Chirpin' Chicken. The chicken was really dry and nothing at all like Chirpin'. But the coleslaw and mashed potatoes were good. Compared to the really dry chicken.
4. PIZZA Tuesday we had Scrappy as per usual, so I suggested making one of the DiGiorno thin crust pizzas. Unlike LV's last oven, the new one has no clock, no timer, and doesn't beep when it's done preheating. Making a post out of his success with frozen pizza might have been rather condescending, though.
I cheated on Valentine's Day... I've been faithfully pulling recipes from the Better Homes & Gardens cookbook since January, but I thought Valentine's Day called for something more dramatic. So, I went to Epicurious, where they were promoting Jamie Oliver's Valentine's Day recipe for anchovy-something-or-other or a less scary-sounding recipe for two. I skipped the soccer mom cookbook and the anchovy delight, and went for veal with potatoes.
LV hung out in the kitchen and helped me make dinner, which normally doesn't happen because I feel I can't have a blog if I don't do all the work. But this was better. We were listening to the Billy Joel box set, and probably should have changed it before we sat down to eat. His poppy synthesizer hits don't mesh well with candlelight.
Oh, yeah, and there's a total lack of a centerpiece. It looks like a cat food dish in the middle of the table... LV sent me flowers, I sent him flowers, we didn't need more flowers for the table. Doh. The bowls are from the bread and dipping sauce we were munching on while making dinner.
We've had a lot of leftovers in our fridge for the past couple weeks. Leftover casseroles, lasagna, wings, cheesecake, coffeecake,... So I decided to take what I could and use up as much as possible in one dinner. LV had leftover steak (I guess didn't document that from earlier this week) with wings and mashed potatoes. Then I took the spinach I bought for beef sandwiches that we never made and threw the pork with melon-tomato relish and blueberries on top. My salad was prettier, so it gets the photo.
In the middle of a cold snap, I decided it was time to make a summertime grill recipe... If I make this again when cantalope and honeydew melon are actually in season, it will probably taste much better. It was mainly the watermelon that sketched me out. I got one of those plastic containers from the store that has chunks of random melon in it. Like funny-smelly watermelon. But I'd just read an article about rinsing meat, so I figured rinsing fruit to get rid of sketchy-watermelon-smell couldn't be nearly as riksy as rinsing rancid meat.
Oh. That's the left-over insides of the potato skins making a comeback as mashed potatoes behind the porkchop. They weren't very mashed. I'm used to the mashed potatoes out of a box.
We decided to have a Super Bowl party. That amounted to four people coming over. But that's more of a party than any other Sunday, so I started looking around for what to make. Wings, of course, and Potato Skins. This is a picture of the skins before they went into the refridgerator. I didn't take any pictures when the came out of the oven (cheese was added, sour cream on the side) or of the wings at all because I was more caught up in getting food out on the table. And people might think I'm really bizarre for taking pictures of the food they're about to eat.
At the last minute I realized we had no sort of desert. Everything was salty bar food. To try to get Scrappy more involved, I pitched a couple different chocolate cookie recipes to her. As we were rolling all the dough into little balls, she asked where the chocolate chips were. The "like Oreos" concept apparently hadn't been a clear enough description.
These cookies have gotten so much better over the course of a week. They came out of the oven a little dry, but with all the frosting sandwiched in between (half were vanilla-filled, half were chocolate) they've become more moist. Mmm...
Hash browns always sound good to me. When I saw the recipe for hash browns (not home fries or the green pepper-potato-onion-mush some diners serve), I ran out and bought a bag of potatoes.
I've never peeled potatoes before. I patiently peeled all the potatoes after scrubbing them. Then patiently shredded far too many potatoes because I was being diligent to the recipe. Then I got tired; Breakfast for Dinner is supposed to be quick and happy. I decided the potato shreds did not need to be rinsed.
First the potatoes turned a rust color. Then they turned gray.
It looks like a photo of a giant sausage patty or something encrusted with pecans. There is sausage in the picture, but mainly you're looking at the hasbrowns. They were so gross. Much as LV told me they would be fine--there are dirty potato chips that aren't washed at all--he wasn't about to finish the leftovers. If I hadn't started drinking Heineken while peeling potatoes, I probably wouldn't have been able to eat more than a few forkfulls.
Fewer potatoes, more rinsing next time.
So this time I didn't pick up chicken breasts still attached to chest cavities, but the thin slices were far too thin to actually work with. Only one stip actually held the bundle of onion, garlic and parsley. The rest were open on one end or the other, causing all the butter to spill out before they were done baking.
I started preparing these the day before (at the same time as the lasagna), so being able to come home and not really have to do any work offset the frustration of it not turning out as well as the first attempt.
I had been eyeing the Raspberry Buckle recipe in the cookbook for a few weeks before I made this. There were two weeks of trips to the supermarket where I couldn't find frozen berries at all or fresh berries I wanted to use. Then I gave up and decided to make Blueberry Buckle with fresh blueberries. After they had been baked, the blueberries tasted so much better. Unlike the nun's puffs, I'd make the Blueberry Buckle again.
My mom makes a really good lasagna. It's one of the few things she makes that I really like. I don't have her recipe, though. I feel like it's something like (with resentment), "Pour the jar of spaghetti sauce in the bottom of the pan, don't cook the noodles, layer on some ground beef, some cottage cheese, some more spaghetti sauce, repeat." I decided to try the Better Homes & Gardens recipe. There was a Contadina recipe on the back of the crushed tomatoes label, but I stuck with the BHG route.
