So...whats for dinner?
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Gordy's fiancee's parents in Katy still had water, power & heat as of last night (they may be just outside the TX grid). I'm hoping my sis in the DC burbs of northern VA doesn't get ice-storm slammed. We're slowly digging out; on my roofer's wait-list for raking and ice-dam breakup (he's serving only existing customers--he did a new roof for us in 2010). Our roofs are pitched & gabled; the only flat one is a reinforced "IRMA" (rubber membrane) over the rear of the attic. Gordy & Leslie's back door froze shut so that he couldn't take the dog out to the yard, so he had to walk her at 4 a.m. Doggy-daycare is closed too, and their alley is as messed-up as ours anyway (Leslie's SUV notwithstanding).
Dinner tonight will be seafood Posillipo Bob's bringing home from the Palm: lobster, shrimp, crab, clams & mussels in spicy broth, sort of like zuppa di pesce. The Palm's portions are huge, so we'll share. This'll buy me time to defrost a couple of wild salmon filets for tomorrow night. (He's observing Lent, as in complying with it; I'm "observing" as in watching him and eating whatever protein I want. He's still guilt-ridden about having had eggs Benedict yesterday morning and not stopping at the hospital chapel to get "ashed" via Q-tip).
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Beesey - thanks for the Houston update. Did you hear from Java?
Not to jinx anything, but we have now had power for 24 hours and 10 minutes. After no water for those same 24 hours, we now have a trickle. Enough to fill a jug with more commode flushing water if you're patient - but boil orders will probably last until Monday. High today is up to 38 but back to 23 tonight.
Lunch was a can of clam chowder from Boudins Bakery in San Francisco. And I baked a loaf of sourdough bread. I found some 'shelf stable', organic, "bake it at home", non-GMO, sourdough bread at Costco last month. Comes 3 loaves to a box by The Essential Baking Company. It was pretty good. Not quite the same 'tang' as real San Francisco sourdough, but better than La Brea or Parisian. Best thing is that it lives on the shelf 6 month so a great emergency ration.
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Mae - Happy Birthday weekend. Hope you have a great time!!!
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Thanks minus! Tomorrow we’re having burritas and ritas. No party, just our houseguest and 1 friend. 45 pretty much sucked with everything last year threw at me, I’m hoping 46 will be nice.
Also, power has been back on for more than 24 hours straight, we are warm and well supplied, I just hope specs didn’t run out of tequila, lol
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Mae, may you have power, water, heat and libations for your birthday!
I'm getting tired of snow every day, but hey--this is Chicago. Our first winter here was the Blizzard of '79. My first band's debut gig in 1982 was on a -23F Saturday night. We hit our all-time record low--minus 26F--when Gordy was three months old and we were stuck inside. We trudged to a 2015 Super Bowl party using ski poles through a blizzard with 3-ft. drifts. We complain, but forget that by & large, this city is built for brutal winters, stifling summers, rolling blackouts during heat waves, and at least one day per spring or summer huddled terrified in the basement watching online weather radar maps for tornadoes. It's a bit tougher this year when COVID precautions keep us from being able to resort to public transit while our cars are snowed in, but we can ride it out.
OTOH, Texas is not prepared for this unforeseen and unforeseeable once-in-a-millennium freakish weather. It never before had to be. Its leaders' perversely independent streak has come back to bite them and penalize their constituents. There was no reason for their wind turbines to fail--they don't fail here in the Midwest, not even the upper Midwest and Canada's prairie provinces--and they supply only 13% of TX's power. Panicked dire predictions that the Green New Deal would make it worse fail to consider that solar power requires only sunlight, not heat. (Antarctica uses solar power). Heat pumps draw heat from all but the very coldest air--and store it. The stubborn self-reliance that led to TX having its own power grid made it impossible to buy energy from neighboring states, the way those of us in the Midwest/Northeast and Pacific grids can.
Oh, yeah--dinner. Bob brought home seafood Posillipo, but the lobster was overcooked. Tasty, but too flaky to extract neatly from the claws & knuckles (poorly cracked, to boot). He bought two orders, so the second one is tomorrow's dinner. It didn't come with a pasta for the broth, so I'll nuke him some spaghetti and spiralize myself some zucchini (or do what I did tonight: sop it up with a slice of low carb high fiber bread). One bright side of those huge snow piles out on the deck: I put the shells in a plastic bag which I tied up and tossed onto the snow pile so they don't stink up our kitchen garbage. I know I should make stock from the shells, but what am I gonna use it for anyway?
