Menus, May 28, 2014

“You can have the other words-

chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. 

I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it. ” 

Mary Oliver

Add the word circumstance to that happy list, and you'll have the crowd of words that have been riding the Ferris wheel of my mind all week. By Friday, the words circumstance, coincidence, serendipity and chance were all spinning so crazily 

that I got a little dizzy about which meant what.
And then I got  vocabuqueasy
and had to throw up a little.

 As an example, this time of year one hears so many repetitions of the graduation march "Pomp and Circumstance" that it's easy to forget the title: pomp,which is such a silly word that repeating it silently to yourself will make you giggle during all the wrong speeches, and circumstance, which was once used to speak of something that was very important:

Behold, a Man Of Circumstance

And most often now means an apparently random chain of events that affect someone or something:

Behold, a victim of circumstance.

So, if a particular set of circumstances leads to a coincidental meeting, is that the same as a chance meeting?
And let's say a girl, at some random party, happens to lock eyes and later lock lips with a cute guy...serendipity, right?

Or maybe the difference between
 serendipity and disaster  may all depend...

on where you end the story.

Here's what kick-started the engine on this engaging verbal hamster wheel: Last Wednesday, errands were interrupted when I made an impulsive detour into one of those shops where women go when they need to stop and smell the candles. There, amid a hundred candles and funny aprons and cookbooks, I met and ended up spending the next half hour or so in happy conversation with this guy:

That is professional chef turned entrepreneur Tim Halls, who has concocted and poured into  bottles some of the nicest BBQ sauce you ever tasted. Not too spicy, not too sweet, not too heavy on the vinegar- but what was even more intriguing to me was the versatility contained in this little plastic shaker bottle:

"So", I asked eventually, "If I were to, say, not have a single clue about what to have for dinner next week, but I did know that I wanted to play with this tasty stuff, and that I only wanted to actually cook once or twice, ummm...what would I, for instance, be having for dinner? You know, for the whole week?"

Thirty minutes later, I had in my eager little hands two nice candles, two jars of BBQ rub, and a full week of great menu ideas. You can check out Tim's terrifically fun collection of Barbecue lovin' Texans and take a closer look at or order some of his yummy creations on his website- 

Meanwhile, I'm going to strike while the serendipity's hot and start dinner.

Wednesday: Grilled pork tenderloin and chimichurri sauce and grilled salad

Ok. There's a link here to what looks like a very good grilled pork recipe, but I'll relay to you here the instructions Tim gave to me: Trim the silverskin (that white tendoney layer of stuff. Such a pretty word for such an ordinary thing. Go figure.), rub the tenderloin with your seasoning rub (there are dozens of rub recipes on the internet if you want to make your own...)and refrigerate the tenderloin overnight. Then grill or roast it in a 350 degree oven until it reaches an internal temp of 145 (Fahrenheit) and let it stand (well, lay there on the plate really) for 10 minutes or so before serving. Tim recommends a chimichurri sauce with this, and making a double batch means enough chimichurri to use with fish on Friday and burritos on Saturday. While the grill is on, it'll be fun to try a grilled lettuce salad and make a dressing by stirring up a spoon or two of  dry rub with plain yogurt or mayo or olive oil, even though the recipe suggests blending up a homemade Caesar dressing. The recipe also lists basil leaves in the ingredient list, but then doesn't seem to tell you what to do with them....



Thursday: Black beans and rice 

Classic black beans and rice, with a little preparation twist that I hadn't seen before and am eager to try. A spoon or two of last night's sauce would be great. Beans and rice are a complete meal, nutritionally, but if you find yourself wishing for a fresh vegetable, how about tossing some tomatoes and cucumbers in olive oil and vinegar?






Friday: halibut and chimchurri  and avocado quinoa bowl

I have Tim's word for it that the bottle of rub I bought is great on vegetables and fish, especially white fish, and there's bound to be a cup or so of chimichurri left in the fridge.  Around here, the fish will find a home next to a few things that are by a happy chance on hand and in need of using: quinoa, avocados and sweet potatoes.




Saturday: Black bean and pork burritos

Here's a trick I learned from my friend Katherine: there are nights when a really great dinner means putting all the leftovers that are in the refrigerator on a tortilla. This is one of those nights, but that doesn't mean it's not a great dinner. The rest of the pork will be shredded and warmed with a shake or two of seasoning, then loaded up on to the softest pillowiest tortillas I can find. The proverbial sky's the limit: lettuce, shredded cabbage, cheese, salsa? Yes to all that.




Sunday: Vietnamese Pork Sandwiches

This was Tim's answer to the question "What's an alternative to plain old pulled pork sandwiches?" 
What a great idea!!! Tim pickles his own vegetables and there are instructions in the recipe for that, but he's a chef, and I'm not, so we may make due with a jar of pickled vegetables, or even some kim chi. No matter what, these look terrific! 