The first difference I noticed was that my lasagna was not very tall. It just doesn't looked like lasagna when it's kind of slumping over that way. The sauce BHG calls for has an entire onion in it. And lots of tomatoes. And a little meat. But mainly you end up eating an onion layered with noodles and lots of Italian spices. I thought it was okay. Not lasagna, but good enough for dinner. We'll have to find a new recipe next time.
I gave Heineken its own search label a long time ago because it plays such a key role in the menu at our house, but this would be Heineken's first solo entry: LV's going away party. It's kind of sad that Heineken is being overshadowed by Stella, the real LV choice of drink, in Heineken's first solo appearance.
(There are some takeout nachos in the background courtesy Wackjob, but food is never a key ingredient in getting people to participate in karaoke.)
I bought pork with no idea of how it was going to be cooked. Flipping through the cookbook, I found a recipe that called for breading and not much else. Perfect.
LV got very excited when he saw the breading come out. If only we could get the Little One that excited about vegetables. Even just carrots.
I don't remember what recipe these were purchased for, but come Monday night I only felt like broiling them. Done. Some more mashed potatoes on the side (because I hadn't really ventured into the vegetables section of my cookbook yet) and it's a LV-friendly meal. Though really any meal is LV-friendly.
Wings for the second half became a staple of Bears games. At this point, winning was still a staple for Bears games, too.
I was completely in love with the shredder after making these little guys. The difference might have also been better crab, but using a shredder to flake the meat made for a much better consistency in the paste. Or dough. Whatever you want to call. They were so much better.
The Little One loves crab. Trying it prepared in some other way than sushi-quality sticks seemed like it might be a problem, though. "Cake" conjured a picture of frosting and candles. She was not prepared for a dumpling with finely shredded crab. But she was a good sport and actually finished one.
I can't imagine what it will be like to shop with multiple children in tow... Keeping an eye on the whereabouts of an active 6-year-old is the only way I can explain not really comprehending what a label says when I buy what's obviously the wrong the thing. Though, I'm not sure "6 per water retainer" would ever mean to me that the chicken breasts I'm about to purchase are still attached to the chest cavity of the chicken from which they came.
I've never been taught to clean a chicken, and at 8:30 at night I hardly have the desire to even pound the thing into shape as the recipe instructs. Instead of trying to remove the chicken from the bone, I decided to just start cooking them in a skillet and then finish baking them in the oven the way I would if they were the little bundles of chicken and butter they were supposed to be.
I apparently didn't cook them look enough because LV's looked raw about halfway in.
Modified Chicken Kiev = No Good
Sunday was a busy day.
BREAKFAST
The new grater was put to good use with all the oranges that needed to be shredded for this recipe. Any dried fruit would have worked, so I picked cherry-flavored dried cranberries. Scrappy decided these were just raisins. "They feel like raisins, but they taste like cherries," I told her.
"No," she said. "They taste like raisins."
But she continued to help make them and ate two biscuits when they were ready.
LUNCH
The Bears play-off game started at 1 p.m. EST. This called for wings. We thought they might be too hot for Scrappy, so she was eating orange slices. "This one has a seed," she said before continuing to eat. Then she stopped. Looked at the seed she had put on her napkin and yelled, "It's my tooth!"
The stuff all over her hands in the photo is sauce from the wings. She decided to give them a try after checking out the hole her first baby tooth had left behind.
DINNER
I'd never had Chicken-Fried Steak before in my life, so I had no idea what it was supposed to taste like and very little idea what it should look like. I've decided creamy sauces are fun to make, but I just can't eat them.
This is a photo of Scrappy's plate. The only part she had a problem with was the mashed potatoes. Crazy. She likes corn, which I don't think counts as a real vegetable, but she got distracted trying to put kernels in the hole where a tooth should be.
DESSERT
While waiting for the Tooth Fairy to show up, LV decided he needed a snack. I offered up vanilla ice cream topped with Oatmeal Scothies and Butterscotch sauce. There wasn't much ice cream left. It would have been a very sad looking sundae in print. But it was tasty.
I thought I could trick the little one into eating vegetables if they were mixed in with a sauce. No such luck. She ate all the pasta, leaving behind all the sauce.
The new issue of O had just shown up with an article proclaiming Bolognese the most seductive of sauces. I stuck with the Better Homes & Gardens recipe. There's nothing seductive about telling a six-year-old she needs to eat two scoops of the sauce before she can leave the table.
I thought this was a good use of the frozen shrimp we had left over from the birthday party. I think the recipe called for four pounds of tomatoes. That was about two more than were going to fit in the skillet. The sauce turned out just fine with fewer tomatoes.
I decided Sunday was a perfect opportunity to spend hours chopping vegetables for two recipes that could be eaten much later in the week: Tex-Mex Chicken & Rice and Chicken Pot Pie.
The Tex-Mex Chicken & Rice looked really gelatinous and green compared to the photo in the cook book. Then I noticed the photo had a wooden spoon. But this did not improve matters tremendously. I moved on. (Three nights later, Scrappy actually ate some. So, that has to be a success. And eating the week-old leftovers four days after that didn't make me want to gag either. Stirring it up made it look fluffy and not gelatinous at all.)
