Welcome back! Here we are with my third installment of Cooking At Home.
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| Onions and such hanging out in the kitchen. |
This was our first full week of Noah working at his new job. After being at home almost every day for eight months, we knew it would be a bit of an adjustment as we all got used to not having him around during the day anymore. This was also the week I began to realize that I needed to plan more simple meals for later in the week when I am likely to be running out of steam.
Breakfast
For breakfast this week we had steel cut oats quite a few times, as usual.
I made carrot muffins this week that didn't really turn out very well, but they were nice to have around for easy breakfasts and snacks.
On Saturday we had pancakes for breakfast to celebrate the weekend.
Lunch
We basically ate leftovers from last week for lunch four days in a row this week. Thank goodness for leftovers!
On Thursday I made soup based on the recipe below from Donal Skehan.
I didn't have any leeks around, so I subbed in some other vegetables. I used carrots, a large sweet potato, some celery, onions, garlic, corn, and white beans. I thawed the white beans and some turkey stock from the freezer the day before. I blitzed the entire pot of soup a couple times with my immersion blender before adding the beans and corn.
Oliver is very anti-soup for some reason. I don't think he took even one bite. Adeline seemed to not like it very much either. I honestly thought it was ok. Not amazing, but still good.
We finished out the week with the vegetable soup and a smattering of leftovers for lunch.
On Saturday I mixed up some tuna melt topping to go along with the soup. I use the recipe below as a guideline. I go pretty light on the mayonnaise and add more celery than it calls for.
I'll mix the grated cheese into the mixture and put it on pieces of toasted bread that I'll put under the broiler in the oven so everything gets warmed up and the cheese starts to melt. So it's an open-faced tuna melt sort of thing. I know warm tuna might sound like a weird thing to eat, but it is very good. Even picky Oliver eats it!
Dinner
On Monday I made pasta for dinner using the recipe below as a guideline.
I sauteed some onion and garlic, added sliced pre-cooked brats, a pound of rotini pasta, and about five cups of water. Brought the pot to a boil. Once the pasta was cooked through I added an entire bag of fresh spinach from Aldi that I had chopped up. Rather than mixing the Parmesan cheese right into the pot, I made a Mornay sauce in a separate pot and stirred that into the pasta at the same time as the spinach. Mornay sauce is Bechamel but with the addition of grated cheese.
For a side we had roasted cabbage. It might sound weird, but roasted cabbage is very delicious. It is the only vegetable that Oliver never refuses to eat.
First, peel off any funky looking outer leaves. Then cut the cabbage in half from top to bottom and cut out the core. Put the cabbage cut side down onto your cutting board and cut from top to bottom into thick slices, about half an inch wide. Place your slices on a metal baking sheet, drizzle or brush with oil (about a tablespoon total), and sprinkle with sea salt. Roast at 450 degrees Farenheit. Flip the slices over after 20 minutes and roast for about 20 more minutes.
On Tuesday I made a ham and spinach quiche while using the recipe below as a guideline. I have followed this recipe before from a cookbook that I own and I made a few adjustments this time.
I decreased the liquid by half a cup and used six eggs instead of five. My previous quiche had kind of a squishy but bouncy texture (if that makes sense) and I thought it would improve by using less liquid and more eggs. My hypothesis was correct. Also, I make this recipe with milk, not cream. I thawed out a package of spinach and some leftover ham from the freezer. I mixed in a chopped green onion, some pepper, and a bit of shredded Swiss cheese that was hanging out in the fridge.
Can I tell you a secret? I mix up my pie crust dough in my stand mixer. I have been very pie crust challenged for a long time, so I will use whatever tips and tricks I can to have it turn out nicely. I also roll out my pie crust between two layers of plastic wrap, a trick I learned from my Cook's Illustrated cookbook. It helps keep the dough intact as you're rolling it out, makes transferring it to the pan quite easy, and it keeps your rolling pin clean!
The quiche took about 15 minutes longer to cook than the stated time, probably because of the extra moisture from the spinach (I should have squeezed more water out of it before putting it in the quiche) and I cranked the oven up to 350 degrees Farenheit for that last bit of time. We had some salad, grapefruit, and carrot muffins on the side.
