Last night was pretty tasty: rice with cubed roasted eggplant (oil, salt, and black pepper), fresh asparagus (dry fried with a tiny bit of salt), and a teryaki-ish salmon (cubed, marinated in soy, honey, garlic, and a little rice vinegar, cooked in a pan), all sprinkled with furikake. Oh, and some sliced raw radish.
Oh, that looks great! I might try that this weekend to make for some lunches for the week.
Silly me, I can make ramen any time (I have a couple of pork chops in the freezer for that exact purpose) but right now I have a nice pre-made Caesar salad and a jar of Renee’s Mighty Caesar dressing with extra garlic, so the rest of the roast chicken will be used to make chicken Caesar salad for lunch.
Dinner tonight will be a lot of Caesars (the drinks, not the salad, and heavy on the vodka) and chicken souvlaki kabobs with tzatziki sauce and fried rice with black olives and red onion.
Can I do a special “What’s For Lunch Today” edition? I was going to make an ordinary ham sandwich for lunch, when I remembered I also still have a lot of pulled pork I froze from a BBQ a couple weeks ago. So I thought …Cubano!
I had most of the necessary ingredients: I used a sub bun for the bread; no Swiss cheese but I had some Provolone slices, which I think works fine as a substitute for Swiss.
But…what’s this-- no pickles? Aw man, the sandwich needs the vinegary hit of pickles. What to do, what to do? Ah, I have some Giardiniera. That and a few capers, I think, will work.
And it did. It worked very well.
An almost Italian take on a Cubano… I like it!
So did I 
Probably a couple of frozen chicken pot pies.
I have a sandwich from a luncheon today of roast turkey, cranberry-apple cream cheese, and greens on whole wheat. I wasn’t hungry at lunchtime, due to copious snacking, so it’ll be my dinner.
I had forgotten that I had all the prepared ingredients for a Caesar salad, and a jar of Renee’s Mighty Caesar dressing with extra garlic, so the rest of the roast chicken was used for a chicken Caesar salad for a delicious lunch.
Dinner will be one of my fave prepared meals – chicken souvlaki kabobs with tzatziki sauce and fried rice with black olives and red onion.
I’m also taking out some frozen boneless pork chops and will marinate them in the fridge in chipotle marinade while they thaw. With a full case of fresh cremini mushrooms, fresh scallions in a jar of water, and a big stock of Sapporo Ichiban ramen, I will be in ramen heaven for the next few days – and probably overdosing on too much sodium! But you only live once!
The ramen I had last night with chipotle-marinated pork was delicious, but I only thawed one chop and forgot to take the others out this morning. There’s a nice lasagna that I froze last week which can be baked from frozen, covered for the first half hour and then allowed to brown. So a nice cheesy lasagna with ricotta, mozzarella, and meat sauce for dinner tonight!
Crock-pot chili for us. I had a piece of beef that I’d cut into portions, but the last piece I slow-cooked turned out tough as an old tire. So this portion I cut up real small. There’s also sausage in the chili so it ought to be quite a meaty batch.
I sometimes slow-cook beef, not in a crock pot but simmering very low on the stove top, and I’ve had that issue too— after a couple hours the beef is still tough. If you happen to also have an Instant Pot, putting the stew beef in it along with the liquid and blasting it on manual setting for a 1/2 hour can help save tough beef and turn it tender.
I don’t have an Instant Pot, but cutting up the meat into little pieces worked well.
Tonight…scrounging for leftovers!
I did a similar concept the other night – not chili, but with beans. I sauteed onions as usual, added Bush’s Original beans, and instead of my usual smoky BBQ sauce I added slices of pork chop that had been marinated in chipotle sauce and then baked but deliberately underdone – just 10 minutes in a 425F oven. Simmering with the beans for a while resulted in perfect tender doneness.
The chipotle sauce is so tasty that I was tempted to add a dollop of it to the beans, but refrained on the principle that very often, “less is more”, and there was already lots of it on the chop. An inspired decision – these were among the best beans I’ve ever made, no dominant taste of anything, just pure mellowness with the flavours of pork, bacon, and a hint of chipotle! They were had with roast potatoes.
I’m definitely doing chipotle pork chops again. Meanwhile tonight will be ramen noodles with a remaining pork chop and mushrooms, with green onions, soy sauce, and a spoonful of hot chili garlic sauce.
When I get home from work in an hour, I’m going to my freezer and pulling out one of my servings of red beans and rice with Louisiana hot sausage. I’ll drop it in the kitchen sink and it will be thawed out (but still cold) by the time I leave for tonight’s work.
Two and a half minutes in the lunchroom microwave, and I’m gonna be a happy camper!
Felt like fish & chips tonight. I had to move a couple of delicious-looking boxes of General Tao Chicken out of the way to get at the fish, and I was tempted, but stuck with my plan.
This is battered haddock (but not beer-battered, as they were out at the time) which will be nice and crisp now that I know to ignore the directions and bake it properly – which consists of setting the timer to about the recommended time, then flipping the fish and letting it bake for another 7 to 8 minutes while the air fryer prepares the fries.
To be had with both regular and chipotle tartar sauce, and of course malt vinegar. In a better world, there would also be a creamy coleslaw, but tonight this is not such a world.
I was going to have frozen vegetables and rice but the frozen vegetables expired in … 2023.
I did try to microwave them but it looked suspicious.
So I had ramen noodles and peas from a can with a future expiration date.
I really need to get some groceries. 
Be careful about long-expired stuff in the freezer. It’s not going to kill you (if your freezer is working properly!) but it can be tough, dried-out, or otherwise unappetizing. I made some spaghetti sauce once with meatballs that at one time had been delicious but had been in the freezer forever (like, years). We ate them with the spaghetti but they had a taste and texture reminiscent of golf balls.
Yes I imagine that old stuff from the freezer would be risky! I didn’t want to chance a medical emergency. Glad yours worked out OK.
I had some leftover rotisserie chicken, so tonight I decided to go old school and made some chicken a la king. My mom would made it on a few occasions when I was a kid, but it’s not something I ever made since I started cooking for myself.
It was… ok. I’m not sure I’m a fan of peppers in a creamy sauce. I probably won’t make it again. I think I’ll go back to tetrazzini as my way of using up chicken.