I don’t do a lot of red meat at home, but I’ve been in an “eat things in the freezer before they get old and forgotten” mode, and I had two ~8oz tenderloin steaks I got last summer at the farmers market that I prepared. Seasoned overnight with salt, and then a reverse sear… they were delicious! Served with maple and dill roasted carrots and an arugula/onion/tomato salad with balsamic dressing and parmesan shavings.
Much food prep this weekend. First, for tomorrow night, I’m doing fancy shrimp and grits, or as the recipe puts it:
Though I’ll make it my own by adding a bunch of diced, roasted green chiles to the polenta, and more cayenne to the shrimp.
Sunday, I’ll do the test batch for the 4th of July at the in-laws, so mixed berries (raspberry and blueberry) topped with some Everlasting Syllabub from Tasting History. It’ll be red, white, blue and alcoholic, so perfect for the holiday. Test batch of course, in case it doesn’t quite work, so we can fix it or pivot to something else.
Tonight? Tonight is World of Warcraft night with the friends, so I’m just making a roast chicken sandwich with onions and green chile on a decent store telera roll.
I’ve been obsessing over onion burgers (also known as Oklahoma burgers), so I’m making those for dinner.
I’m replying to your post from 4.5 years ago. 
The recipe offered up is MIGHTY tempting.
For the last year or two I’ve been leaning into a local market called Food Bazaar. In addition to being a large and pretty comprehensive supermarket, there are aisles dedicated to only one or two nationalities. So, if you want genuine spices or sauces from a particular cuisine, you can find them here. Since the county of Queens in NYC did, for many years, have more languages and dialects spoken than any other county in America, it stands to reason that finding really good dishes, spices, sauces and fixins should be easy. And it is.
A few misses but mostly solid hits when I’ve shopped for both Thai sauces and Indian sauces.
Some are used at full-strength, others are cut in half with coconut milk.
Dinner tomorrow night will be chicken korma with chunky onion, toasted cashew nuts and coconut milk. Fairly inexpensive- My Dearly Beloved™ and I will get 2 dinners out of it.
Served with Basmati rice from the hills of the Himalayas. Major Yum. Chicken thighs are once again fairly cheap ( along with all chicken parts and eggs ) and the jar of sauce is around $ 5.00.
Guessing with boneless chicken thighs, sauce and a few vegetables and 2 cups of rice the whole thing will come to less than $ 20.
That’s $ 5 per human for 2 dinners. In this day and age, I count that s a bargain.
It’s about time! I’ve been waiting!
Korma is a huge favorite. Let us know how it turns out.
Bad news: the amazing Szechuan beef bowl wasn’t available yesterday (it appears fairly rarely). Good news: the Mexican beef bowl was, and I’ve now learned to keep chunky salsa on hand to have with it. That will be a spicy late dinner tonight, after a few spicy Caesars!
This being a sort of super-long weekend for many (Canada Day is Tuesday, and just about everyone outside of retail is taking Monday off).all the subs were sold out at my local supermarket that makes such nice ones. So I’m going to satisfy my craving for sandwiches with some assorted cold cuts, fresh bread and rolls, vine tomatoes, and Frankenstein lettuce. The latter (not its real name) is a greenhouse-grown organic hybrid of romaine and iceberg lettuce, and labeled as “no need to wash”. Since I dislike sloppy wet lettuce on my sandwiches, this is a feature – just crisp, cold lettuce!
Update: Shrimp and Grits (by any other name) came out great!
I did add two tablespoons of roasted green chiles to the polenta, and 2 cloves of minced garlic. I used the whole milk I had on hand, but it was almost too creamy and rich, would have been just right with 2% or something similar. And since it’s the season for sweet corn in the store, it was probably a good bit sweeter than the default option from the lovely fresh corn (which was good enough to eat raw!) but it just meant the spicy and sweet combo was nigh perfect.
I don’t care much about using basil or thyme as toppers, so went with some dried green onions I had on hand, though fresh would have been better. Some nice fresh cilantro would also have made a nice presentation and even additional flavor, but that’ll be for next time.
And the wife was more than happy to enjoy the vegetarian (though absolutely not vegan) polenta as the main part of her dinner.
Dang, that looks and sounds nice and tasty. I’d stop at the green onions for the garnish, though. Cilantro seems a bridge too far.
Last night was a Marlborough pizza from Cento’s, Cup+char pepperoni, deli pepperoni, and bomb peppers. It’s the pizza I always wanted to try, but haven’t gotten because my sweetie always says “That’s a lot of pepperoni” when I suggest it. She wanted their mortadella and pistachio spread sandwich last night (I had a bite, quite divine), so I went for it.
Awesome pizza, maybe the perfect one. I didn’t need to coat it in crushed red pepper. Lunch today was more pizza, and dinner was the last of it. My only regret is that I don’t have more of that pizza hanging around the house.
