Apparently it’s Friday! Here’s what we cooked this week:
SATURDAY
Meatball subs
Had my sub outside with a short, chatty person who, after a rather violent bath, was drying her hair in the setting sun.
I could try to pass off that sub as the sub that a silly child has clearly started eating sideways, but in fact that is my sub.
Damien made the meatballs. He uses the same recipe I do,
Jump to Recipeexcept he’s much, much better at seasoning meat than I am, and they turned out very yummy indeed.
SUNDAY
Beef gyros
This is it. This is the simplest, tastiest gyro marinade yet.
Jump to Recipe
It’s just olive oil, lots of garlic, fresh mint, oregano, and paprika, and salt and pepper. The wild mint has come up in the yard, so I added a big bunch chopped up.
I don’t remember how I cooked the meat. Maybe I seared it and then roasted it, or maybe I just roasted it. It sliced up beautifully rare and juicy.
I served it with fries and sliced cucumbers and tomatoes and plenty of spicy yogurt sauce, and a little hot sauce. Three of the kids spontaneously said it was good! I don’t know if you realize what a dazzling triumph that is for me.
I took some of the marinade and added it to some plain Greek yogurt, for a zippy dipping sauce. I also made my usual yogurt sauce, with fresh garlic, pepper, salt, and lemon juice. This is definitely the recipe I’ll be using from now on.
MONDAY
Cumin chicken and chickpeas with yogurt sauce, pita, and red onion salad
An easy, very appealing one-pan meal I haven’t made in some time. You marinate the chicken thighs in a cumin yogurt sauce for several hours before cooking, then just spread it out on a pan with some seasoned chickpeas, and away it goes. The meat is SO juice and the skin is SO crisp and tasty. You really must try it.
Jump to RecipeReally lovely with some fresh pita bread, garlicky yogurt sauce, and red onions and cilantro with lemon juice.
Great for people who like middle eastern food, but mild enough for people who don’t especially.
TUESDAY
Kielbasa, cabbage, red potatoes; green beans
Another easy one-pan meal (or two pans, as the case may be)
I normally flip the components halfway through cooking, but skipped it this time, and that was a bit of a mistake. The kielbasa got a little burnt on bottom, and the cabbage was a bit flabby, but that was my fault, not the recipe’s.
Jump to RecipeI usually make a mustard sauce with honey and wine vinegar and fresh garlic, but also skipped that, and put out a bottle of some kind of fancy trick mustard from Aldi.
Not bad at all. It was a hot, salty meal that you could easily eat with a fork, and I had no complaints.
WEDNESDAY
Beef and broccoli on rice, red bean buns
Another surprisingly popular meal! I followed the marinade recipe from Damn Delicious to the letter, so I didn’t bother writing up a recipe card (which I generally only do if I alter the recipe). Slightly spicy (courtesy of sriracha and hot pepper flakes). The sauce didn’t thicken, but I wasn’t expecting that. My sauces just don’t thicken. I accept this. Yes, I used corn starch.
The pictures turned out bad, but it was a pretty dish, as well as tasty.
I had some bean buns in the freezer, that I grabbed when we ventured into a different supermarket a few weeks ago. I wasn’t really sure how to cook them, so I put them in the Instant Pot on the rack with a cup of water and set it to high pressure for 8 minutes. I also wasn’t really sure how they were supposed to taste, but that worked well enough, although I crammed twelve of them in there, so they stuck together a bit.
What do you normally eat bean buns with? Are they an appetizer? These were sweet. I’m still very much a country mouse and don’t know much about other cuisines.
THURSDAY
Chicken nuggets/supermarket sushi
I’ve spared you all the details of how busy we’ve been this week, but suffice it to say the schedule made me cry more than once, and also the car broke down again because of course it did. Hence Thursday’s meal. I accidentally bought something called “teriyaki chicken sushi,” which is an abomination. I mean, I ate it, but still.
FRIDAY
Domino’s, and cake
Today is Benny’s first communion and Benny, Irene, Lucy, and Sophia’s confirmation! There’s a long sad story about how we kept traveling over diocesan lines right when various parishes were switching order of sacraments, and then when we got caught up, we got covid symptoms and had to stay home. So we’re finally finally getting this done, and then having cake and pizza. Clara made this pretty “stained glass” cake:
We make this by covering a cooled cake with royal icing, which gives you a flat, dry surface to work on.
Jump to RecipeThen you make your stained glass design with black icing (you can plot out the design with a toothpick first), then carefully fill in the spaces between the lines by spooning in jellies and jams of various colors. You can whip up the jelly with a little water to make it more spreadable. Very handy for people who have a lot of sacrament parties.
And that’s it!
Meatballs for a crowd
Make about 100 golf ball-sized meatballs.
Ingredients
- 5 lbs ground meat (I like to use mostly beef with some ground chicken or turkey or pork)
- 6 eggs, beaten
- 2 cups panko bread crumbs
- 8 oz grated parmesan cheese (about 2 cups)
- salt, pepper, garlic powder, oregano, basil, etc.
Instructions
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Preheat oven to 400.
