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.

Weekend Update January 13, 2014

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. 

Dr. Seuss

I love Dr. Seuss. Really. Lines from his books, lodged in the brain after years of reading them aloud, still give me comfort and courage. Except.  Except here's a thing about making resolutions, choosing directions and  steering new courses. You write them down on ruled lines and plot them directly from point A to point B but after not very much time you realize that resolutions are like spaghetti- they start out straight and smooth and simple, but dunk them in hot water,

and they get a little tangley.

Take, as a teensy microcosmic example, this little blog. Last week, my mind was occupied with the phenomenon of resolution rebound. That is, the thing that happens when you try to shape your life around a negative

Surely you've seen it- someone spends the energies of her most energetic years determined to NOT, NEVER, NO WAY be like her mother, and one day she calls you to laugh or cry over the thing you already knew-

she is an awful lot like her mother.
Of course, if  her mom has loads of style,
this is may not be a horrifying revelation.
(I mean, pink with red hair in
the 50's! What a woman!)

Last week, the thought occurred that resolves get results when they're shaped around what you love. Which is not as easy as it sounds.

Because the world is filled with lots and lots of things to love.   What if, for instance, you love the things that a fit and healthy body can do for you,

but you never met a cookie you couldn't fall
in love with?

  Or, say you resolve to up the healthy eating around here with a positive plan for Meatless Mondays and  Fishy Fridays, but then things you love ever so much more than a plan come to town?

You flex the plan,
and direct yourself toward
the things you love best of all.

 Early in the week, dlife Cabbage Soup went off without a hitch,

super easy, super tasty

 Two notes:  1) My friend Ester was right- throwing a sliced  low fat sausage into this soup makes it even better.

2) The raisins! Weird as it seems, don't leave them out- they add a wonderful mellow sweetness to the soup, and plump up and sink out of sight to the bottom of the pot. Which is nice. Because, as it turns out, though raisins may make this soup taste good, they are even more unattractive waterlogged and bloated

than they are when they're
all shrively.

 Then the  arrival of our son and his girlfriend took the weekend in a happily different direction.  Suddenly a plain plank of baked salmon wasn't nearly fun enough, so our first fishy Friday slipped off the hook. But  this absolutely fantastic coconut soup and this great Pad Thai recipe came together and turned Fishy Friday into Thaiday Friday. 

Next came a night of plowing through the fridge for leftovers- let's call it Salvage Saturday.

Which meant no leftover chicken or fish for today.

So our fish tacos were made, for the first time ever, with firstover fish- turning today into a great Salmon Sunday!

What a great recipe! Here are the chunks of (very cheap frozen) salmon in a zip bag with cumin and chili powder:

And in the pan, after a very short (about 6 minutes) sear in a hot pan:

And on a tortilla with the last of my Mother's East Texas Cabbage, avocados, jack cheese and Rodrigo sauce

Upside: One week into the new year, and I have not yet totally busted the let's-have-fish-once-a-week plan.

Downside: These tacos were so good that tacos with leftover fish will from now on and forever seem not quite as good.

Meh.  As the downside of this week's foodventures, I can live with that.

I hope the downsides of your week are easy to live with-

And I hope that what you need more of

 lies within easy reach and

what you need less of 

falls away gently.

I hope all the things you wish for 

surrender graciously to all the things you love best.

And that the path 

down which your loves lead you

is full of happy adventure.

Menus and grocery lists, January 7, 2014

You've got to ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive

e-lim-inate the negative

Johnny Mercer

If the first week of the year, when our attention is steered at high speed round a curve so tight, 

it makes hairpins look like straight pins.

It seems that just as the last page closes on the last cookie, cheesecake, fudge or fudge swirled cheesecake with a cookie crust recipe in the last magazine of the year, 

the next issue opens with news that you really ought to feel
guilty about indulging in so much of that horrible stuff
 and get to work working it off.

Sure, it's as good a time as any to grab a fresh start or turn over a new leaf or chart a new course. But which old race is restarting, and what was wrong with the old leaf anyway, and is this new course even on the map, or should we pull over and ask how to get to where we're going? The thing is, "anywhere but here" might be an interesting direction to head in if one has a full tank of gas and nowhere to go, but lots of good and hopeful plans shipwreck

when you navigate by negatives.

Lots of us know, from discouraging experience,  that this time of year comes loaded with 6 full barrels of motivation by detestation. You know, it's the New Year, and so one is supposed to take stock and take a long look in the mirror- either

A. An actual (shudder) full length mirror that reflects your whole body.

B. A metaphorical Dorian Gray mirror that reflects the condition of one's soul (shudder shiver)

C. The metaphorical mirror of mockery that reflects your unachieved life goals (shudder again)

D. The numerical mirror otherwise known as the bathroom scale (ok, now this is getting really scary)

E. All of the above 

And having braved the terrors of any or all of the above mirrors, one is supposed to change something. Or lots of things. Or lots and lots of things, depending on how the mirror-gazing and the stock-taking panned out. And all too often, one adds a few pages to the well-read volume titled "things I hate about myself", and reaches for a cookie and a comforting beverage. And things stay pretty much the way they are.