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Yup ChiSandy - lots of problems (and assholes) in Texas. But lots of problems everywhere. I don't think that political angles belong on the dinner thread, so I have no other comment.
Let's get back to basics. Let's talk about what we're actually cooking or baking or stewing or roasting all by ourselves. What are we making & cooking in our own kitchens with our own two hands. Many of us haven't been out to a restaurant or ordered take out since COVID hit. We've learned to make new things and it's just not the same as ordering out all the time. Once again - I REALLY miss Susan and her fresh bread every day. Special & Nance & Lacey & Mae are cooking. And Eric - what are you cooking?.
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Yes, Mae, Happy Birthday!
Dinner was meatloaf, nuked sweet potato, green peas. Too cold in the house for green salad.
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If Bob didn't have to work nearly every day, he wouldn't be able to pick up curbside takeout. Chicago is now permitting indoor dining at the lesser of 40% capacity or 50 people, but I don't quite feel safe yet doing that in places without high-power air-exchange ventilation systems, at least not till after my second shot. (The weather has also been a factor--duh--and our favorite places have yet to reopen, even for takeout). I'm fridge-and-freezer-foraging most of the time anyway, especially when it's just me. (Easier to "eat clean" that way too).
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Tonight we had pork country style ribs, roasted cauliflower and salad. DH does meat pretty well but overcooks the steaks, so I usually grill those.
The opossum we heard looking for scraps out by the grill got a plate of old dog food from our little ones emergency bag (he passed in 2019). I know the critters are cold too but I’m not bringing them in, we will help them out though.
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ChiSandy: Save your shells for stock and make risotto or a fisherman stew. I miss having someone put the food in front of me then cart away the dirty dishes but I am not ready for indoor dinner, even though I think it it is only 25% here. Most of my favourite places are still just take-away.
Last night's dinner: Baby back ribs in the Instant pot, mashed roasted cauliflower/roasted garlic, green beans from last summer's garden.
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Mae, Happy Birthday! And may 46 be a much more gentle year for you, indeed! You have weathered a lot and your zest for life is delightful! I’m so happy for your visiting opossum.
The snow gods just sent a teaser here this time, so we feel very thankful. And now DH can continue to focus on his king cake baking experiment. We are negotiating how much I should be involved. LOL We have such different approaches to kitchen creating. Hmmmmm. To be determined..... ;]
Nance, thanks for your recipe suggestions! He's still deciding!! And, Special, we sure do have “the baby". We have enough babies now to share with anyone else who wants to engage in this late-timed baking effort!Yesterday I made lasagna for us and for DS2's kitchenless crew, which I'll deliver today or tomorrow. I made the meat sauce with ground turkey and added eggplant to our layers. We had “some of" ours with a salad last night.
Tonight we'll have “jump ups" (did we ever recall who introduced that term to our thread?) since that's what exists in our fridge. Yay!
Sending warm thoughts to all who are dealing with the extreme weather.
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lacey - it was seasidememories way back in 2013, the term came from someone she knew many years before and refers to "jump up and get your own" leftovers out of the fridge.
illimae - Happy Birthday - and may this be a better year - you do indeed deserve one! Also thanking you on behalf of the opossum, he prob said jackpot!
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Echoing the birthday wishes illimae. You deserve a good one. Cheers!
Possums are the good guys. They eat ticks!
Lacey, DH does understand that a king cake is basically just a big cinnamon roll doesn't he? Of course down south they come in many delicious flavor variations. Please let us know how it turns out. I'm tickled that he's so enthusiastic about the project.
DH wants homemade pizza tonight but I think I’ll put it off until tomorrow night so I can do an overnight rise crust. That leaves me in the what’s for dinner quandary. I think maybe oven baked thick pork chops and cornbread stuffing and apples. I’m feeling like lemon meringue pie tomorrow because I have a single pie crust in the fridge ready to be rolled out.
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Dinner plans for tonight are for "planned overs": corn chowder for each of us, raspberry chipotle pork tenderloin with roasted potatoes for DH, meatloaf and green peas for me. Salad is not yet decided as we still do not have water or propane., making it hard to wash greens or boil water to do so! May just have an apple. Snow is mostly melted and fingers crossed below freezing temps over night don't turn the roads into skating rinks.
