food food food

Food has lately been a little in the background for me.  I have a couple of pictures that I can post about dinners, but nothing too exciting - for the most part I've been making some standard meals (hamburger patties and pickles, or chicken sausage with bell peppers, lots of caesar salads and taco salads.)  We're in a good spot with meal-planning where I'm usually two or three days ahead of the game, not quite the weekly planning that I like to do, but enough to keep us eating with some balance and usually (usually) at home.  It means I have to go to the grocery store more often than my ideal, but Sophie is a fun co-shopper, so it's not too much hassle.

House projects and visiting family have shifted some of my focus.  I'm also finding that the cost of ingredients is keeping me tied to the basics for the most part - just for a couple of budget cycles.  There are exceptions, like buffalo steaks the other night :)  I'm looking forward to building further on our foundation of meals and planning it out in the future, but I'm not in a rush.  It's nice sometimes not to be rushing!

Chicken Lettuce Wraps

I made lettuce wraps for dinner earlier in the week and they were a big hit.  I used this recipe from Everyday Paleo and I loved how they turned out.  I used romaine leaves instead of iceberg for a little more flavor.  

delicious chicken, zucchini, cabbage, red pepper, green onion filling

chicken filling wrapped in lettuce

I made a sauce to go with it, made from almond butter - flavored a lot like a Thai peanut sauce.  I used this recipe - and subbed coconut crystals in for coconut aminos.  It was such a great sauce!  Tim has the leftovers at work with him, or I would be munching a spoonful right now. 

I < 3 hamburgers

I do *heart* hamburgers, but that is not why there is a <3 in the post title.  The hamburger patty is in the shape of a heart!  It's a heart-shaped blue cheese and beef patty from Whole Foods in honor of Cupid Day tomorrow.  It was slightly pretty, but excessively delicious.

I grilled it on the George, along with the zucchini spears.  I steamed some apples in my stovetop steamer and then sprinkled them with cinnamon.  Avocado slices with the burger, fresh raspberries on the side.  

Side note: I got two burgers.  One for each adult in the house.  Sophie can have a few bites of mine, right?  She probably doesn't even like blue cheese, right?  Few bites - HA.  Try 60%.  We might have become a three-entree family when no one was looking. :)

Chipotle Chile Crockpot Chicken

Another creation from Chef Steph!  Grauntie Steph to the Little Miss :)  Tim had a gig at a coffee shop on Friday which made it the perfect night to have a crockpot meal that was filling, easy to eat before the show, but nothing that needed a lot of careful timing and planning for prep. 

We started with a splash of water in the bottom of the pot and then some semi-thawed chicken.  I seized the opportunity to use the boneless skinless chicken thighs that I have, since we don't like them plain, but they hold up great in casseroles and dishes like this.  Next we added sliced and de-seeded dried chipotles (five, where three might have done, but bravely we charged forth), tomatoes, green pepper, onion, garlic, and sprinkles of salt and pepper.

After cooking it on low for about 5 hours we pulled the chicken apart with forks and added leftover steamed carrots, as well as some fresh mushrooms.  It was the perfect time to add them so that they had time to warm up and blend with the flavor, but they weren't too mushy.

It was smoky, slightly spicy, but had an excellent overall flavor.  It did not have that unfortunate flat taste that so often comes from a crockpot that is overfilled with a starch and some sort of creamy soup.  It tasted like a fiesta (cha cha cha).  I had the leftovers for lunch a couple of days and it was even tastier.  It had that fully bonded flavor that a leftover lasagna has.  I need to load this into Plan to Eat and queue it up for the near future.

One-Eyed Marthas, Portobellos, Zucchini, Sirloin and Bacon

This is a Kiersten and Aunt Steph meal from last week.  There were a lot of things happening at once in the kitchen, but we handled it with our natural grace and talent and it turned out to be completely worth it.  We knew we wanted to grill portobello mushrooms, so we picked up one of those and marinated it in some red wine.  I also had some zucchini that I wanted to have with the meal.  From there, we got creative.  We browsed the meat counter at Whole Foods and came up with Bacon-Wrapped Sirloin skewers.  These got unskewered so that we could cook them in a pan with green onions, but the flavors still blended together well and they were delicious.

Now for the main attraction.  I grew up with an "egg in the hole" sometimes called a "one-eyed Jack."  It's basically a piece of bread with a whole cut out (I usually just pressed a glass into the center of the bread) and then fried in lots of butter with an egg in the center.  Bread is out, veggies are in these days, so I was thrilled to see this idea from the Novice Chef about making the same basic dish with a bell pepper instead of bread.

Here is a closeup of the egg.  It's an over-medium egg housed in a slice of red bell pepper that is being fried in coconut oil.  We omitted the asiago cheese, but kept the balsamic glaze.  I think next time I make them I would just skip the glaze since the egg alone doesn't really need the glaze and it doesn't have the cheese to balance out the vinegar.  Overall, it was very tasty.  And we had fun making them.  This is the showpiece One-Eyed Martha.  The rest of them were pretty comically spread out.  But still tasty.

Chicken on a Salad

It's simple, delicious, and quick.  Chicken on a salad.  Not to be confused with chicken salad.  Romaine lettuce, oven-roasted chicken, walnuts, dried cranberries, tomatoes, celery, bell pepper, balsamic and oil dressing.  No fuss. No muss.  Dinner.

Spinach Salad Palooza - with leftovers

I whipped this up for lunch the other day.  I put a bed of fresh spinach in a bowl and started tossing in ingredients.  Feta cheese, Dried Steak Strips (kind of like beef jerky, but thicker and a bit more tender), Steamed Asparagus, Blueberries - tasty.  No dressing needed, but I splashed a little lime juice on to give it some zip.  I totally love the colors in this salad.