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Dinner - The Polyphonic Food Blog


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Red leaf lettuce and radicchio, kalamata olives, chickpeas, celery, shallot, Campari tomatoes, avocado; balsamic-fig vinigrette
Skillet fried chicken with herbes de Provence
Au gratin potatoes with Gruyere and dill 

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Last night was stuffed peppers with leftover lost dog pizza cut up into small pieces to be more flatbread like.

But tonight- I made kale with garlic and onion- a staple in my house if you can't tell, white basmati rice in the instant pot which is a great rice cooker, butter chicken (the sauce was out of a bottle that someone gave us for Christmas, homemade would have been better, but I wanted to use it) and the best part- homemade naan.  I think I did ok for my first time making naan.  It was super easy!  

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Orecchiette con cavolfiore e acciughe

It's so easy you can make it in 20 minutes. Fill a pot with water. Break up a head of cauliflower. Add the cauliflower to the pot of water. Bring to a boil. Boil the cauliflower for 5 minutes. Lift out with a giant strainer or slotted spoon. Chop cauliflower coarsely. Crush a couple of cloves of garlic or if you like, slice or mince them. Add dried pasta to the pot you cooked the cauliflower in along with some salt. Prepare pasta according to package directions. Warm olive oil in a pan along with garlic. Add an anchovy fillet and a pinch of crushed red pepper flakes to the garlic. Fry garlic until it turns color. Anchovy will disintegrate. Add cauliflower to pan. Saute cauliflower in flavored oil. Cook pasta until just shy of al dente. Drain pasta and reserve 1/2 cup pasta cooking water. Add pasta to pan with cauliflower. If pasta seems dry, add pasta cooking water. Increase heat to high and finish cooking pasta in the pan with the cauliflower. Taste for salt and pepper, then serve immediately.

Occasionally I like to add a spoonful or two of toasted breadcrumbs at the end.

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8 minutes ago, Smita Nordwall said:

Which recipe did you use? It looks awesome. 

 

This one:  http://rasamalaysia.com/naan-recipe/  A few notes: I see no reason why you need to use the dough well method at all, and it is really too much liquid between the yeast and yogurt for that method, it made a mess for no discernible benefit.  The dough was more sticky than your normal needed bread, I found to get it to look more like the pictures I made mine a bit thinner than he picture appears, and you need less oil in the skillet than you think- a quick spray of cooking spray actually seemed to work the best.

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Weekend cooking roundup

Friday - Didn't feel like cooking so I pulled a vegetarian chili and corn bread from the freezer.  Mixed together pizza dough for Saturday.

Saturday - First time making pan pizza.  Come out great.  I'll definitely make it again.

Sunday - Afghan pumpkin with tomato sauce, yogurt mint sauce; Balti-style Baingan Bharta (Eggplant); Rice pilaf, saffron and toasted almonds; Naan (Not homemade)

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Bake/roast them with a prune stuffing.  If you don't want to stuff them literally, I've baked the chops on top of a moderate amount of bread stuffing made with prunes. 

I hit upon a great preparation once, but I have no idea what I did with the notes I kept on it (but it was the baking them on top of stuffing version). Here's one that calls for cutting a pocket in the pork and stuffing them directly: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/pork-chops-stuffed-with-prunes-and-pine-nuts-recipe-1970353

 

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38 minutes ago, Simul Parikh said:

Have some bone in pork chops. Panko pan fried them yesterday. What to do today??

Are you wanting to use leftovers already pan fried (I would make a sauce and smother them OR make make them into pork chops parmesaen) or a new way to use the other bone in pork chops you have? (Brown sugar, garlic and herb rub OR Maple Balsamic Glaze OR stuffed with apple and gouda )?

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My friend gave me the leftover pork chops from a dinner we attended.  Yesterday I took them out of the freezer, and sliced the meat off the bone.  I made a sort of "Sunday gravy"  by adding some pork sausage I had in the freezer, and some chicken thighs.  I used two cans of crushed tomatoes some extra tomato paste, and a lot of red wine. Also garlic, bell pepper, onion, and mushrooms.  I simmered the heck out of it.  I think I liked it better than she did.  There are tons of leftovers, which I will freeze and enjoy later. 

