Rotisserie chicken from Safeway (for $8, I can’t make a chicken that good myself*) and homemade dumplings cooked in low-salt chicken broth (since I didn’t have a pot of chicken water to use) and green peas. It was deeee-licious.
*Can’t and won’t - for $8 I can get a raw chicken and bust my ass cooking it, or have someone do it for me.
I eat Cheddar, and I find that if I eat sharp or extra sharp, I’m quite satisfied with a much smaller portion. Similarly, I eat one or two small pieces of good chocolate a day. One of those Dove Promises, in dark chocolate, is just the thing for my chocolate fix. They’re about an inch square, and my doctor told me to eat a little bit of dark chocolate each day. This doesn’t mean that I can or should eat a huge amount each day. But eating a small amount of very flavorful food can be more satisfying that eating a larger amount of bland food. I’ve tried eating rice cakes. While they have a satisfying crunchiness, I suspect that I’d get more pleasure from eating styrofoam.
OK, it gets better than a shitty sandwich at my desk. I had some Italian friends round for dinner last night. I wanted to show them that English cuisine can be better than they think. So we had:[ul][]Cherry tomato tarte tatin with green salad and feta cheese with an English mustard vinaigrette.[]Beef Wellington made with £36 worth of fillet beef, wrapped in prosciutto with a truffle, mustard and chestnut mushroom duxelles, served on a bed of traditional English mash, with roast organic carrots and steamed broccoli with gravy.An inside-out chocolate ginger and cinnamon red wine cake.[/ul]It’s nice to see normally quite culinarily chauvinistic Italians eating English(ish) food and going “Mmmm! This is-a really good-a!”
So I made my pork chops with escalloped apples. I also made cheesy hash brown potatoes, and baby peas with mushrooms and pearl onions. Since we had the apples to go on top of the pork chops, I wasn’t going to make gravy, but by the time I took them out of the oven (I cooked them on the stove top, then popped the pan in a warm oven to ‘keep’ while I finished up everything else), there were so many beautiful drippings in the bottom of the pan that I couldn’t bear to throw them away. So I deglazed the pan with a little dry white wine, then made a slurry with some corn starch and a little more wine, to thicken it. It didn’t need any extra seasoning, since there were lots of seasonings already in the pan from the pork chops.
Note, I don’t always make dinners this ambitious. But my hubby’s only home on weekends, during the week he’s traveling for work and eats a lot of Boston Market, Golden Corral, Chinese buffet, etc. So when he’s home, I try to give him real home cooking!
We’re going to use the leftover cheesy hash browns with some eggs, for breakfast/brunch this morning.
Tonight’s dinner will be steamed shrimp (for me, at least) because we are going out to dinner, and the restaurant we’re going to has, on Sundays, a pound of steamed shrimp for $9.99!
I didn’t get to the grocery store yesterday, and the cupboard was seriously bare, but we did have bits of leftover cheese, so we had homemade mac and cheese. Sharp cheddar, provolone, asiago, gruyere, butter, cream, and chardonnay, without even a nod to health, since I didn’t have so much as a leaf of spinach in the house.
Our Sunday afternoon dinner today was thick cut grilled pork chops, (boneless and seasoned with a salt, pepper, garlic powder blend), sweet potatoes baked on the grill, corn off the cob, and mini corn muffins with homemade butter.
Had a USDA prime ribeye today. Used Alton Brown’s steak cooking method. The steak was just a tad too rare for my taste but I ate it anyway. I still have one more in the freezer, maybe I’ll have another one tomorrow.
A huge pot I will eat for a day or two before I freeze up portions for the freezer. Currently I have three other soups in the freezer and makes up the bulk of my winter meals.
Dry Szechuan stir-fried green beans, long beans, and pea greens, and tofu, with a ton of green onions and chopped garlic. Tasted great but didn’t look so good.
I had what I call deconstructed rice balls: vinegared sushi rice, umeboshi (pickled plum), and seaweed to pick it all up and stuff it in my mouth. Plus miso soup and edamame.
The wife and I just treated ourselves to a weekend at Shanghai Mansion, a boutique hotel right in the middle of Bangkok’s Chinatown. A fantastic place, actually not too expensive, made up to resemble 1935 Shanghai, including the rooms. A fun weekend, hanging out in Chinatown. Some excellent Chinese seafood restaurants there, including T&K (we ate inside in the air-conditioning) and the equally bustling Hua Seng Hong. Mmmm. They finally had to roll us home when we checked out this morning (Monday morning).
And for lunch one day, we wandered into the adjacent Little India area to eat at the original branch of Royal India. This is arguably the best Indian restaurant in Bangkok, but the two satellite branches elsewhere are simply not up to snuff.