Today’s the big day, my 42nd birthday. I’m tired (see photo at bottom) and didn’t want to do much. Plus, we already celebrated over the weekend.
We had a very simple dinner of baked tofu, chicken with white wine & lemon, rice, and my favorite, Japanese salad turnips with miso butter. For dessert, Shane bought me a huge, yummy, carrot cake from Billy’s Bakery.
Shane’s been a bit under the weather, so I decided to make soup tonight. Soup is also an excellent choice for our crazy-schedule Mondays.
According to this blog, Egg-lemon soup was well-received the last time I made it. It’s a quick and simple soup that also provides some protein, thanks to the eggs.
To make the soup more substantial, I cooked up a nice organic chicken breast, weekday style, and then shredded, and used it as a garnish.
For salad, we had a much simpler version of this elaborate and delicious escarole salad. The simple version was great, the recipe is below. You can find the Egg-lemon soup recipe here.
• Escarole & Cheddar Salad with Creamy Mustard Dressing •
for the salad:
1 medium head escarole lettuce
1 cup freshly grated cheddar (or gruyere) cheese
for the dressing:
2 tablespoons plain greek yogurt
1 1/2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 1/2 teaspoons dijon mustard
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1/2 cup olive oil
Wash the escarole lettuce well, then spin it dry and tear it into bite size pieces. To make the dressing, combine all ingredients except the olive oil in an 8oz-ish jar and mix well. Add the olive oil, lid the jar, and shake vigorously to combine. When ready to serve, toss the lettuce with the dressing. You may not need all of the dressing, depending on how big your head of escarole is, so start with half and go from there. When salad is well dressed, top with grated cheese. Toss again at the table, to distribute the cheese.
I wasn’t too excited to receive weird broccoli rabe, with extra-thick stems, in my CSA box this week. When I gave it a closer look this evening, I realized it might not be broccoli rabe.
Upon checking my CSA web site, I discovered that it was Guy Lon (or Chinese broccoli), and that those extra-thick stems could be eaten with minimal effort.
I now have a new favorite broccoli. Guy Lon is really flavorful, even a little bit sweet. It doesn’t have even the remotest amount of the bitterness of broccoli rabe. So don’t be fooled by it’s similar appearance.
With it we had cheese ravioli with a very simple fresh tomato sauce made with 1/2 a stick of butter, a teaspoon of fresh, slivered, sage leaves, and two fresh, chopped, plum tomatoes.
I thought that maybe a third night of pasta in a row was too much, but Shane said it would be okay if we pretended to be Italian. I’m half Italian, so it wasn’t much of a stretch.
• Easy Guy Lon (or Chinese Broccoli) •
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 cloves of garlic, peeled and smashed with the flat side of a knife
a pinch of red pepper flakes
1 large bunch Guy Lon
Wash the broccoli well, and trim off the bottom most part of the stems (only about 1/2 an inch). Cut each stem, or the whole bunch, in half crosswise so that half of the bunch is mostly thick stems and the other half is leaves, tops and florets. Halve the thick stems lengthwise, and set aside. Heat about 3 tablespoons olive oil in a large skillet. Add two smashed cloves of garlic and a pinch of red pepper flakes and cook over medium-high heat until the garlic begins to color, just a minute or two. Add the broccoli stems and cook for 3-4 minutes. Add the tops, leaves and florets, and cover. After a minute, uncover and stir to coat all of the broccoli with oil. Cook for another 3 minutes or until the broccoli is tender to the bite, but still bright green. Season with salt and serve immediately.
My folks came to town this weekend to celebrate with me. My birthday is exactly a week after Rose’s, which means that by the time it comes along, I’m tired of celebrating and don’t really want to do anything.
But really, it’s hard to say no when my mom offers to come down and cook for us. We had my folks, sister, aunt, uncle and cousin over for a delicious dinner of vegetable lasagna, two salads, sausages and birthday macaroons. To add to the celebratory-ness of it all, my aunt and uncle also share a birthday month with Rose and me.
The lasagna was the wonderful Vegetable Garden recipe from the New Basics Cookbook. It’s a labor of love kind of dish, it literally takes hours to make. You have to prep each vegetable separately. But it’s worth the time if you can find it. Thanks mom!
I don’t know what my mom did with the salads (aside from use up a lot of my CSA veggies—thank you) but they were spectacular, as always. She says I’m a close second, but she really is the salad queen.
The macaroons were a delightful departure from cake. Not that I don’t love cake, but we’ve been eating Rose’s all week. They were chocolate chip macaroons stuffed with dark chocolate ganache. They didn’t last.
Thanks family, for celebrating with me.
Honestly, I don’t know what exactly happened with dinner tonight. I made Penne alla Vodka and a CSA salad (topped with roasted corn). My mom added rotisserie chicken, pita and roasted potatoes from the chicken place around the corner. It was a little bit weird, but no one went hungry, that’s for sure.
