Menus January 28, 2014

In the many there are one.
Stephen Lawhead.

Here's a funny thing about things- they're never just one thing. 

here's a simple example:

is this one tree, or many leaves, branches and roots?

now a little harder-...is this a little boy enjoying an unusual snack,

or a psychotot who's just hidden the
lid of this can sharp side up at the
bottom of the sink?

harder still....is this an ocean....

or a vast ecosystem that contains vast ecosystems,
each one of which supports a near infinite variety
of distinct organisms each one of which

is far more than just one thing?

(Whew. I don't know if I'm dizzy because I just spun out my own brain, or because I thought that last sentence without taking a breath.)

Here's the hardest of all- is this guy a fearless, patriotic hero...

Or a remorseless, sadistic murderer?

The easy and unsimple answers are: yes, psychotot, yes, and yes (unless your last answer is who? what? 24?) 

No one thing is ever just one thing- not plants, or people, and certainly not Januaries. Well, at least here in Texas, where a cold and windy week has been bracketed by warm weekends that provoke the sort of giddy talk usually reserved for spring: 

"Really ladies,  I dread turning into someone who talks
with interest of the weather, but OH MY GOSH this
beautiful weather! Let's never go indoors!! I can't wait
to explore this stream with my granddaughter Dora! Who
brought food?  Did I mention weather?"

One day cold, one day warm, heater in the morning, t-shirts by lunch-  it's a fun challenge to plan dinner, when  the soup that sounds good in the morning, may need to turn into salad by the afternoon. 

Here's how I'm hoping to roll with this crazy wonderful mercury:

Wednesday: Pan seared chicken and kale and beet salad

Just look at this beautiful salad!  Kale and winter beets! It's salad! It's winter! I'm so excited!. The recipe is right- giving the kale a good  rub down on its way to the salad bowl makes a heap of difference. The protein here is just a supporting player; a nice honey-brined chicken breast, pounded thin and quickly fried in olive oil should be perfect. Any leftover chicken will go into tomorrow night's gumbo.

Thursday: Gumbo

Mom, I have one, count em- oh wait, you don't need to count em cause there's only ONE bag of your garden's tomatoes and okra left in the freezer, and I'm using it tonight. We shall somehow commemorate this bittersweet occasion- some sort of somber memorial of how much life your garden gave over the summer. And then we'll dig in. There is at last a small packet of a spice called gumbo file (as in feel-ay, with a French thingy over the e. Unfortunately, this keyboard is the Standard American model- it means well, and is easy going, but it only speaks English.)

Friday: Honey and lime salmon and broccoli

The great honey lime marinade that my daughter suggested using on tilapia gets a try out with salmon tonight, and a simple pan sear will let the marinade flavors shine. I'll be roasting the broccoli in a pan or in the oven, for no particular reason. Well, unless taste is a particular reason. Roasted broccoli is just a whole lot tastier that steamed. 

Saturday: Chili and mexican slaw

Hard to believe, but this is the first time this winter that I've broken out this great chili recipe. Cross it with the spices in Deb's Hot Rod Chili if you want to take it up a notch, and spoon out some of the browned meat for tomorrow's salad.

Sunday: Cheeseburger salad

There seems to be some sort of important sporting event going on today (go Denver!!!). You may have your party menu all planned, or you may be relying on the menu of your favorite sports pub, or you may be wondering what I'm talking about. This Pioneer Woman salad looks great, whether you're eating with a crowd, or alone, or using gametime to go somewhere that's usually crazy crowded on a Sunday afternoon. It's a sort of deconstructed cheeseburger that looks hearty enough for winter, and light enough for what could be a relatively warm day. Because it'll be February! And if there's a month in Texas that can be 12 different months, it's February.

We'll deal with the multiple personalities of a Texas February when they get here. 

For now, I want you to know that I know-

I know that you too are never just one thing.

You, and the people you love

are hardly ever only 

just one thing.