Because while self-loathing may be satisfying way to spend a rainy afternoon,

it's pretty lousy at motivating change.

Hate a thing hard enough and long enough, and you will probably become (or remain) the very thing you despise. Because hatred, which is well known to have absolutely zero sense of humor,

still knows how to get the last laugh.

So, if you're going to start the New Year by walking the plank onto the deck of the ship of good intentions bound for ports of positive change, you're more likely to get there if you like what you know about where you want to go, and give the heave ho to hating who and what and where you're coming from.

Lucky for me, I had some help.

Sure, the year started with all the usual lists of lesses and mores: 

-more vegetables, less meat (goal: One vegetarian meal and one fish meal a week)

-more exercise, more reading (goal: learn to read while using a treadmill. Goal: get a treadmill)

-more healthy snacks, less sugar (goal: invent a carrot that tastes like a chocolate cookie)

What I didn't expect was the gift from my mother that got the first meals of the year off to such a fun and nutritious start- look what she grew!

No, not the guy! That's my daughter's boyfriend,
modeling the two head-sized heads of cabbage
I brought home from my mother's garden.

here they are serving as table decorations while I pondered what to do with them, along with a platterful of the cutest little turnips, also courtesy of that rich East Texas soil:

Lucky too, that when I happened to say out loud "What in the world can I do with all this cabbage without boiling it till all the vitamins give up or coating it with mayo?" I was in the company of my good friend Esther, who pointed me to dlife.com, the website that helped her steer straight away from the looming threat of diabetes.

And that's where this week's dinners get their start:

Wednesday: Cabbage soup 

I love the look of this dlife recipe!

Well, except the caraway seeds. I can peck at most nuts and seeds with all the enthusiasm of a true bird-brain, but maybe not caraway seeds. Maybe fennel or dill or thyme instead. 

I'll use the food processor to shred a whole head of cabbage for this soup, and ziploc the leftover shreds for fish tacos over the weekend.

Esther recommends slicing some low fat smoked sausage or kielbasa into the soup, and that sounds great to me, though I may decide to make this meal meatless.

Sausage doesn't really count as meat, does it? 

If the idea of dinner without carbs makes you sad, try toasting some rye bread or making some wholewheat cornbread to serve alongside.

Thursday: Baked Teriyaki Chicken and Pad Thai

Two ways to go here- either give a try to this fast and easy homemade teriyaki, or pick up a rotisserie chicken. Recipe calls for chicken thighs, but we may go for leaner chicken breast, if I can find it on sale somewhere. The pad thai includes chicken in the recipe, but we'll be leaving that out. Can't find rice noodles for the Pad Thai? That's okay- use ramen noodles (without using the seasoning packet) or angel hair pasta instead.

 Friday: Baked salmon and roasted cabbage steaks

 Thanks again to the ladies at the old workplace, who tell me that rubbing slices of cabbage with garlic and olive oil and baking it is all the rage because it's easy and it tastes great. It at least looks fun, doesn't it, and I'll hop like a lemming on any rage that is all about good health and good taste. We'll start what I hope becomes a routine that I'm going to call Fishy Fridays with a simple baked salmon. Since I've yet to consistently cook a piece of fish I like that is not fried, I've linked to a basic tutorial on baking salmon that includes some ways to jazz it up. A few extra pieces of salmon will make Sunday's fish tacos no work at all. 

Saturday: Thai coconut soup 

The home audience has requested a soupier approach to dinner, and soupy he shall get. Any leftover chicken will shred itself into this soup, and I'll leave out the ramen in the recipe and serve a little (hopefully brown) rice on the side instead. 

Sunday: Fish Tacos 

Everything comes together in this easy, nutritious dinner- the leftover salmon, the leftover rice,  the rest of the shredded cabbage, (though it's not in the picture, cabbage is, for some reason, super tasty on fish tacos). With all of this stuff already done, I might stir up a batch of the legendary Rodrigo Sauce  to top it all off. 

So there's a week of menus that set the direction for the rest of this year- heavy on the veggies, light on the meat, and a fish or two for good measure.

I hope your week measures up to all your best intentions-
I hope that no matter where you're starting from,
the who that you want to be
and the whats that you wish for
become so clear
that you can steer straight toward them.
I hope the journey of this year 
faces you forward, 
and teaches you how to carry
the things that can't be left behind.
And even though things may get scary,
though your destination seems hopelessly distant,
I still wish for you, now as ever,

a bon voyage, and a glorious adventure.