We caught up with family and friends, wine and much rum was consumed, princesses were paraded, and all was well.
We met some friends at the coffee shop for dinner tonight. What a wonderful idea! Why did I not think of it before?
The kids had a grand old time, eating, wrestling and who knows what else. And the moms got to chat over a glass of wine… or mineral water (sigh).
As if wrestling, tickling and running all around wasn’t enough. Rose felt compelled to work out on her new gymnastics bar, from the moment we got home, until we peeled her off of it, at 10 minutes past bedtime.
The chicken was not really aged, Rose and Shane just decided to have some fun with their ketchup, and their ages. For the record, neither of them has seen Breaking Bad, this was purely honest ketchup creativity.
It’s the same Parmesan Chicken Goujon recipe that we had last week. Now that I’ve remembered it, and Rose has decided it’s her favorite meal, I think we’re going to have it a lot.
Note: People with kids, or kid-like food preferences, you should really try this recipe.
Of course it’s an easy make-ahead dish as well. You can prepare the chicken all the way up to the baking part, and then just let it hang out (covered, if you have pets) until 12-18 minutes before you plan to eat dinner. Which is what we did tonight.
Fortunately, and unfortunately, Shane was home to pre-heat the oven, which is what made this meal possible.
He was home because the tightwad bastards at Cigna cut off his physical therapy coverage. This means that he’s now available to do some dinner prep on our crazy-schedule nights. Delightful as that may be, I think I’d prefer for him to recover fully from his surgeries.
With our chicken—or without it, in my case—we had roasted CSA peppers and the rest of last night’s kale & potatoes.
Our Rose Lilliana turned 6 today. Being someone who loathes the passage of time, I’m always a bit of an emotional wreck on her birthday. Fortunately, I was able to snag a chaperone spot on her school field trip today. This kept me from sitting at my desk all day, mourning the loss of the baby, toddler and little kid that she once was.
Rose had a couple of requests for her birthday dinner. One was steak, the other, a purchased cake. It kind of breaks my heart that she wanted a store-bought cake instead of a homemade one, but I don’t want her to grow up feeling all deprived because she never got a cake from a store. Also, I let her have Doritos today, for the first time in her life.
We got a nice Local Harvest shell steak from Fresh Direct, which I seasoned with the leftover steak seasoning from our chili, and grilled in the grilling pan. Shane and Rose approved of the seasoning, Rose saying that it was spicy in a good way, like Doritos.
For starch, we had potato and celery root mash, from this recipe, again, except without any measuring. It seems like any reasonable combination of potatoes, celery root, butter and sour cream with a squirt of dijon, is delicious.
We kept up the Kale Challenge tonight too. A friend (who is an actual food writer) recommended preparing kale Greek Style to really get through a lot of it. What this means is that you blanch your greens (baby kale in our case), squeeze out the water and dress liberally with olive oil and lemon juice.
I decided to add crumbled feta, because cheese is my solution to all problems. The blanched baby kale (two varieties) came out tasting a lot like lightly-cooked spinach, and only benefitted from the addition of lemon, olive oil and feta.
For lack of a better way to describe it’s pre-cooked volume, I’d say the recipe used up approximately 1 cubic foot of baby kale. Our kale supply is now fully depleted… until we get more on Thursday.
We ordered a birthday cake from Billy’s Bakery in Chelsea which is our go-to bakery for purchased cakes. They make a classic cake that looks very much like homemade, but is just perfect enough to give itself away as bakery-made. Rose approved, so all was well.
Happy Birthday baby girl. We love you.
Since the night we had chili was by far the smoothest of our hectic schedule nights, I decided to repeat it tonight. To learn more, and for the extremely delicious vegetarian and/or turkey chili recipe, click here.
Rose ate dinner at a friends house tonight. What that meant for me was total creative freedom in the kitchen. No need to hold back on the spice, or cilantro, no leaving green bits out, no thinking about whether any of what I’m making is something she’ll be willing to eat. Hallelujah!
So did I whip up a nice spicy Indian feast for the hubby and I to knock down with a couple of beers? Hell no! I don’t have energy for that kind of thing. I took a nap, and then made glorified leftovers.
You might recall that Shane is not a leftover person. This has not changed. However, the Patriots lost today, which means Shane is depressed, which means he wasn’t that hungry, nor was he in the mood to complain.
I made black bean and goat cheese quesadillas with the beans left over from Friday’s dinner. Some roasted CSA peppers went well over greens with leftover creamy cilantro dressing. I made a spicier version of Friday’s pico de gallo. And we each got a nice bright orange olive-oil fried egg, from Sawkill Farms, which represents at our local greenmarket.
When Rose arrive home, she was not only fed but bathed as well, and we were quite relaxed.
Happy Sunday!