Serendipity- a happy accidental discovery. 
That's what I hope for you all week long.
Even if circumstantial evidence leads you to 
expect a week of discovering disasters.
I hope you know that
through the unexpected encounter,
the lucky break,
the random opportunity,
that chance and providence are working
a grace on you- 
and that you feel yourself fortunate,
even on days

when you could feel like fortune's fool.

 

Weekend Update, April 20, 2014

"A goal is not always meant to be reached,

 it often serves simply as something to aim at." 

Bruce Lee

Little dreams get a bad rap. We're told (and we tell our children)  to dream big way before we understand the concept of metaphor, before we understand that dream is a word that can  mean a lofty and somewhat improbable goal, and not just the images thrown together by your sleeping brain. Which is a little confusing, because when you're little, the wrong kind of big dream can wake you up in a sweat, clutching your most heroic stuffed animal. When you're little, big dreams are sometimes awesome-

but mostly awful.

But then we grow up, and we understand that what ever dreaming big is, that's what we're supposed to do, and that dreaming big has nothing to do with sleeping in til noon,

(big sleeping being one of the ironic enemies
of big dreaming.)

 The loftier and more ludicrously unattainable the better. Because no one dreams of doing the diabolical-

well, almost no one

and no one dreams of achieving the reasonable. Well almost no one. It's not that I don't love the idea of being tall, brunette, comfortably famous and fabulously wealthy, but that's not the stuff my dreams are made of. As an example, I offer the small but worthy hope which has often begun my day:

please help me not hurt anyone
with my hands or my mouth or
heavy machinery.

Tiny but attainable. A goal that bite-sized means that at the end of the day, no matter what moved from the to-do list to the undone list, one can crawl into bed at night (no matter how many mountains of laundry one had to climb to get there) and assess daily success with a single question:   No one irreparably harmed? Well then:

Goooaaaallll!!!!!!

Or take a bigger wish- the wish to stay healthy and strong enough to accomplish a million dreams. That wish was broken into dinner sized pieces, and I dreamed last Tuesday of a week of fast, inexpensive, healthy meals that would power us through all we wanted to achieve.  It seemed like such a simple dream too. Here's what happened:

First up, Alton Brown's slow cooker pork chops. A great choice for a busy day. Or it would have been, if I had read the recipe. The recipe that says the pork chops ought to sit in the salt solution overnight. Too late for that, a few hours of brining would have to do. And the recipe calls for dried apples. Which I had forgotten to buy. Ok, there were two apples in the fridge. No time for searing, and no beef broth. The only interesting cooking type liquid in the house was a can of coconut milk. Coconut milk it is...

and do you know what?
They were great!!! What a forgiving and flexible recipe!

And I'd forgotten to make the quinoa ahead of time. Fortunately, this method of cooking quinoa is one of the fastest and most straightforward I've found. Once dinner was on the plate, I realized that the real objective wasn't a recipe, it was a healthy, yummy, inexpensive meal. So, you know-

gooooaaaallll!

After that, the week's tiny dinner-plate sized goals came together a little more easily.

adding radishes to black beans and rice!
Amazing!  

The black beans were so good in fact that we had, and this was a little hard to believe, not enough black beans for the bean part of the pork and black bean tacos. So they turned into just plain

  coconut lime tacos

When we have leftover pork anything except-for-ham-and-bacon, it usually gets covered with barbeque sauce and ladled onto a bun. And that's great, but these tacos are a terrific alternative- very simple sort of street taco stand tacos, with a filling so flavorful that mounds of toppings like salsa and sour cream are overkill. We'll be doing this again.

And if one of your goals is to be energetic and healthy, and your goal-to-get-you-to-the-goal goal is to cut out some fat without depriving yourself of flavor, try this:

Salmon on angel hair pasta with Dijon Butter Sauce.
It takes longer to type than it took to make.
and that sauce!! so much flavor for so little fat!  I can't
wait to try it on broccoli.

There was enough leftover quinoa for the quinoa and brown rice bowl with vegetables and tahini, but no leftover brown rice, and none in the pantry. So, dinner turned into quinoa and quinoa bowl with vegetables and tahini. Because a trip to the shop would have taken longer than it took to cook up dinner, and almost as long as it took to say the name of dinner.  Here's what this super complicated sounding meal really is- it's a veggie stirfry on quinoa, with a tahini sauce (a little like hummus) instead of a soy sauce. 

and avocados. Because avocados are for always.