And I hope that this week

you and the people you love 

are okay with that.

And that you find a way to embrace

all the wonder 

and beautiful diversity

of the mighty ocean

that ebbs and flows within your soul

Weekend Update, January 26, 2014

"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art....

It has no survival value; 

rather it is one of those things which give value to survival."

C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis is somewhere around seven oceans smarter than I am, so I'm sure he's right about this. I mean, let's say one was stuck, alone and friendless, on the proverbial desert island. One could survive. One could survive absolutely alone, and there would be nothing about a having a friend on that island that would make survival more likely....

okay, so Wilson is the exception.

all right, Robinson Crusoe and Friday are
exceptions too.

okay, okay, so maybe it's scary deserted islands
that are the exception.

Whether one can survive without them or not, friends make surviving sweeter. They're the people who are willing to be a part of your process, the people who you trust, the people to whom you can say your weirdest stuff,

and know that they won't get bent out of shape.

Friends give you room to fire off questions

without trying to shoot you down,

and they know how to help you with the hard stuff.  Stuff like making peace, and making plans, making decisions, and making dinner- though admittedly, different sorts of friends have different ways of helping.

Here's how I imagine a guy friend helping another guy friend decide what to cook:

(some of my best friends are guys, which is how you can know that this a totally and completely not sexist imagining of  a conversation I, being not a guy, could never have actually been a part of.)

Women friends (or at least a few of mine) can collaborate on a dinner plan as if it were a wall, one idea stacking on top of the other like hastily-mortared bricks:

When you're playing and planning with friends who tastes you trust, great things can happen- at least they did this week:
A shaved Brussels sprouts salad with grapefruit and walnuts was rostered early in the week, and I was all set to start sprout shredding, when my friend Rachael wondered out loud what this salad would be like with kale instead of Brussels. Only one way to find out....

here it is, with pecans instead of the more expensive
hazelnuts, sittin' pretty next to
  Alton Brown's worth-every-carby-calorie mac and cheese.

And then, naturally, one wants to know what it tastes like in the original....

here it is with the corned beef- actually, I kinda liked the
kale version better.

Later in the week, we were set to try the red cabbage slaw and honey lime tilapia that my daughter had enthusiastically recommended. Except I had forgotten to put a red cabbage in the shopping cart. There was, however, right there at our fridge's front and center, half a zip bag of shredded Brussels sprouts. So, after a quick "what do you think" style pick of the brain of my friendly daughter Liz, the swap was made:

Three reasons this salad looks not as good as it tasted:
1. My camera phone
2. the use of balsamic instead of apple
cider vinegar sort of browned things out.
3. My not so great photog skilz

The tilapia, by the way, was great- something about marinating it in a bit of honey gave it a wonderful crispy caramelized edge. We cooked the marinated fillets in olive oil; Liz says they're even better cooked in coconut oil, and I can't wait to try this marinade on salmon! 
That'll happen Friday-
But until then,
I hope that this week, you're in the company
of friends-
 people who help you
with the hard work of staying alive,
and make that hard work
worthwhile.
I hope you're in the company 
of friends who respect your boundaries
and never push past your limits
and know exactly the right way

to help you dance along life's ledges.

Menus, January 22, 2014

“There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.” 

P.G. Wodehouse

Opposites, as they say, attract. They being the lots and lots of people who have who go all swoony over  stories that start with people who dislike each other eventually finding out that if bees had knees, the dreamboat they had once seen as the scum on the pond of humanity would be them. These stories of opposites slamming together like protons and neutrons looking for an atom to call their own go way, way back- there's the love of dark Hades for the sunny Persephone-

Wait, not that one,
that ended badly.

Or there's the sweet, resolute Juliet falling like a ton of Verona bricks for that fickle, moody Montague boy-

Okay, not a real happy ending
for those guys either.
Hmmm.
Ron and Hermoine maybe?