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As a (mostly) low-carber, I never make risotto. I eat it only rarely, in a tasting portion as part of a multi-course dinner out. I don't do stews of any kind, either. At one point, my freezer was full of crustacean shells, with no room for the food I needed to store; and I don't make stocks either because there's no room for containers of it in the fridge or freezer. My freezer has an icemaker, and there's no level surface to put an ice tray full of stock to freeze into cubes. When I cook, we tend to eat our meats & fish plain, with pan sauces and some veggie on the side. Sometimes a stir-fry with leftovers. (I'm a bit more adventurous for breakfasts/brunches). I'm no longer an adventurous cook, in no small part because there's just the two of us (and sometimes Bob is so late that he decides to eat at the hospital, so it's just me), it's no longer safe to have guests over, and we're lucky enough to afford to order out (and dine out when it's restaurant-patio weather). I cooked a lot more before dieting, and when Gordy lived with us,
Tonight, though, Bob had sourdough and I low-carb bread to soak up the broth from the second order of seafood Posillipo. For veg., sauteed julienned tricolor bell peppers. (We ate the entire "Gigi" salad as last night's appetizer).
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Burritos moved to tomorrow, tonight is stuffed pork loin with kale and broccoli/cauliflower.
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Yum Mae. Thanks again for calling to check on me. I hope you will have a fantastic entire weekend long B-daze celebration.
For dinner I made two green chili cheese enchiladas with flour tortillas, served with LOTS of sour cream. And I ate them both.
Got my 2nd Pfizer vaccine 8 hours ago. So far no side effects except a tiny bit of swelling at the injection site in my thigh. Not sore at all unless I thump on it.
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Oh, Mae, be still my heart! That pork looks so amazing, (maybe because we don’t eat mammals very often and my eyes get big every time I see a delicious looking serving!). And I am a kale girl, so this plate is just beautiful to me.
So the king cakes are done, as is the kitchen clean up. And yes, Nance, by the time DH finished almost a week’s worth of research, he realized that he was making a large, highly decorated cinnamon bun! And he went for it anyway! I was minimally involved in the process, but by the end he was happy to let me do the sugar sprinkles. I was impressed that after we each enjoyed a piece of his first effort at baking, he went back to several of the recipes he’d looked at to see if the temp and timing in the oven might be improved...and decided what he will try the next time. A successful snowy day at this house! Now maybe DH will start baking bread! He is a huge consumer of bread (and never gains a pound!), and I bet he would love to start baking it. I’m tempted to buy some sour dough starter for him!
Dinner was thrown together...some carrot hummus with veggies, tortilla chips with last minute guacamole, and leftover balsamic chicken.
Have to attach a pic after all this talk about DH’s “late” king cake... I think DS2 and his crew will get a kick out of being gifted with a big oldlasagna along with a king cake! I think this one looks a bit like a stylized pumpkin.
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Minus, we just cross posted. Glad to hear that you were able to get your second shot despite all the weather chaos, and serum hold ups for many states. And really happy that so far you are experiencing no unpleasant SEs. Yay! Hoping that it stays that way
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Thanks Lacey. And that cake looks delicious. I like the sourdough starter gift idea. Maybe Eric can fill in with some easy beginner recipes?
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Wow Lacey, he did great! I think the sourdough idea is great. The care and tending of it is very motivating and makes you want to bake regularly.
Beautiful meal illime.
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illimae happy birthday! And the dinner/pork looked delicious.
Lacey impressed with DH culinary skills. Bread making might be just the thing.
Tonight was simple and a bit routine but good. Fresh sausage and cheese pastas with sauce and a sprinkle of parm. Started woth a delicious green salad with chopped mushrooms and tomatoes. I think it tasted so good because everything was purchased recently. I have a habit of letting produce "age" before guiltily consuming it before it goes bad but its no longer best.
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Before the little pink plastic baby, a bean was placed in the king cake. Before my time (LOL) but that's what I have read. DH and I are not fans of the plain cinnamon flavored king cakes. We like the lavishly filled ones that are moist and gooey. We had two this mardi gras season from the same store, filled with cream cheese and blueberry jelly. They were delicious.
Also popular in our "neck of the woods" is the crawfish king cake, served as an appetizer or party food.
Because of liability issues, the pink plastic baby is no longer inserted into the king cake by the baker. The buyer has to insert it. The person who gets the baby in his/her slice has to provide the next king cake.
Off subject, dh and I watched an hours long documentary on George Washington that was eye opening to me. I had no idea he was such an admirable man. He was just a portrait that hung in all the classrooms. It's sad that he enjoyed only two years of retirement from public service before he died of an illness that could easily have been cured by an antibiotic.
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When we were in New Orleans for a spring break minivac years ago, we bought the best King cake at the street marketplace. It had the cream cheese filling and was so delicious that we bought several more to bring home for family. The one we bought this year was just a giant cinnamon bun with the Mardi Gras colored icings, beads, fleur de lis, and coins. Haven't found the baby yet so not sure if there is one. It's okay tasting but wish I could have one from New Orleans with the cream cheese filling.