But what to do with the left over leftover quinoa? Breakfast, that's what! And before you eewww at the idea of something so dinnery making the move to mornings, think of how wonderful it is when breakfast invades  dinner territory. And then read this very fun list of 24 ways to eat quinoa for breakfast. Since there were two cooked sweet potatoes, some kale and a stack of tortillas in the fridge, we brunched on Kale and Sweet Potato Breakfast burritos- and they were the surprise hit of the week:

Vegetarians rejoice! A great tasting portable, protein packed meatless meal.
Carnivores, you're right. It would be even better with bacon.

Even when I dropped the ball, these dinners made a touchdown- the slow cooker pork, the quinoa, the butter mustard sauce- all of them relatively easy, satisfying and inexpensive ways to wind down one day and fuel up for the next.  
And this week, I hope you have time to celebrate
the little goals, the daily dreams.

and that you hold in your hand a few of the
things you're reaching for.
I hope it's a week you're proud of.
And if it's not,
then I hope for you the courage to dream deeper
to reach deeper than the voices that tell you
what your dreams ought to be,

and name the dreams that are.

April 16 2014

“You can’t cross the sea 

merely by standing and staring at the water.” 

Rabindrath Tagore

Nor can you shape up that newly sprung spring garden by staring at the weeds, or clear out the flotsam and jetsam of winter

by staring at the closet.

It's really truly Spring up here in the Northern Hemisphere- well, mostly. Snow fell in Lubbock yesterday, but Lubbock doesn't count. Expecting Lubbock to match months to temperatures is a useless as expecting a dryer to match socks. 

For most of anyway, it's spring- and that means brains and backs and pinterest boards are popping with  projects that really need doing before the window of spring slams shut and summer roars in. Only the Holidays rival these next weeks in the stuff that needs doing to time it can be done in ration. The difference, the great big planetary difference, is that in spring, we are not fighting the urge to curl up with the rest of the natural world and take a nice long nap. In spring, the whole world is vibrating with energy, and all we have to do

is catch the wave.

Even though Spring is doing it's best to put a, well, spring in your step, if you want to tackle that list without developing a midwinter scowl, you'll have to eat well.  Because that's what eating well is for. Doing other stuff besides eating. No one chooses 

one of these...

instead of one of these...

because the ones of these of the first part, vis-a-vis carrots, taste better than the these of the second part, vis-a-vis a warm, gooey, chewy cookie.  Nope, you  (most of the time) choose the carrot over the cookie because you care about eating well. And you care about eating well because there's stuff besides eating that you want to do. So, in order to put my own spring project list in perspective, I asked menu advice from a friend whose spring projects include training to become....let's see, what was it?

No, no, that's Iron Giant....that's not right...
dial it down a little...

Oh! yes, Iron Man! that's right,
he's training for an IronMan.

Never a bad idea to ask someone who's  using tons of energy every day to reach a long-term goal what his family eats for dinner, and lucky me, it all sounded very tasty. Lots of vegetable protein, and lots of vegetable everything else, carbs and lean meat- here's the plan: 

Wednesday: Pork Chops and Quinoa

I learned last summer that a crock pot is the year-round friend of a busy day. Cast in the role usually played by rice or noodles in this meal is the high-protein friend of a busy of a busy tomorrow, quinoa. Both the quinoa and the pork show up later in the week, so extras are welcome and if there's energy left after the quinoa's made, it'll go into opening a bag of salad.

Thursday: Black Beans and Rice

One of our favorite sources of vegetable protein turns out to be a training day winner too. If you have time to kick it up a notch, try topping the black beans with this dressing made of tomatoes, peppers, vinegar and oil.  Beans have a law of physics all their own, and there are always leftovers, no matter how many you start with. Not to worry, they'll be great in tacos on Saturday night.

Friday: Salmon with Angel Hair Pasta and Asparagus

This looks just yummy- and take a look at that lemon mustard sauce pouring itself around where the higher fat hollandaise would go! Whatever springtime burst of energy you need for a busy Easter weekend, this'll help get it started.

Saturday: Black Bean and Pork Tacos

Pull out all the leftovers and a stack of tortillas and you've got tacos. Add a can of coconut milk, lime, cilantro, avocados and cheese and you've got great tacos. If you feel like the chips and salsa really ought to be there and you want to save some fat calories, try these homemade baked tortilla chips and open a jar of salsa or try Pioneer Woman's great (and fantastically easy!) homemade salsa.

Sunday: Quinoa and Brown Rice Bowl with vegetables

This would be a really time-consuming way to spend a Sunday; would be, if you didn't have leftover quinoa and rice waiting in the fridge, and a ripe avocado that you didn't use on the tacos. All that's left to be done is cook up the veggies an stir up the sauce, and you've got meal that will send you into next week feeling strong and satisfied.