The thing is that though opposites may attract, odds are even that if they approach each other at a high rate of  speed, 

things are going to get a little wrecked.

Which is why beautiful, enduring friendships often start with frequent repetitions of phrases like "me too!"  or  "I thought I was the only one!" Sort of like this:

"Wow! I thought I was the only half-dressed,
high-voiced, mousy music lover
in the whole world!"
"Me too!"

Lovers of all things bookish know that to recommend a favorite book to a new friend is to offer a test of potential me-too-ness; if they pass, you may have found someone with whom you can share your deepest pleasures. Which is great, because someone with whom you can share your deepest pleasures may just turn out to be someone with whom you can share your deepest woes.

even if on the outside,
you're not very much alike.

That's why this week's dinners lined up around the  suggestions of a few people who love reading some of the same sort of stuff I do- my daughter, (who puts so much imagination into the reading of recipes that dinner's as good as cooked before the groceries are home) and the teeny and not-so-teeny Denverites who have shared their reading and eating passions with me all week.

Wednesday: Corned Beef and Cabbage.

Here's an easy one pot warmer for a January night. Easy, that is, if you totally disregard Alton Brown's instructions for starting with a beef brisket and brining it yourself in the fridge for ten days. Just start with a corned beef brisket from the supermarket. I'm going to try this in a slow cooker, and I may add an interesting liquid- maybe a little apple cider- to the cooking water. Zip bag some of that shredded green cabbage for a slaw on Friday, and any leftover corned beef is turning into sandwiches on Saturday.

Thursday: Macaroni and Cheese with Shaved Brussels Sprout Salad.

On one hand, this recipe looks way more complicated that the instructions on the blue box of mac and cheese. On the other hand, this is not blue box mac and cheese. It'll take a little while, but it's really yummy, and you can freeze the leftovers. The same two year old who named mac and cheese as his favorite dinner took me on a lunch date last week where I had a salad that was copy-worthy at first bite. Just clean and thinly slice some Brussels sprouts (kale or cabbage would be great too)  lay on some grapefruit sections, walnuts and feta, and top it with a dressing like this grapefruit vinaigrette.

Friday: Honey Lime Tilapia and Red Cabbage slaw

Here's a recipe that earned raves from my daughter- a simple marinated fish, and a simple un-mayonaisey slaw. If you have a food processor with a slicing blade, it'll make quick work of shredding both Brussels sprouts and cabbage, and if any of this meal is leftover, it'll tuck itself nicely into fish tacos for lunch.

Saturday: Butternut Squash Soup and Reuben Sandwiches

True, we had butternut squash soup just last week. Also true: it was very very good and I want some more. The recipe linked here includes canned pumpkin and cubed butternut squash, which is all pureed together before serving. If you're pressed for time (and who isn't?)  using another can of pumpkin is a great option.  Wednesday's leftover corned beef gets sliced thin and takes a warming trip through the microwave for these sandwiches- and I'm pretty sure my tummy just growled.


Sunday: Sweet and Savory Crepes

This idea comes to you from a sunny afternoon  at CrepesnCrepes in Denver, where the grown ups had a wildly delicious mushroom crepe, and the littlies surprised us by enjoying every last bite of a crepe packed with strawberries and blueberries. Here's the basic crepe recipe- fill them with berries, with the mushrooms in cream sauce linked to above, or with eggs and asparagus, or with- oh, you get the picture. That lunch, which proved that happiness can be wrapped up in pancakes, was followed by a stroll through a pedestrian mall, and a longing gaze through the window of The Hermitage Bookshop. Which was very sadly closed.
But I'll be back- There are books in there- books that, going by the name of the place, hermits come out of seclusion to recommend to each other. Or maybe it's a place where one can hermit oneself away among the shelves with only a few hundred of the very best characters ever written for company. 

