This has been a tumultuous week, I feel like it’s been non-stop action, good and bad, start to finish. I couldn’t think of anything in the world I wanted for dinner after back-to-back parties today, and a lot of drama over the impending storm.

When all else fails, I make pasta with red sauce. I always serve pasta & red sauce with grated parmesan or pecorino cheese, the lack of cheese in the photo above was an oversight.

Those cube shaped things are Butter-Braised Kohlrabi, which might be my favorite kohlrabi recipe yet. I didn’t trust the recipe when it said not to peel the kohlrabi, and I think that was a good choice.

I also discovered a great way to entertain a 3-5 year old while cooking. Boggle Junior! All you have to do is insert the card, every time you do, you get a whole 30-60 seconds of “free time” to cook while he or she looks for letters and spells the word. Genius.

What do you make when you don’t know when or if people will be coming over for dinner? My first choice is lasagne, tonight it was Butternut Squash & Sage Lasagne from Martha Stewart. With butternut squash from my csa box, and sage from our coop’s communal garden, I was more or less all set to go. I like to keep a box of Barilla no-cook lasagne noodles in my pantry and I used them instead of making fresh pasta, which is what the recipe called for.

The lasagne is easy to make and all it needs is a veggie side or two to make a hearty meal that can be served whenever your guests arrive, or even saved for another day.

I know that I’m exceptionally meat-tolerant for someone who doesn’t eat meat, but every now and then I feel like I’ve gone too far. Like tonight when it really hit me that I’d made a meatloaf. Meatloaf! It just feels weird.

This meatloaf however, Ina Garten’s Turkey Meatloaf, solved some major dinner-related problems for me. I have to give it credit for that. Also, Shane ate almost all of it, which means that it was pretty good, or that he didn’t have lunch.

Problem number one: Thursday night is a bitch. Somehow between bus drop-off and csa pickup and the resting and snacking that needs to happen in between, I can never manage to get dinner on the table by 7-ish. And 7-ish is when it dinner really needs to be on the table for the evening to go smoothly. Solution: This meatloaf is quick and easy to prepare, and then it bakes for an hour and a half leaving plenty of time to get your evening stuff done. The recipe says you can serve it hot, at room temperature, or cold in a sandwich. It’s incredibly versatile as a make-ahead recipe.

Problem number two: Shane bought a ton of ground turkey at Costco. There is so much ground turkey that we barely have room for the important things, like compostable food scraps, ice and vodka. Solution: The recipe uses up 5 pounds of ground turkey. Hallelujah!

In case you’re wondering what I ate, we also had rice, ad-hoc baked tofu, and another variation on that delicious roasted broccoli. This time I added a squeeze of lemon and parmesan cheese. Yum.

Have I mentioned that I’m not the best planner-aheader? I was all set to make a vegetarian version of this Easy Pasta Bake with Tomato, Mozzarella & Prosciutto from The Kitchn tonight. When I got started I realized that the tomato sauce it calls for, Marcella Hazan’s Famous, would take 45 minutes, and I just didn’t have that much time.

My solution was to make a no-bake version of the dish, and it came out pretty well, in a messy, cheesy sort of a way. Shane called it “a delicious, cheesy dish,” and had seconds.

What I did was this: I started the Marcella sauce, which really is remarkably good for something so easy and with so few ingredients, and put the water on to boil. About 30 minutes into cooking the sauce I put the pasta in. Meanwhile I grated 1 cup of mozzarella, I thought the 2 cups that the recipe calles for would be too much for a no-bake version, and it would have been. Then I chopped the fresh mozzarella. When the pasta was cooked and drained, the sauce was also done. I added the pasta to the sauce pot and mixed in the cheeses. All was done in 45 minutes flat.

We also had a fennel, apple, dill and caper salad (with Rita’s Dressing, naturally). This week’s csa box is officially depleted.

This morning I discovered some chunks of plastic-wrapped meat in the fridge which hadn’t been there the night before. I called Shane and left a message: “Hey, it’s me. Are we having big chunks of beef for dinner? Let me know so I can plan accordingly. Thanks”

A few minutes later, I received an email response: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/giada-de-laurentiis/filet-mignon-with-balsamic-syrup-and-goat-cheese-recipe/index.html Shall I buy the Chevre or will you pick it up?

And it was settled. We were having big chunks of beef for dinner, because Rose loves meat and it’s her birthday. I cooked the steak as in the recipe above.

The new oven fries recipe that I tried tonight was great. It requires a few extra steps but is definitely worth the time, if you have it. The fries came out crispy and good. We dipped them in the leftover dill sauce from Friday. I think that sauce would be good on pretty much anything, it was great on the fries.

I made a waldorf-type salad with the last of my csa escarole, some apples from our recent trip to Dr. Davies orchard, grated cheddar cheese and my new favorite salad dressing. The thing I’m loving about escarole these days, is that you can put the dressed leftovers in the fridge after dinner and it’s still good enough to for lunch the next day.

We’re tired and the Pats were playing. I served dinner buffet style from the stove, and we ate in front of the TV. This is a very rare occurrence in our home.