Yesterday's unloved grilled-cheese sandwich (made for the girls), onto which I plopped a dollop of ketchup as if the sandwich itself were the plate. Quinoa tabouli from Costco, straight from the package. Holy god it's good. We just moved and we don't have all our dishes here yet. Also, I'm that lazy.
Read more...I'm trying to get into the habit of writing up realistic meals, not just the ones where everything was shining and organic and served up with an apron round my waist. (Ok, that last bit - uh, never.)
So today, we came home from a morning of preschooler adventures such as story time at the library, and shoveling the half-inch of soggy snow that we didn't get to before school dropoff this morning, and came inside to have:
me: a turkey and cheese sandwich with some lettuce and mayonnaise, on some bread machine bread.
young L: a little bit of turkey and cheese sandwich (i made him a mini-half sandwich with a small piece of bread from the end of the loaf), some more bites out of a spinach and feta croissant that I saved for him after he only ate about half yesterday, and before I brought lunch to the table, some more of a bagel that he was eating for breakfast.
Looking at my back page I noticed nobody's been talking about what's for lunch. We had a late brunch this morning that included biscuits and gravy, Beeler's mini-sausages, scrambled eggs, grits, and these frozen hash brown squares that my son fell in love with over the holiday season. With that much on the table you'd think we had invited an army to feast with us! It was just the four of us plus Groovy Girl had a friend over and she was a pretty light eater. We won't need anything to eat now until dinner.
Read more...Last week we got takeout Indian food one night. One of the things we got was sort of a steamed plain bread, which is good, because that's what the kids ate. L also ate a sort of Indian-cheese-filled pastry dumpling sort of appetizer, too. Everything else was SPICY. So spicy that, when I found the leftovers today in the fridge, along with more brown rice from yesterday ,I decided to turn them into dinner by mixing some leftover cooked kale, some carrots, and a LOT of yogurt into the spiced chickpea dish we hadn't been able to finish the first time, and then served it over brown rice. We had a few of those little pastry dumpling things and some Indian bread left, and I made us a cucumber and yogurt salad without any spices. The doctored version - good, but still spicy enough to require a beer!
K had a plate with brown rice, a leftover breaded chicken piece, and some plain cucumbers. L ate some
leftover cauliflower, some rice, one of the cheese dumplings and a few bits of chicken.
I didn't get my act together to eat lunch from inside our fridge, and then I tempted my husband (who works from our home office most of the time) to come to the really yummy Tibetan buffet and pick up his library book on the way. And then the really yummy Tibetan restaurant turned out to be closed on Mondays.
We ate at the Amsterdam Falafel Shop across the street - where they have the option of a bowl with as many pieces of falafel as you want and then all the interesting vegetarian salad and topping options you want, sold by weight, or a small or large pita with a set number of falafel pieces *more for the large one) and then all the topics you can fit inside the pita. The bowl is less messy and lets you have more toppings without mixing up too many weird flavors in the same bite, and a reasonable amount of toppings costs about the same amount as the one served in the pita. So that's what I got. K was at school, and L ate some falafel and devoured a bunch of pink-colored pickled turnips. And then we noticed that they a set of squirt bottles of different sauces - they put some tahini and some garlic cream sauce next to the ordering station, but over by the tables you could get many other kinds. Including something called "curry ketchup." We had to go back an order some fries to fully appreciate the curry ketchup, and L of course devoured many of those too - quite happily dipping in the curry ketchup. (His big sister will occasionally eat regular ketchup on fries,
but generally is not a sauce fan and that and mac and cheese are about the only sauces she will consider.)
My hope is that if we eat there sometime with Ms K as well, she will eat some plain falafel in a bowl for protein. She does like vegetables, but all of their salads have "interesting" flavors, and she usually just eats plain lettuce, or plain cucumbers, or plain steamed broccoli, etc. I would like to have them be an option for all of us, though, since they are a good nearby cheap fast option for dinner. If she doesn't like the falafel, then I guess we'll have learned for next time and she'll eat fries for dinner, with a side of ketchup-as-a-vegetable....