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Based on a post I saw online (which called for making something like this as timbales), I layered these components on a dinner plate:

Wheatberry salad (vinaigrette, dill, shallot); chopped avocado; chopped baked sweet potato (lemon juice, parsley)

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Last night was Hubby and my's 12th dating anniversary.  We celebrate this sometimes a bit more than our wedding anniversary, but this year the actual night was a bit low key in a good way (we have reservations at the Inn at Little Washington for another night).  I made steak with my go to Adam's steak seasoning.  I also made asparagus and fried wild and brown rice of sorts (not a traditional fried rice with an egg, but it was skillet fried) that I added an Asian inspired sauce I had in the fridge that I made as a dipping sauce for dumplings as it needed a little more flavor.  We finished the meal off with whisky of choice on the rocks and some chocolates.  This was a pretty haphazard picture, no food styling on this plate last night, but it was tasty.

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Chicken with shredded zucchini
Leftover mushroom risotto with truffle cheese

The chicken recipe is one from the Washington Post back in 1992, written by Lisa Yockelson. I found it a few days ago when sorting through old recipes I'd saved from newspapers and magazines. I didn't think I'd ever made it so decided to justify having kept that yellowed piece of newsprint for so many years and got the ingredients for the recipe.  It didn't specify what size zucchini. I had gotten two smallish ones and ended up only using one, but that probably wasn't quite enough. This would be a good recipe to utilize a spiralizer. It having been in the pre-spiralizing era, she calls for shredding on the largest hole of a box grater, but I just sliced it thinly with a Y-peeler.  It was pretty good though I needed to cook the chicken longer than the recipe said, but I don't know it justified keeping the recipe around for almost 26 years.  

I did find the recipe [link here] in the Post's archive of very old items online, but none of the other Post recipes I found from the same period turned up in searches.  I still have to decide if they're worth saving or tossing.  

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Garbure (with pork shoulder, duck confit and saucisse de Toulouse ("garlic sausage with red wine and thyme"))

For those keeping track, it's from pages 86-88 of "Around My French Table" by Dorie Greenspan. It's an awesome pot of soup and next time, I'll be sure to separate the meat and vegetables from the broth which is luxurious enough to serve on its own as a first course.

See you tomorrow!

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Last night I made a wheat berry salad recipe from the February 2018 Bon Appetit.  I omitted the pomegranate seeds because my husband doesn't like them.  The merguez sausage I bought at Eastern Market was lamb and beef and only 10 oz. (rather than a pound), so I also broke up 4 1/2 oz. worth of cooked pork-sage sausage patties and reheated them in the pan fat and spices after cooking the merguez.  I found the yogurt dressing to be a bit too thick and thinned it out further with more lemon juice, but I think I'd use regular, rather than Greek, yogurt next time.  It also was not enough to dress the entire batch of salad adequately.  Three cucumbers was way too much for this. I used one fairly big cucumber and about 3/4 of one leftover in the refrigerator, and there was an abundance of sliced cucumber left over.  There is still some more salad to be assembled, but this doesn't require more than two cucumbers unless they're very small.

The flavors were really good, though. I'd tinker with this and make it again. I also added some marinated gigande beans I bought at the corner market to the wheat berry mixture.  I picked up some dolma there too and we had them with additional lemon and yogurt, and baguette slices with seasoned olive oil.

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Creamy tomato soup with meatballs
Spicy macaroni and cheese

I had a cup of leftover coconut milk and small lamb meatballs I'd made last year taking up space in the freezer, so when I saw a recipe on a blog I read that called for simple tomato soup made with coconut milk, I went for it. The recipe calls for making little meatballs from a pound of ground beef and adding them to the soup.  I suspect the dozen or so meatballs I had was fewer than I would have gotten from making the recipe as written--and the spicing was different--but it was a really nice tomato soup and didn't necessarily need to be packed with meatballs.  The canned tomatoes I used for this seemed especially acidic, so I added a teaspoonful of sugar to the mixture, something I rarely do.  I'll keep this soup template in mind for the future.