Either way, that's sort of what I hope for you.
I hope that this week, 
you know the company of people
who can read your joys,
and don't skim over your sorrows.
I hope the people who know 
the story of your life 
see you as it's hero.
And that this week, once or twice,
you can revel in the sweetness of friendships

that are bound by books.

Weekend update, January 18, 2014

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me "Look for the helpers.

 You will always find people who are helping.” 

Fred Rogers

Days and weeks are filled with themes and thoughts, and there's nothing unusual about that. What makes one week different from another though, are the themes themselves- and the themes that have paraded through this week are as different from my norm as cotton candy is from cauliflower.
 and by cotton candy I mean

pink airy sweet stuff sprinkled with
edible sparkles that looks like some
sort of intergalactic fairy nebula.

and by cauliflower I mean

boiled cauliflower.

For instance, I can now recognize at least four My Little Pony ponies. I can name them on sight, describe their cutie marks and enumerate their particular magic powers. This will come in extremely handy 

the next time I am mugged by a plastic pony
and have to describe it to the police.

And there have been princesses. Lots and lots of princesses. All of whom, if you tip the story a certain way, have a helper- an invariably something not quite human, usually small, often goofy, always loyal helper. Whom no one aspires to be.

Sigh. Everyone wants to be the princess. No one wants to be the resourceful, diplomatic and musically gifted crustacean.

well, okay.
Almost no one.

The thing is, in most of the old stories, the Princess graduated to let's-pick-out-curtains-for-the-castle princesshood only after she'd earned an A in a long course of gracious and goodnatured helpering. Without ever knowing it was a prerequisite for princessness, these hard-working girls learned how to give and receive help.

This one did                                       and this one                                            and this one.

As well as the princess in training who has been helping me all week,

this one.

We started with the always phenomenal, super versatile red sauce. 

Here it is on night one as spaghetti sauce, served up for the pure food aficionados without any of its molecules doing any icky mingling with any other food molecules. 

sauce, meat, cheese and pasta in
separate compartments.
and yes, as a matter of fact, I did teach them to
test for pasta doneness by throwing a noodle against a wall.

On night two, it turned into pizza sauce

We used  this so-easy-an-actual-child-can-actually-do-it  no knead bread for a crust, and since we had a jar of basil pesto in the fridge, she also added pesto, chicken broth and half and half to some red sauce so she could offer her mother some tomato-basil soup. She assured me her mom would love it, and she was right.

The useful thing I learned this week, besides important and interesting facts about ponies and princesses, was that you really can make stellar butternut squash soup out of canned pumpkin.

here, we are learning that sometimes you just
have to let your hands get ookey.

Half of that butternut squash was sliced for roasting, leaving only half for the soup. So with my daughter's past experience to assure me, we spooned a can of pumpkin puree into this really great Apple and Butternut soup recipe. (We were a little too focused on it's warming soupy goodness to remember to take pictures.)

The only not so great dish of the week was, ironically, the one we picked from a list for picky eaters, this cheesy corn casserole. Not quite cornbread, not quite corn pudding, neither grownups nor children wanted more.

But if you have 15 minutes, a box of broth, about 3 other things, and a hungry tummy,  try stirring up this easy taco soup. 

it's this easy,

and this good.

We used broth instead of water and leftover cooked ground beef, but with leftover or canned chicken or no meat at all, this is still an amazing recipe thanks to the crazy secret surprise ingredient, a packet of ranch dressing mix. There, I've linked it twice, so you know I mean it.

And here's another thing I mean-

I mean it when I say that it matters.

What you do, what you have done,

to help the people you love with the 

hard work of living.

It matters.

And this week

though it may come in unexpected forms

and from unexpected places,

I hope that you receive in return

all the help you need.

Menus, January 15, 2014

"Puritanism: The haunting fear that 

someone, somewhere, may be happy."

H.L. Mencken 

Greetings from Denver Co, where Puritanism is rare, and purity abounds. Although, I could greet you from anywhere else, and purity would probably be abounding there too. Because as undeniably rare as purity is, there's an awful lot of it.
there's lots and lots of-

pure love

and the pure other things that accompany demonstrations
of pure love.