We also found a satellite Beignet shop (owned by the Cafe du Monde) in a shopping center that overlooked the Mississippi. We would get some coffee, beignets and sit on the outside deck to watch the ships go up and down the river. Miss traveling and moments like this.
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Carole, where do you get your king cakes? When I make them I always make them cream cheese filled. . The best king cake I ever had from a bakery in Galveston was raspberry filled.
Homemade pizza tonight with lemon meringue pie. Carb fest!
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Happy birthday Illimae!.
I have my favorite sourdough bread and sourdough dinner roll (uses extra yeast) recipes.
I juiced enough oranges from our tree to get almost 35 gallons of orange juice. Each morning I make about 3 gallons of orange juice and I do the same each evening. If I go any faster, the freezer can't cool down fast enough to prevent the other foods from thawing. I'm now done and the dogs are disappointed....it turns out they love oranges, orange peels and orange pulp.
The vet said it's OK for them to eat oranges, but to not let them eat too many at one time due to the likelihood of what they termed "unpleasant digestive issues". :-)
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The meringue came out a little wimpy because I didn’t have cream of tartar. Bet it tastes better than it looks.
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Can't figure out how to make these pics smaller.
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Lacey, that's the prettiest king cake I've ever seen! The ones I've bought from Bennison's were oblong, with choice of plain, cream-cheese or almond-paste filling. The "baby" is the same kind of metallic hard plastic as Mardi Gras beads, in the traditional colors--last one I got was green.
Betrayal, I know that Riverwalk mall branch of Cafe du Monde well--was last there in Feb. 2019. Never had a problem finding a seat, especially on the outdoor promenade. (At the original, in the French Market on Decatur, you have to pick out an occupied table that looks like the person or people are finishing up, then stand over it and watch it like a hawk. And there are always panhandlers going table to table). Biggest problem with eating beignets outdoors is the powdered sugar--one wayward breeze and you're wearing it.
Bob wanted to order brunch from Beard & Belly/Honey Pie. I had bacon quiche (left the crust) and mesclun salad; he had a couple of fried eggs, three large sausages (each one nearly the size of a hot dog), and a house-made biscuit & jam.
For dinner, we walked around the corner to Ethiopian Diamond. (They're great neighbors--helping cater the block parties and even helping dig Bob out of the alley when he got stuck in the snowy alley). They'd been doing takeout & delivery all winter but tonight's their first night offering indoor dining since November (and our first indoor restaurant meal since Oct.--and even then, we'd only dined indoors twice, both times at Cellars, since the shutdown just before St. Pat's Day). Even with only 40% capacity allowed, they appeared to be doing well. Many of our neighbors were there. We had the "tibs sampler:" started with sambusas (like a cross between Indian samosas and Greek spanakopita)--lentil & chicken. Then, a platter (lined with injera--a teff*-flour pancake) of slightly spicy cubed chicken breast & lamb, plus beef strips; spinach; turmeric cabbage; spicy red lentils; and salad. No utensils--just more injera. You tear off a piece and use it to scoop up your food. Need I tell you that as a result, I definitely carb-cheated tonight? (Not to mention that the mead, made in-house, was sweet). Next time I'll swallow my pride and ask for a fork!
(I'd never considered ordering out from them, because an Ethiopian meal is a social, shared occasion).
*Teff is a grain native to Ethiopia. Since we have three Ethiopian and two Nigerian restaurants w/in a 2-mi. radius, there's an African grocery across B'way.
Tomorrow night, I'll make steak & broccolini. (Brunch will be tonight's leftovers, plus eggs).
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And who would ever want those pix to be smaller!?!? What a perfect Sat dinner! I love homemade pizza and DH and I have recently rediscovered how much we like lemon meringue pie. So this was perfect food porn for me! Totally outdoes any king cake pix (which was also not reducible somehow).
Eric, so far, DH is just making allusions to trying homemade pizza dough next, which will be pretty easy, but I’d love you to share your favorite sour dough recipe, if you are willing, if he gets on the sour dough bread baking train. I do hope he does. I have to say that while I have been getting very little beyond sewing done, DH has been amazingly productive in many new ways throughout our pandemic isolation. While I admire it, I could never get close to matching his creative activity level.
Tonight I made eggplant pizzas (more virtuous, perhaps, but waaay less satisfying than the "carby" version), balsamic roasted veggies,and salad. It was all tasty and healthful, until we had some of the cherry pie DH picked up impulsively this week. Yum!
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