On Wednesday I made something that is always a big hit. Slow-Cooker Char Siu.
This recipe makes A LOT of food. (We ate it for dinner twice and Noah took some to work for lunch.) I used a five and a half pound pork butt this time around and I cooked it over night on low for about ten hours. Much like cooking corned beef, you will likely need to cook your pork butt longer than your recipe suggests. You want to hit that magical internal temperature of 195+ degrees Farenheit so that your pork is tender and falls apart easily rather than being dry and tough.
The above recipe asks you to separate the fat from the leftover sauce once the pork has finished cooking. This is another reason why I cooked the pork overnight. It is so much easier to separate the fat if you pour the leftover sauce into a bowl and let it chill in the fridge all day. The fat will rise to the top and solidify making it super easy to remove from the sauce. After removing the fat I chopped up the pork, put it in a dish, poured in most of the remaining sauce, covered it with foil, and then warmed it up in the oven since it was already on because I was roasting sweet potatoes to go with dinner.
If you're having trouble finding Hoisin sauce for the marinade, see if you can find an international grocery store nearby. We have a couple of favorite Asian grocery stores where we buy our special ingredients such as Hoisin. The ingredients we buy there cost less than what we could find in the "international foods" aisle at a typical grocery store and there is much more variety to choose from.
We ate the pork over rice with some cilantro, green onions, and sesame seeds for toppings. If you struggle with cooking rice, I suggest trying out the recipe below.
My rice was always starchy, too wet, and just a gloppy mess. No need for a fancy rice cooker or steamer, just a normal pot will do fine. Quite often I don't bother with browning the rice before adding the water. I'll just bring the water to a boil, add the rice, and then turn it down to a simmer and follow the rest of the recipe. You can add whatever seasonings you like to your rice. Definitely make sure you set a timer! You don't want to burn your rice or end up under cooking it.
At the end of the week I mixed up some ham salad for sandwiches. I know the words "ham salad" don't sound very appetizing, but it is actually quite a tasty filling for grilled sandwiches. It was also a great way to use up that last bit of leftover ham in the freezer. I found the recipe in my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook one day when I was looking for new ham recipes to try. It is pretty similar to the recipe below, although my recipe doesn't mention anything about cantaloupe.
As always, I go very light on the mayonnaise. (Why do so many recipes call for so much dang mayonnaise??) We made grilled sandwiches with cheddar cheese, ham salad, and avocados.
I also made a "brothy beans" recipe after watching this Sorted Food video, but it didn't turn out very well and I was reminded why I always cook my beans in the crockpot. Even after soaking the beans they had to cook on the stove for more than an hour before they were soft enough to eat. I ended up pulling some frozen veggies from the freezer to go with dinner that night because the beans were taking so long. The flavor of the beans was just kind of "meh" but there were still a lot leftover so I fashioned them into lunches for the following week.
This was Noah's first week working at his new job and I was honestly feeling quite tired and burned out towards the end. It has been a long time since I've been on my own with the kids, and while we are pretty easily falling into a good daily rhythm, it still takes a lot out of you being the only parent around to oversee everything little thing that is going on. When I'm tired one of the first things I lose motivation for is cooking. We still had enough leftovers from this week to carry over into lunch on Sunday, but we were starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel. I think on the weeks when I'm tired I need to force myself to make a big batch of something that can stretch through the weekend so that I can take time to relax and recharge instead of cooking a lot of little meals.
How many times did I cook during this week? I count about eleven different times I cooked or prepared a new meal or component of a meal. I also baked some little vanilla cakes with Adeline on Saturday because she had been asking me all week long if we could. We had quite a few lemons leftover after making the Babish pork loin recipe the previous week so I used the zest to make some homemade lemon extract and then the juice of those lemons to make lemon bars.
Man, they were quite sour the first day we ate them, but the sourness seemed to mellow as the days went on. I made a double batch in a 9x13 pan because I wanted the effort of making dessert to be worth it. If you are using normal lemons rather than Meyer lemons, I suggest adding a little more sugar or using a little less lemon juice if you aren't a fan of super sour things. But even with the sourness, everyone loved the lemon bars!
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