There's  pure weirdness

and pure terror

and there is here in Denver, as in many other places,  an awareness of and insistence on pure food. 

Though not necessarily the non GMO, zero pesticide, no growth hormone, zero additive, organically grown organic kind of food.  I'm happily curled up in a corner of Denver that bounds and bounds again with 

 

pure fun and cuteness,

and pure food around here means, and I quote: "Just plain" as in plain grilled cheese, plain broccoli, plain apples, plain pancakes and plain hot dogs.
I know, there are frustrated cooks out there who call a child with this sort of approach to food a "picky eater" but parents of children who've been tagged with this uncharitable label know (underneath the perpetual frustration) that their children are purists, who prefer food and life to be uncomplicated. They are contented little souls, who are happy with a bag of potato chips, and have no perceived need for adventures in asparagus.
Here is the look given me when I suggested adding vegetables to spaghetti:

I am, apparently, so silly.

This is a challenge for any grown up whose cooking philosophy can be summarized as
"Nourish people. Give them good food. Don't be boring."
 So I enlisted the help of my favorite pure food fan, who agreed to help me poke at the picky eater  recipe files on the web, 

and tell me which pictures she liked best.

And here's what she came up with, and how we've added a little soup or salad somethin to interest the grownups who prefer a more varied spread:


Wednesday: Spaghetti and Salad

We'll be using the simplest and most amazing recipe for spaghetti sauce in the world-canned tomatoes simmered with onion and butter until they form a thick, rich sauce that smells like the Italian restaurant street in Heaven. A simple salad for the grown ups of greens, fresh mozzarella, grape tomatoes and a dressing made from a bit of the red sauce whisked together with  vinegar and olive oil. Here's a trick learned many years ago from the food purist I was lucky enough to have given birth to: we'll put the pasta and the sauce and the browned meat in separate serving bowls. (Or in separate compartments of their adorable little sectioned plates.) That way, the individual diner is in absolute control of what food is on the plate, and so is in a position to prevent any impure touching.


Thursday: Pizza and salad

The link is to the amazing no knead bread recipe that I love breaking out whenever I can manufacture any reason at all to cook for people who don't have to be on any sort of gluten guard.  We'll be rolling out the dough and topping it with some red sauce from last night and "just plain" cheese. Another salad for the grown ups, or, if it's very cold, maybe a quick soup made by adding some beef broth and vegetables to leftover red sauce.







Friday: Quesadillas and Tortilla Soup

See the list of optional additives in the quesadilla recipe? We will not be using those. For at least one or two at the table, the quesadillas will be the just plain grilled cheese on a tortilla thing that a quesadilla ought to be. 
This soup recipe is one of the nicest surprises of the winter, and if there's any cooked ground beef leftover from the spaghetti, it'll get used up in the soup.




Saturday: Cheesy Corn Casserole and Butternut Squash Soup

My assistant menuplanner surprised us all by choosing the picture of this corn casserole from the line up of kid-friendly meals on Disney's family website. We'll make it a  monochromatic meal with butternut squash soup and some sliced oranges and maybe a few carrot sticks. And then we'll ask a two year old to say "monochromatic". 




Sunday: Chicken Satays and Pad Thai

Chances are, we'll skip the very nice looking Tyler Florance marinade and instead soak these little chicken swords in a just plain honey salt brine. We'll also pull the spaghetti trick with the pad thai: noodles will be served separately from the vegetables, hopefully making both noodles and veggies more attractive. 





I hope your week is fun and uncomplicated-
pure, without a hint of puritanical.
I wish for you days of clarity 
in the face of confusion,
happiness 
the middle of sorrows,
and humming a counterpoint 
to each day's chaos,
hour after hour of perfect, pure, 

absolutely just plain peace.