I made this thing from the Bittman app a couple nights ago -- lentils with rice and onions, pretty simple. I mixed in some leftover chicken and topped it with yogurt. ET VOILA. pretty good lunch. It's the happiest meal of the day, you know.
Read more...I like to improvise in the kitchen and I like to eat what I'm in the mood for on a certain day, not what my calendar says I was supposed to cook. So I am not drawn to the "plan out the menu for the week" sort of meal planning.
But this weekend began with a potluck camping trip and the Jewish New Year so I started making a little bit of a plan before I hit the supermarket - combined with what we had in our farmshare box (which I love because it forces me to improvise!) I had a plan that sort of fits my more haphazard style, jotted down on the fridge whiteboard. 7 things I wanted to cook, done on different days and mixed and matched:
1) panzanella salad - this is an addictive salad we make a few times when we have tasty summer tomatoes! Bread, tomatoes, onions, garlic, olives, some other vegetable such as zucchini or bell peppers, oil, vinegar, and basil. The kids don't eat it. That's okay. We brought it to the potluck, the kids ate hamburgers and pulled pork, and it was fine.
2) roasted chicken for Rosh Hashana dinner.
My older child eats the drumsticks and the mini drumsticks. My younger child is still in toddler eating mode - he eats all carbs one day, all protein the next, all fruit the next.. don't understand it, but it adds up to a balanced diet, we hope. Some days he eats the chicken, anyway. Not this one.
3) matzo ball soup for Rosh Hashana dinner.
Both kids devour this. Matzo balls are a sort of fluffy dumplings that go in chicken soup. I am cool and cheap enough that I have actually gotten into the groove of making and freezing soup - whenever I roast a chicken, I freeze the back and scraps so I can make chicken soup later, whenever I have celery I cut off the tops for chicken soup as well, and then probably every ~2 months or so I combine celery, chicken parts, and carrots and boil for a while into chicken soup that I freeze later.
4) rice made with the chicken drippings for Rosh Hashana dinner. This was originally going to be a recipe for rice pilaf, but instead I just put the rice in the rice cooker and when it was done, I heated it up with onions I sauteed in the chicken drippings . The brown rice maybe makes up a bit for the amount of bad stuff in the chicken drippings? Toddler eats the good kind, grownups eat the good kind, first grader eats the plain rice and I don't mix in the extras into hers.
5) Roasted Eggplant - I haven't made it yet, but I've got the eggplants in the fridge. Probably only the adults will eat them.
6) Beet Tzatziki - I got beets and dill in the farmshare, and made this recipe that I love - inspired by middle eastern cucumber tzatziki, but with beets - a sort of salad with beets, garlic, lemon, dill, and yogurt. The kids ate some cooked beets I did not shred, and some yogurt - the younger one tried the whole thing but did not approve.
7) plum dumplings - these are a dessert or a dinner or breakfast treat - a dough made with potatoes, flour, and eggs wrapped around little oval "prune" plums - which our supermarket has in the early fall each year, and which are the kind my husband grew up with. I will make a whole batch and freeze them with the uncooked batter wrapped around the plums - both the recipe and the freezing technique come from my mother in law. Then I boil them to cook the dough, and roll the cooked dumplings in butter, bread crumbs and sugar. This is dinner sometimes sort of the way pancakes and maple syrup are dinner sometimes. The kids eat them too.
I bought more chicken and made more soup than we needed, because my mom and her boyfriend were supposed to come over but then I got sick. So all of this leaves us with a lot of mix and match leftovers in the fridge to use for different meals as the week goes on - though I've also got some more stuff on my to-do list to cook, and some more vegetables in the fridge to add in for side dishes etc.
Beet tzatziki and a package of hummus and a package of pita was dinner last night; lunch the day after the Rosh Hashana dinner was more chicken, more rice, more soup and tomato salad; lunch today for me was a sandwich with chicken and onion and bbq sauce and cheese, and we still have a bunch of these things to choose from for dinners the next few days.
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