 And I hope that no matter what you end up doing,
or what you end up eating,
that you feel strong and satisfied all week long.
whether it's running a marathon or running an office or running after preschoolers 
whether it's digging into problems or digging up weeds
whether it's taking a step toward a dream, or taking a hike.
I hope you feel the energetic earth 
giving you the lift that will float you
from one happy day

straight into another.

Menus May 21, 2013

Frugality without creativity is deprivation.

 Amy Dacyczyn

 
I've been thinking a lot this week about being wasted. 

no, not like that!

I've been thinking about what it means to waste time, waste effort, waste food, waste love or kindness, and what it means to waste money. So, I asked the dictionary. Which helped, sort of:

waste 

verb

1.

to consume, spend, or employ uselessly or without adequate return. 

So, waste is all about the math of what was spent versus what was gained. Sounds simple, yet it became slippery, and perplexingly relative: the definition of waste can depend on what one had to spend, balanced against what one needed to receive. I almost allowed myself to become quite lost on that rabbit trail, but..... it was time to cook dinner. 
And cooking dinner was a necessity which led to another oft visited concept:  frugality, which I'm pretty sure is not about avoiding spending, but about avoiding waste. At least I hope so. Because this week, I'm resplicing my frugal gene to my creative gene in the hope that I can once again....

spend money as if I were a miser        and feed people as if they were royalty

Why? Well, it's not for anything as abstract as a bank balance. No, I am that sort of woman who saves money to spend money, and there are about a bajillionty-seven things that I'd rather spend money on this summer than food. There are in fact so many things that I'd like to spend money on that I occasionally consult my canine counselor, AKA Josie the wonder dog. She tells me the list of things she'd like to spend time on, and I tell her the list of stuff I'd like to spend money on, hoping that her non-materialistic, zenny little soul will somehow influence my own.

this rarely works. But I keep trying.

This week and through the summer, I'll be (sigh) trying to stick to what we around here call a money diet, saving in one area so that we can do a little splurging in another. I'll tell you more about that this weekend, but for now, here's what we'll be having for dinner:

Wednesday:  Beef and Cheese Chiles Rellenos

Remember that  Oven Roasted Brisket from last week? I bought the smallest one, and it was still huge-nourmous. And it cost $30, which was also hard to swallow. However! Since it was roasted on Sunday, it's made 3 lunches, and this will be its third (and last) up-at-bat for dinner. So, you know, frugal. This basic rellenos recipe will be stuffed with a mixture of chopped brisket, onions and cheese, and I'll put it together with a salad of tomatoes and some avocados that I really need to use before I lose. 

Thursday: Black Beans and Rice
I count myself lucky to be married to a guy who thinks that black beans and rice are one of the best "oh boy!" dinners ever. For cheap and easy protein, it's hard to top beans. Actually, it's easy to top beans. And I'll probably do just that, by spooning on a Brazilian chopped onion and tomato vinaigrette called mohlo.   I may also put a couple of smoked sausages either in the beans or on the plate. Maybe some zuchinni too, if I experience a sudden episode of no-green-vegetable-guilt. I'm making extra rice for tomorrow night, and using the leftover beans on Saturday.





Friday: Sweet and Sour Pork
The City Chicken that was such a success last week left me with a ziploc bag of pork tenderloin in cubey bits. I'll be pulling most of that out of the freezer, and using last night's leftover rice for this retro fun thing. By retro, I mean that I have some nostalgic childhood memories of my mother cooking sweet and sour pork for special dinner nights, and I am way old enough for my childhood to qualify as retro. I think I may give her a call while the sauce thickens up.....

Saturday: Sweet Potatoes with warm black bean salad
If you cook a pot of beans, there will always be leftovers. Count on it. The only way to avoid leftover beans is to start with canned ones, and they STILL multiply in ways that defy conventional kitchen math. Usually, I'd be using the leftovers in burritos or tacos, but that's so....usual, that I'm going to try this. I think. If I happen to have lettuce and tortillas in the fridge, I may yet default to burritos.






Sunday: Pork and Quinoa Salad
I may have just enough bits of the pork tenderloin left to make this salad; if I don't, then we'll go meatless. If you've never cooked quinoa, think about giving it a try- there's actual protein in those little grains, and they're as versatile as rice. Here's a nice  tutorial on cooking it and if you can find it in a grocery store's bulk section, it'll be a little more affordable. You can always substitute couscous.



There's the week's plan- a plan for food that costs little, wastes almost nothing and (I hope) feels like fun instead of deprivation. I'll tell you later how that plan pans out when it hits the real week ahead.
And about that real week ahead-
I hope you feel as if nothing is wasted.
I hope the time you spend returns you pleasure and rest.
I hope the effort you spend brings you achievement and recognition.
I hope the kindness you offer is met with appreciation.
And I hope the love you pour out on the people around you

nurtures the entire world.