Valentine Treats

This is how we celebrate Valentine's Day....no gifts.  No outings.  Just cards, a little candy for the boys, and food.  Awesome food.  Because, why go to a restaurant, wait in line for an hour WITH RESERVATIONS and come home completely ticked off that the food was so-so?  Making our own is so much more fun.  This year, Brian made a day of it.  The day was bitterly cold and no one wanted to leave the house.  The comfort foods made the house feel pleasant and we didn't mind being stuck inside.

Breakfast:  Homemade waffles with caramel coulis.  Homemade caramel, even.  AWESOME.

Lunch:  Squash soup and cheese toasts.  The soup was from Epicurious I think, and featured both butternut and acorn squash.  The toasts were just baguette with a little asiago on top, but it complimented the soup nicely.

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Dinner was a stuffed pork loin wrapped in bacon.  I don't have any photos because it was a bit frustrating for Brian to cook.  There's reason to believe that our oven is on it's last legs, as it takes FOREVER for things to bake/roast.  It was delicious, despite the issues.


Dessert:  Chocolate Almond Mousse with fresh whipped cream.  It was supposed to be hazelnut, but you need to change gameplans when the hazelnuts are rancid.  This was good, a little heavy for any other night of the year.

So that was our day of delightfulness.  Until next year....

Brought to you by The Letter "F"

No, not that "F".......today's words are Freezer, Frittata and Fail.

First the frittata....last night's dinner was from the Epicurious  cookbook that we like so much....it was called "Kitchen Sink Frittata."  In other words....tons of stuff in it.  In anticipation of (hopefully) knocking some things off the Holiday To-Do list, Brian had dinner on the table early.  The kids weren't interested in the slightest so they had leftover pizza.  Sean's got an aversion to pizza lately, but even he had a little and then some yogurt.  Anyway.....it was delicious.  Not the most filling meal in the world but just have two pieces and you're good to go!  It had tomatoes, basil and potatoes, and plenty of cheese.  Brian said that the recipe had called for bacon but he didn't put it in, given his bacon-cooking woes as of late.  (Smoke, smoke smoke!)  And I now know the difference between a frittata and a quiche....quiche has crust.  And either of them would be delicious at breakfast.

Now for Freezer and Fail.  I've got a lot of friends that have super good luck in freezing things.  There's a lot of pins on Pinterest about freezer meals.  Yet.....I don't have much luck in the freezing department.  Either I forget something is IN the freezer and it gets destroyed over time, or it wasn't meant to be in the first place.  We also seem to have a shortage in plastic containers, but obviously that's an easy fix:  get more containers.  The most recent fail was the other day:  Brian had made bone-in chicken breasts with a corn relish, with mashed potatoes sometime in November.  It was more food than we could eat at one meal and we were heading to Philly in a few days.  I hate to throw food out, so I froze the chicken, relish and potatoes separately.  This week being a busy week (HA!  That's an understatement) I defrosted them.  Only to my dismay....the potatoes were soup and the relish had turned brown.  The chicken was probably fine but I'm throwing it out anyway because I have nothing to go with it.  I want to get better at this, if other people can do it so can I!

Chicken n' Muffins

Chicken n muffins....not meant to be eaten together but that's what was made on Sunday.  It was also the first case of "Trashed Kitchen" in this house!!  And I'm sure we'll do it again and again.

The chicken was "Peruvian Grilled Chicken" from Epicurious, and man, so flavorful!  Brian quartered a whole chicken, and I made up the marinade.  It consisted of soy sauce, lime juice, paprika, cumin, oregano, and garlic.  Lots of garlic.  Absolutely fantastic, and a different flavor combination than what we're used to.

Brian had gotten unsweetened flaked coconut at the grocery store to make a banana bread recipe that he found on Pinterest.  I was running low on sugar though, and it also requires rum.  (Sounds pretty good, huh?)  No rum in the house, so instead I made the blueberry-coconut muffins on the back of the bag.  Brian adores anything coconut, so it works out well.  Plus, it's nice to have some muffins for mid-morning coffee at work.

More March Meals

The last few weeks have been insane.  Getting a house ready to sell is way more work than I ever thought.