Up here in the Great White North, we don’t even know what “grits” are (except for the kind of grit by which you rate sandpaper), but dang, those shrimp look good! I get similar results when I put shrimp skewers on the grill, sometimes alternating the shrimp with scallops on the skewer. Either one works with the marinade a chef once clued me in to, a vinaigrette type of Japanese salad dressing, to which I add a small amount of teriyaki sauce. Works great for shrimp, scallops, and also for marinating mushrooms for the grill.
Happy to hear that there are other fans of mortadella here! I got a lot of grief from some posters here when I mentioned that I occasionally like to make mortadella sandwiches. Not everyone is a fan, but I am! TBH, I couldn’t take a steady diet of it, but it’s very tasty once in a while. It’s basically an upscale Italian version of bologna.
I’m doing sausage, peppers, and onions tonight, we haven’t had it in ages.
That looks delicious!
I’m a big fan of grits/polenta for anytime. One of my favorite breakfasts is a portion of sage parmesan polenta topped with poached eggs and bacon alongside. There’s something so decadent and rich about slightly liquidy eggs and the flavorful polenta together.
Polenta is also a fabulous base for Ossobuco or most any other braised meat mixture, like short ribs or oxtail stew. Too hot for it now, but I find these to be the finest of comfort foods in winter.
We’re having a stretch of hottish weather (for us), so I’m not keen on making any dinner that heats up the house. Great weather for grilling, but I’m a bit tired of doing that. Your shrimp dish inspired me, @ParallelLines, so it will be a quick sauté of shrimp with garlic, white wine, chopped tomatoes, oregano, basil and cream tossed with linguine, along with a side salad.
A friend gave me about 10 pounds of fresh Bing cherries yesterday, so my day was spent pitting them, arranging them for freezing, jamming and baking a cherry pie. So I have fresh cherry pie for dessert over the next few days. I’m freezing half of it for another time.
I’ve used quite a few “Japanese BBQ/Grilling sauces” as Salad dressings, so it makes great sense it works the other way around! I love scallops, but even the IQF cheap stuff is $11+ on sale, so so I haven’t had any in quite a while. Damn all responsible adulting!
Spent the last two hours loading up a trailer of accumulated household and lawn trash, so I made a dent in my creamy, cheesy grits-based calorie excess from yesterday, but still need to work on being good before the cheat extended holiday weekend with fun houseguest. So seared chicken and greens tonight!
Lead me NOT down the path of Temptation! Seriously, that sounds great though, and now I really also want to make some more saag-shakshuka though I’m trying to watch the cholesterol before my follow up checkup in 3 weeks. Grrrr.
The onion burgers were okay, but the online videos are misleading. I think next time I’ll caramelize the onions first and add them to a less well-done patty.
Tonight is a prepackaged coconut curry. As packaged meals go, they’re pretty good. I’ll make rice to go with.
Onion burgers sound delicious. I know what you mean about the online videos. I did my sausage, peppers, and onions in the oven because of a video, and they were ok, I’ve always done them in a slow cooker and they come out very good. Live and learn.
Smashing. Now I gotta learn how to post a photograph in my posts, so I can post the label of the jar I used.
Oddly, it’s very soothing to slowly toast cashews in an iron skillet…
Dinner last night was a surprisingly good prepared frozen General Tso chicken with fried rice. So good, in fact, that I’m getting two of them next time. Tonight will be another Mexican beef bowl that I froze some time ago, just took it out of the freezer now. Lots of leftover chunky salsa to add to it. For an interesting variation I might just treat it as a giant dip and spoon it onto some large corn tortilla chips.
I continue on my current trend of lazy comfort foods. Last night was a hot roast beef sub to which I added sauteed onions and, of course, Dijon mustard. I love sauteed onions and mushrooms on roast beef subs, but I found that mushrooms don’t really add that much, while the onions add both texture and flavour – so my shortcut cuts out the shrooms!
Apparently that wasn’t enough because I woke up at 3 AM with a craving for dim sum. Fortunately I had some – chicken & veg dumplings fried on their flat side til well browned, then covered and steamed, anointed with chili garlic sauce, and dipped in soy sauce with chopsticks. A fine treat at around 3:30 AM!
Late lunch/dinner today will be another thick roast turkey sub with lettuce, tomato, and mayo. I could add red onions but with the tomatoes it’s already dauntingly thick! Maybe with some won ton soup.
Tomorrow night will be a Buffalo chicken rice bowl with salsa.
Am I repetitive? Am I a creature of habit? Yes, and yes.
For the fourth, we’re having grilled brats + onions on bollilo rolls. I’ll start the fire in about two hours.
Yesterday was another take-out Vietnamese. Bahn mi, broccoli and garlic (stir fried?) and a dish made of lightly scrambled egg, pickled julienned radish, some other cubed thing which I couldn’t recognize but may have been a tofu product (it didn’t taste like it, though), scallions, and chili sauce. It was delicious! Next time I go, I’ll see if anyone there can tell me what the mystery ingredient is.