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For dinner tonight, we had

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Pasta con sugo di costine di maiale 
Green beans and endive braised in an olive oil bath with garlic, Meyer lemon and anchovy

The spareribs were seasoned with salt and pepper, then set aside for 15 minutes. Then browned in 2 tbsp. olive oil with garlic on all sides, then added 1 28 oz. can whole plum tomatoes and 1/3 that amount of water, along with a little more salt and some torn basil leaves. Brought liquid to a boil, then covered and braised for two hours. Uncovered during the last 10 minutes and simmered on high to reduce and thicken the sauce. This is technically two dishes in one. Tossed with some cooked pasta with sauce and grated pecorino cheese, and served that as a first course. The second course consisted of the ribs with more sauce.

The recipe for the contorno is here but I reduced the amount of olive oil by 50% and substituted green beans and curly-leaf endive.

 

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Apparently Wednesday night, my Hubby just had a normal night for his birthday- what he told his family.  I will take that as a compliment, let it be known, a "normal" night in our house includes spaghetti al bianco from scratch and homemade bundt cake with nutella on the inside.  The bundt cake would have been better I think, if I had added some sort of drizzle to give it more moisture, but Hubby likes it plain, and it was his birthday, so he gets it how he likes it.  For some reason I think bundt cake tastes better the day after you make it, but the warm nutella wasn't bad at all.

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I am cooking for a friend tonight.  I am grilling skirt steak that I marinated in red wine, soy sauce, Thai chili garlic sauce, and honey.  We're having a spinach and radicchio salad with strawberries and Gorgonzola, with a pomegranate balsamic vinaigrette. I'm also grilling asparagus.  We are having a mass-market Shiraz.

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I spatchcocked what was left of the rotisserie chicken (we had eaten mostly the drumsticks previously) and reheated it on a sheet pan under the broiler to get the skin crisped up again and more browned.  Underneath the chicken I put a mix of cooked wild and brown rice, chopped dates and scallions, and a little torn bread from a staling baguette.

So we had chicken with the rice stuffing, roasted butternut squash (previously roasted and reheated) and kale braised with bacon cut into lardons.  

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Last night was leftover spicy mac and cheese and leftover broccoli rabe and turkey sausage. Really good combination, actually.

Tonight is a roasted chicken plus a couple of extra legs, roasted yukon golds, asparagus, and brussels sprouts.

 

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Being single on Valentine's Day means that I can treat myself without concern for anybody else's expectations.  So I bought myself some Stone crab claws ($$$$), and made my own mustard sauce, and roasted some organic fingerling potatoes. I also had a spinach salad with strawberries. The potatoes were delicious dipped in the mustard sauce.  I think stone crabs are more of a novelty for me than a delicacy.  I find the flavor of the claws on regular old blue crabs to be far superior. 

 There are some cookies for later! 

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Creamy tomato soup garnished with salmon and dill
Spinach in puff pastry
Lamb rib "lollipops" and tzatziki

The soup and pastry combo was intended to be a riff on grilled cheese and tomato soup. (The spinach filling had both Gruyere and Parmesan. Recipe from Ina Garten's Barefoot in Paris.)  There was a little bit of salmon left from the previous night's dinner, which was beautiful sliced and presented on top of the soup. I had intended for this to be the entire meal but saw some very small (about 1 3/4 oz. each) frenched rib chops at Whole Foods. We had 4 each, marinated in lemon juice and olive oil for a while and then seared briefly in a cast iron skillet. I'd guesstimate we each got about 4 oz. of meat.  It was just enough, not too much.

Tonight I'll have to do something with the excess tzatziki. It didn't make a lot but there's still plenty left.

 

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Last night we had some of the leftover spinach in puff pastry, with more of the tzatziki on the side. In addition, I made a cheese "soufflan" recipe from Jacques Pepin that I saw on the Post website.  It's a mixture of eggs, cottage cheese, whipped cream cheese, salt, pepper, and chives. It goes in the oven in a greased cast iron skillet for about 40 minutes until it's puffed and brown on top.  Really good, easy recipe. 

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