It's going well, though.   I've packed up a lot of things for storage, and we've painted, cleaned, fixed, installed, and lots of other action words and items.  Pretty soon though, I'll be packing up the cookbooks.  That's ok though, there's still the Internet.  :)

I haven't had time to write individual meal posts, so how about a summary.

One night last week we had Pork Lettuce Wraps, courtesy of this month's "Cooking Light."  Usually I make these with chicken, so this was a nice change.  The ground pork is mixed with garlic and ginger and sauteed, and the vegetables (peppers, cucumber, etc...I didn't have any carrot so I put some onion in there instead) were supposed to be raw.  I don't really like raw veggies on a wrap, so I opted to sautee lightly.  It called for a serrano pepper, but only half of a serrano pepper.  Right, anyway....I chopped up a whole one because they're small and I am just NOT going to put half a serrano pepper away in the crisper to rot slowly.  I ignored my desire to put sriracha sauce in the mix and I'm glad I did because OH BABY!  Those were spicier than expected.  Delicious though.  Brian wasn't crazy about them because of the intense flavors.  (Fresh garlic, ginger paste, serrano)  I served the leftovers over rice the next day and was thrilled with them.

We were replacing the carpet in the family room over to Pergo laminate flooring on St. Patrick's Day weekend.  I had anticipated that this would take both Saturday and Sunday, so there really wasn't a point to making a corned beef and cabbage dinner.  Which is really too bad, because I love corned beef and cabbage!  So I planned an Irish Beef Stew instead.  And thanks to the awesome skills of hubby, my brother and my dad, the floor was done in a day!  I am SO THANKFUL that we have family members that not only have the skills to do this kind of work, that they don't mind helping!  The stew was really good, with some Irish soda bread on the side.  (not made by either of us, but bought at Price Chopper.)

Lastly, and I feel this really deserves its own blog entry....steak over arugula with a parmesan butter.  This recipe was out of Epicurious (goodness what a great cookbook!) and it only called for 12 oz of ribeye steak.  I was skeptical, I really was.  But sliced up, and served with a balsamic brown sugar and shallot glaze and the aforementioned pamesan butter?  This was good enough to be restaurant food.  And I wasn't at all unhappy with the amount of steak.  So, so very good.  And a very easy recipe to boot, the only difficult part was making sure you didn't overcook the steak.

That's it for now, folks!

Best of the Week

We had a week of crappy dinners.  Lots of hustle and bustle tends to do that, so it was meals made of boring chicken and ho-hum canned veggies.  One night even featured a skillet meal from the freezer section, something that we used to rely heavily upon.  I'm glad we've gotten away from that stuff!

  I know that we are going to have a lot of meals in the next couple of months that have "quick" and "convenient" ingredients.  Neither one of us likes it, though.  , This week Brian wrote a menu that put that stuff to shame. Lemony Zucchini Risotto on Thursday night, served with a poached egg on top.  We've made that one a few times now, and I still love it just as much, and ALWAYS have the leftovers for breakfast the next day!!  I am kind of in love with risotto, and will definitely be happy to try some more versions.

 The most intriguing meal?  Roasted chicken and kimchi-smashed potatoes.

This one comes courtesy of Epicurious....which has never produced a bad meal in our kitchen.  This one didn't disappoint, either.  Kimchi is not something I thought that I'd want to try, nor did I think that my husband would MAKE kimchi.  For those who don't know, kimchi is a fermented cabbage dish from Korea.    Authentic kimchi is mixed up in glass jars and left to ferment for some time.  I had a boyfriend in high school whose mother was Korean, and she used to make it and leave the jars on their back deck.

Anyway, the recipe called for store-bought jarred kimchi.  Our local market didn't have it, and I was shocked (shocked!) not to find it at Wegman's.  So we found some cabbage/slaw mix in the produce aisle and decided to give it a whirl.  The spices are more authentic, but the cabbage blend was more "pickled" than fermented.  Looked pretty authentic!

First of all, I have to admit.  Kimchi does not look appetizing.  But this meal was actually pretty great.  The chicken thighs were spicy and quite crispy, with the perfect blend of sririacha and fresh garlic.  The kimchi was good, and the dandelion greens were bitter but worked in the dish.  I don't know if this is something I'd eat again, but I was pleasantly surprised!