Feb 2 – Homegrown Pork, Salad and Quinoa

As usual, I’m making more than one side to go along with the main course. Tonight’s dinner is the very last of the pork from our friends’ farm-raised hog. I never want pork from the supermarket again. This meat is so flavorful! It looks and tastes completely different (in a good way) from store bought meat.

I was overtired after a sleepless and stormy night on Sunday so I let my trusty slow cooker do the work. I diced onion, celery and green chile, dumped in can of whole peeled tomatoes, and seasoned the pork with garlic, cumin, oregano, salt and pepper. I put in the tomato juice from the can and added a bit more water. The chops were still a bit frozen so I left the cooker on high setting for most of the day, then as the meat was getting tender, I brought it back to low for the last 3 hours or so.  I made some quinoa and finished off the ginormous bag of spinach Hubby had bought for me by creating a mixed green salad, adding beets, scallion and topping with goat cheese. Hubby got the leftover truffle mac ’n’ cheese, and I had quinoa. It was the sort of comfort food meal that we both love, and we devoured it with sort of a bittersweet sensation knowing that the homegrown pork was gone forever.  No more farm-raised hog until summer time.  Enjoy your dinner! V.

Feb 1 – Super Bowl Sunday

This year’s Super Bowl meal wasn’t as elaborate as some I’ve done in the past. In fact, I worked during the game on my freelance project and Hubby snacked on chips and salsa. What I made for halftime food was a departure from the chicken wings, cheese dips and other finger foods I am known to prepare. I ended up making three kinds of turkey wings instead. One was a soy/garlic/ginger, the second was a garlic marinade (think sweet BBQ), and the third was classic Buffalo (Tabasco) sauce.  Since halftime coincided with dinner time, we ate the wings for dinner. I marinated them all afternoon then broiled them. They turned out yummy but we could only eat two each, leaving the Buffalo-style for another snack on another day. Enjoy your dinner! V.

Jan 31- If You Are What You Eat …

I would surely turn into a giant salmon steak with spinach leaves for scales. Forgive me if I’m repetitious, but it’s a spinach salad with beets (canned from our garden), tomatoes, pickled green beans, chickpeas and scallions and topped with some amazing goat cheese my hubby made.  He got some truffle mac ‘n’ cheese and a side salad with his salmon steak.  Pineapple upside-down cake was baked for dessert. I had a small piece and didn’t die. Hooray! Enjoy your dinner. V.

Roast lamb with gravy

Roast leg of lamb with gravy, mashed potatoes, and roasted butternut squash

It was a very small roast, just enough for dinner and leftovers. I made gravy from the pan drippings and some lamb stock I had in the freezer. Mashed potatoes and roasted squash are both leftovers. Good fuel for shoveling more than a foot of snow.

I’m Baaaack!

I plan to rest my chin on my palm before opening things up to post this, because I know I will find that it has been well over a week – perhaps two – since I last wrote. If I let my jaw drop, I drool on my keyboard and that has happened too many times already, for much better reasons than being aghast at the sheer quantity of my slackery.

Time disappeared somehow… I didn’t forget to eat. My children did not go hungry. But I was not present in what I consumed, for the most part. Welcome to Cautionary Tale Time, kids! This is why the Dinner Project exists.  And I completely blew it. Can I get an LOL?

I may have ruined my own precedent by having those three significant meals in a row. My dream at this very moment is to craft a witty Twelve-Days-of-Christmas sendup of the past twelve or more days (I couldn’t wait any longer – had I written on Friday as I had planned, it would have been exactly twelve days). I’m tired and don’t wanna. Probably because I haven’t been eating right.

A few nice things happened. I enjoyed a good buffet at an Indian restaurant near a friend’s house, about an hour away. They had just started an extremely reasonably-priced Sunday afternoon special. Most of the dishes came from regions of India with which I was not familiar, but when I passed along the report to an Indian person I work with, she was able to name most of them based upon my unschooled descriptions. The only obviously not-ethnically-Indian folk in there were my friend and me and our blue-haired teenaged waitress.  To me, that is a sign of ‘real’ ethnic food.

I ate a cheesesteak or two and a burger or two during childless times. There may have been fries and a couple of beers here and there, and a minimum of one milkshake. There were at least two nights with pasta and sauce (score two for Mom and the kids eating the same thing). One Friday night I planned to see a controversial blockbuster hit, which I found had sold out for the 7 p.m. show at 5:30. I bought my ticket for 9 p.m. and munched on the small bag of Combos I had stashed in my purse. I saved the combined bag of Skittles and M&M’s for the movie itself.  The sugar and adrenaline got me home through the snow (some dinners have an express purpose not actually determined until well after they are consumed).

I ate a pre-gallivanting dinner one afternoon – a good bit of heavy and fried food in preparation for an evening out with friends enjoying each other’s company and the kind of beer that is served in pitchers. The dinner itself was unsatisfying but the enjoyment of the evening more than made up for it.

Tonight I returned to the real-food fold. I threw chicken thighs into the crock pot with some barbeque sauce (I would not recommend Sweet Baby Ray’s Cola-Q for this, but it sounded good at the time) and sprinkles of salt and pepper. Tossed some rice into the cooker and frozen peas into the microwave. It was mediocre at best and the kids would not have anything to do with it, but at least everything was organic and had all of the right acronyms and none of the wrong ones. I’ll have a couple of nice lunches.