Here we are with a whole new week of meals!
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| The always present pile of dishes drying next to the sink. |
If you read my previous Cooking At Home post, you'll notice some leftovers carrying over into this week.
Breakfast
We started off Sunday with some scrambled eggs and leftover biscuits.
For Monday we had the ever present steel cut oats
We had recently bought some bagels at the store, so we had a fancy breakfast of scrambled eggs and chorizo with toasted bagels on Tuesday.
On Wednesday we finished up the bagels and leftover eggs, along with some homemade yogurt.
I use our probe thermometer to easily keep track of the yogurt's temperature and a tea towel for straining.
I wasn't able to make another batch of steel cut oats right away because the pot was full of stew, so we finished up what oats were leftover in the fridge along with a couple bowls of microwaved rolled oats on Thursday.
For the rest of the week, we had steel cut oats with various toppings.
You might be wondering, "Why do they eat so much oatmeal?" It is easy to make a large amount, you can dress it up with whatever toppings you desire, and it's a pretty cheap breakfast. We buy our steel cut oats from a bulk health foods store and it ends up being quite a bit cheaper than the containers of oats you can typically buy at a normal grocery store.
Even though we eat oats pretty often for breakfast, I do try to plan two or three mornings with something different for breakfast, so we don't get too tired of eating oatmeal.
Lunch
We still had corned beef, sandwich bread, and cheese soup leftover from the previous week, so we had those leftovers for lunch the first three days of the week. I didn't make a hash on Tuesday like I originally planned. Noah ended up being gone all day so I kept it low key with the kids and we finished up the remaining bit of leftovers still hanging out in the fridge along with some apples and carrots.
On Wednesday I made Chicken Cream Stew, a recipe from The Gaijin Cookbook by Ivan Orkin. It is basically what it sounds like, a creamy chicken stew that is served over rice. A sort of comfort food. It was good, but we agreed it wasn't too different from any other creamy chicken stews we had eaten before, so I didn't save the recipe. There are many other interesting recipes in The Gaijin Cookbook though, so I highly recommend checking it out! I just didn't have any of the specialty ingredients on hand to try the other recipes. His Ivan Ramen cookbook is also a very interesting read!
We really did finish out the week with the chicken stew, minus one day when Noah's mom came over to watch the kids for a bit in the morning so Noah and I could have some time out of the house together. We picked up some gyros to bring home and eat for lunch after the kids went down for their naps. The French fries were pitiful, but the gyros were good. All week we had been reminiscing about the tasty shawarma we ate in Atlanta while I was pregnant with Oliver, which is what led us to buy gyros for lunch.
You must eat there if you are ever in Atlanta. It is so good! We had it twice during the day and a half we spent in Atlanta.
Oven Roasted Chicken Shawarma
Grilled Ribeye Steak with Onion-Blue Cheese Sauce
Dinner
I did make a version of chicken shawarma for dinner this week and it was SO GOOD!! Every night we ate it we kept saying, "This is so good! We need to save this recipe. It has so much flavor!" I would say the only thing it was missing was whatever tasty sauce the restaurant in Atlanta slathers all over its chicken shawarma. I used bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs for this recipe and it turned out just fine.
I suggest roasting twice the amount of onions the recipe calls for. They are so delicious! We ate our shawarma chicken wraps with spinach, tomato, homemade white bean dip, the roasted onions, and yogurt. I make my own pita/naan bread wraps using the recipe below.
I have tried many different flatbread recipes and this is the only one that has given me consistent results. I do tend to add just a smidge more flour so it isn't quite so sticky, but even then it still cooks into soft, bubbly, delicious flatbread.
On Thursday we had burgers for dinner. I don't know what recipe Noah follows for burgers, but I think he just forms the beef into patties, seasons them, and then cooks them on the grill outside or a cast iron skillet on the stove. I have been trying to make my own hamburger buns lately but I felt like keeping things simple this time so we used store bought buns.
Have y'all ever had roasted sweet potatoes? Everyone in our family loves them. Cut up your sweet potatoes into stick or wedges, toss with a bit of oil (a general rule is 1-2 tablespoons of oil per one pound of whatever you're roasting), and sprinkle with sea salt. Spread them out on a baking sheet, making sure they aren't too crowded or they won't brown very well. Roast them in the oven at 450 degrees Farenheit for about 45 minutes, depending on how big your cut your potatoes. Check on them halfway through the cooking time, stir them around and flip them over. Poke them with a fork to see how soft they are and how much longer you need to cook them. These potatoes are a very simple and tasty side dish.
Now, let me tell you about the blue cheese sauce we had with the burgers. The first time we had it we ate it with steak like the recipe suggests.
We had some extra cream hanging out in the fridge and Noah had recently bought a little container of blue cheese so I figured we could try something new with our burgers. Neither of us are really huge fans of blue cheese. We don't seek it out. But there is so much more to this sauce than the cheese. You have the soft, slightly sweet caramelized onions, richness from the cream, and the bit of stink and flavor of blue cheese all wrapped up into something that you just cannot stop eating. Really, it is that good.
On Saturday I tried out a new pork loin recipe from Andrew Rea of the Babish Culinary Universe.
We agreed it was the best cooked pork loin we had made at home thus far. It wasn't dry and the filling added another layer of flavor. I think though that maybe my pork loin was a little bigger than what he used in the video, or maybe I didn't have enough bacon in the filling (I didn't have any pancetta around so I used bacon instead), but I think it could have used twice as much filling as what I ended up with. I had only four pieces of bacon to use, so I think next time I will use eight pieces. I believe we had salad as a side dish that night and probably something else.
So, how many times did I cook a meal or part of a meal this week? There were about six different cooking sessions this week. That number came down quite a bit from the fifteen different times I cooked during the previous week. We had quite a bit of leftovers carry over from the previous week and I made sure to make big batches of whatever I was cooking so that it would last longer. This is a good example of a fairly easy week of cooking for me. Honestly, the two dishes that took up the most time were probably the flatbread and then prepping the pork loin later in the week.
I hope y'all are enjoying these new cooking blog posts. What are some of your favorite recipes?
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