Cooking dinner for a week
As part of my deal with myself, I’m trying to cook more since I don’t really have an excuse now. I’ve cooked every night this week and we’re having leftovers tonight. I’m actually really enjoying putting together dinners that are slightly more involved. Instead of putting veggies in the oven and cooking some rice or cooking everything in one dutch oven, I’ve been using multiple pots and steps and for just that little extra work, the resulting meal is so much better. They almost look and taste like something I’d get at a decently nice restaurant. I used recipes found online for all of them with a few modifications or additions to each one.
Raw Tuscan Kale Salad
Monday: Raw tuscan kale salad with lemon pecorino dressing on a bed of wheat berries and topped with a poached egg. This was a delicious meal that I highly recommend. The dressing is pretty lemony and the cheese in it is amazing. I used an extra clove of garlic following my personal rule of always adding at least an extra clove of garlic to any recipe and I think that may have been a mistake, it was really strong. I used her suggestion of topping it with a poached egg (first time attempting that technique, quite a learning experience!) and instead of mixing it with farro, I just cooked some wheat berries and put the salad on top of them. I used almost an entire bunch of lacinato kale for two people which sounds like a lot but I could have eaten more.
Beet Bourguinon
Tuesday: Beet Bourguinon served with lentils and mashed potatoes. This was a recipe Drake sent me. I was a little wary at first because, while I like beets, I generally enjoy them as an accent flavor, not the dominating one. The earthiness of them really mellows out in this recipe, though; it wasn’t too beety at all. The recipe suggests only cooking the stew for 30 minutes total but at that point, the beets still weren’t cooked through. I started this at around 3 and just let it simmer until dinner. The lentils and mashed potatoes broke up the monochromatic effect and helped it be a little more filling. If you don’t outright hate beets, I definitely suggest trying this recipe.
Chili Relleno
Wednesday: Chili Relleno. Poblanos stuffed with a quinoa-bison mixture and topped with a pecan cream sauce, served with black beans. This recipe needed a few tweaks. I halved the stuffing recipe because there were only two of us eating it and ended up with way too much quinoa, I ended up leaving out about 2/3 cups of cooked quinoa. The sauce was really what needs work, though. It was just really bland. I don’t know if it would be better if the pecans were toasted or if they’d had time to sit in the milk and sour cream mixture so that some of the flavor could absorb, but the pecan flavor was pretty much undetectable and the sauce mostly just tasted like milk and sour cream. Overall the meal was good I just recommend being careful with the spicing of things. I didn’t get to put much time into the sauce but I think I’ll come back to this recipe in the future and put more focus on perfecting the sauce. Making it before the end of the meal would probably be a good idea.
Roasted Veggie Pizza
Thursday: Roasted vegetable pizza. I used the pioneer woman’s pizza dough recipe topped with pre-roasted sweet potatoes, red onions, carrots, garlic, beets, and broccoli. This is something I’ve made many times since we got a pizza stone and is one of the favorite meals in our house. Until we did this, carrots and beets on a pizza seemed completely outlandish to me, but trust me, they are fabulous. (Just make sure to roast them first because I’ve tried it without that step and it is not fabulous.)
Tonight will be leftover beet bourguinon because that made a lot of food.