I cook at least 3-5 nights a week, taking my leftovers and creatively reinventing them into a new meal. But we’ve gone from 4 of us down to 3 and our schedules don’t always mesh. Very often it’s just my husband and I enjoying our meal and I’ve cooked way too much.
I was given an email invite for one of those meal services and last night we receive our first box. I’m not going to do a full blown review, but I was eager to sit down after work and knit so I asked my husband to join me in the kitchen to make dinner, hoping that he would take the hint and do it all by himself one night!
The salmon and green beans and potatoes were pretty good. The pesto sauce had a bit too much lemon for his liking, I enjoyed the dish and will definitely use the technique of cooking the salmon and beans in foil packages again. With less lemon! I liked how they had you make the pesto fom scratch rather than include a pre made sauce. My husband enjoyed making that by himself, but the recipe assumed we owned a mortar and pestle! We used our Nutribullet instead.
We’ve got a chicken dish, a beef and Brussels sprouts dish, a kale and pork soup, and a pancetta Mac and cheese left out of the box. I’m going to let my 15 year old try her hand at dinner tonight since she was out yesterday. I got the 2 person meal kit, and there was definitely enough last night for 3.
Has anyone used these meals services before? My SIL uses Blue Apron about one week per month (I’ve got a free week from her to try as well). The one I am trying right now is Hello Fresh and the calorie count seems a bit high.
I will have to try that sauce! One of our go to sauces comes from the Life Alive restaurant in Lowell, MA, their famous Ginger Nama Shoyu Sauce that somebody deconstructed here https://solfoodd.wordpress.com/2014/03/30/life-alive-the-goddess-with-their-famous-ginger-nama-shoyu-sauce/ The Goddess is my favorite dish, I keep assorted veggies and beans around to keep it interesting. I love a cold sesame noodle and will try the Smitten Kitchen one next week!
I braised a turkey leg the other night with white beans, thyme, garlic olive oil etc. When tender I shredded the meat off the bone and added it back to the beans. It was as tender as a lamb shank much to my surprise. I agree, way better than the breast.
I’ve gone back and forth with Blue Apron. The two-person works well for three of us (me and two daughters) but often too sophisticated for their age 11/15 tastes. Never as fast to make as the recipe card claims. And always too much packaging. So I turned it off again for a while.
Surprisingly delicious slow cooker Ropa Vieja with plain black beans and white rice and salad on the side. 1 - 1/2 lbs Flank steak cut into chunks, cut up: 1 red onion, 1 green pepper and 3 cloves garlic. Spices: 1 bay leaf, 1 tsp oregano, 1 1/2 tsp ground cumin, salt & pepper, 14 1/2 can chopped tomatoes, 8 oz can tomato sauce. Cook on high for 4-5 hours. Tastes far better than the simple list of ingredients indicates. The picky eater and the human garbage cans both loved it.
Last night we had our favourite casseroled pork chops. I take some Paxo dry sage and onion stuffing, out of a packet, and press both sides of each chop into it, before frying them off. Then put them in an oven-proof dish with a couple of sliced onions and a sliced cooking apple. Add some vegetable stock and oven cook for about 45 minutes. The stuffing swells and flavours the whole dish, while the apple melts into the sauce. I make up a whole batch - there are just the two of us - and freeze some in microwavable containers, so we can have a meal in minutes. It tastes far more special than the ingredients would suggest.
This sounds very classy. I always think of that scene in “Cold Mountain” where Ada manages to bring down two wild turkeys and they make a stew of them up on that mountain.
We had lamb burgers that Jim made (by squishing mince together - hardly taxing!), but the secret of these is in the trimmings. They were in a bun with stilton, slices of apple, lettuce and a red onion relish. Absolutely delicious!! Tonight is far less interesting… Baked potatoes and beans.
I took advantage of eggplant-loathing husband’s overnight absence to make moussaka. It was a recipe for the cast-iron skillet, and it was So. Amazingly. Good.
Eggplant is so inoffensive. I have never understood the loathing. When he returns I’ll just say I’ve got a nice leftover lamb casserole and see what happens.
As it is so easy to hit reply, I will address my question to you. Could
there ever be some kind of yarn swap on the MDK site, perhaps in the
Lounge? And if not, do you all know of any good virtual yarn swaps? I ask
because I have some gems in my stash that I will never knit but that I
cannot throw away. Just like EVERY OTHER KNITTER IN THE WORLD. I don’t even
need to swap, I’d be so happy to give the yarn to someone who likes a pinky
tweedy Rowan DK, for instance.
Eggplant is one of those foods that some people are sensitive to! They are in the nightshade family. The flesh isn’t poisonous but some people have a skin reaction to them - tingling or burning sensation on their tongue. (We learned a lot at the Wicked Plants exhibit at our natural history museum)
We had pumpkin soup. The key to making soup - as opposed to vegetable puree - is to sweat the vegetables in a little oil, to soften them, before adding the stock. I diced two small onions and a potato with half of a very small pumpkin from our allotment. I added a couple of rashers of bacon, snipped into lardons, and some Knorr vegetable stock. Then I ran it through the blender. My husband found it delicious, although he usually finds pumpkin too watery a taste.
I’m working on the bottom layer of the 40 pound box of Eastern Shore Sweet Potatoes that I ordered. (I did share 10 pounds) I peeled and diced a few, tossed in onion slices, an apple, a few garlic and some lovely little CSA peppers (seeded) - coated it all with a few T of olive oil and a few T of curry powder. Into the oven for 35 min, into a deep bowl with a few cups of broth. Puree with an immersion blender, add half of a can of coconut milk, salt to taste and serve with a sprinkle of toasted pumpkin seeds or as I did last night, with Trader Joe’s Omega Mix. You can make a ton of it and freeze for very quick dinners when you don’t have the 20 - 30 minutes of hands on and the hour plus before needing to eat. <3