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Mix all ingredients together with your hands until it's fully blended.
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Form meatballs and put them in a single layer on a pan with drainage. Cook, uncovered, for 30 minutes or more until they're cooked all the way through.
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Add meatballs to sauce and keep warm until you're ready to serve.
Yogurt sauce
Ingredients
- 32 oz full fat Greek yogurt
- 5 cloves garlic, crushed
- 1/4 cup lemon juice
- 3 Tbsp olive oil
- 1 tsp salt
- 1/2 tsp pepper
- fresh parsley or dill, chopped (optional)
Instructions
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Mix all ingredients together. Use for spreading on grilled meats, dipping pita or vegetables, etc.
Cumin chicken thighs with chickpeas in yogurt sauce
A one-pan dish, but you won't want to skip the sides. Make with red onions and cilantro in lemon juice, pita bread and yogurt sauce, and pomegranates, grapes, or maybe fried eggplant.
Ingredients
- 18 chicken thighs
- 32 oz full fat yogurt, preferably Greek
- 4 Tbsp lemon juice
- 3 Tbsp cumin, divided
- 4-6 cans chickpeas
- olive oil
- salt and pepper
- 2 red onions, sliced thinly
For garnishes:
- 2 red onions sliced thinly
- lemon juice
- salt and pepper
- a bunch fresh cilantro, chopped
- 32 oz Greek yogurt for dipping sauce
- 3 cloves garlic, minced or crushed
Instructions
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Make the marinade early in the day or the night before. Mix full fat Greek yogurt and with lemon juice, four tablespoons of water, and two tablespoons of cumin, and mix this marinade up with chicken parts, thighs or wings. Marinate several hours.
About an hour before dinner, preheat the oven to 425.
Drain and rinse four or five 15-oz cans of chickpeas and mix them up with a few glugs of olive oil, the remaining tablespoon of cumin, salt and pepper, and two large red onions sliced thin.
Spread the seasoned chickpeas in a single layer on two large sheet pans, then make room among the chickpeas for the marinated chicken (shake or scrape the extra marinade off the chicken if it’s too gloppy). Then it goes in the oven for almost an hour. That’s it for the main part.
The chickpeas and the onions may start to blacken a bit, and this is a-ok. You want the chickpeas to be crunchy, and the skin of the chicken to be a deep golden brown, and crisp. The top pan was done first, and then I moved the other one up to finish browning as we started to eat. Sometimes when I make this, I put the chickpeas back in the oven after we start eating, so some of them get crunchy and nutty all the way through.
Garnishes:
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While the chicken is cooking, you prepare your three garnishes:
-Chop up some cilantro for sprinkling if people like.
-Slice another two red onions nice and thin, and mix them in a dish with a few glugs of lemon juice and salt and pepper and more cilantro.
-Then take the rest of the tub of Greek yogurt and mix it up in another bowl with lemon juice, a generous amount of minced garlic, salt, and pepper.
One-pan kielbasa, cabbage, and red potato dinner with mustard sauce
This meal has all the fun and salt of a wiener cookout, but it's a tiny bit fancier, and you can legit eat it in the winter.
Ingredients
- 3-4 lbs kielbasa
- 3-4 lbs red potatoes
- 1-2 medium cabbages
- (optional) parsley for garnish
- salt and pepper and olive oil
mustard sauce (sorry, I make this different each time):
- mustard
- red wine if you like
- honey
- a little olive oil
- salt and pepper
- fresh garlic, crushed
Instructions
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Preheat the oven to 400.
Whisk together the mustard dressing ingredients and set aside. Chop parsley (optional).
Cut the kielbasa into thick coins and the potatoes into thick coins or small wedges. Mix them up with olive oil, salt, and pepper and spread them in a shallow pan.
Cut the cabbage into "steaks." Push the kielbasa and potatoes aside to make room to lay the cabbage down. Brush the cabbage with more olive oil and sprinkle with more salt and pepper. It should be a single layer of food, and not too crowded, so it will brown well.
Roast for 20 minutes, then turn the food as well as you can and roast for another 15 minutes.
Serve hot with dressing and parsley for a garnish.
Marinade for beef gyros
enough for 4-5 lbs of meat, plus a little extra to mix into yogurt sauce if you like
Ingredients
- handful fresh mint, chopped fine
- 1 head garlic, minced or crushed
- 1-1/3 cups olive oil
- 4 tsp dried oregano
- 2 tsp paprika
- kosher salt and pepper to taste
Instructions
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Mix all ingredients together and marinate meat. If you like, take a few spoonfuls of the marinade and mix it into 2-3 cups of Greek yogurt with a little water, for a sauce.
Royal icing
An icing that dries hard, so you can use it to glue pieces together, or use as a flat surface to decorate. Add less sugar to make it thinner and pour over cookies or petits fours; add more sugar to make it more thick for spreading or piping. It will be stiff enough to decorate over within about half an hour, and it will be like cement in four hours.
Ingredients
- 4 egg whites
- 6 cups confectioner's sugar, sifted
- 2 tsp lemon juice
Instructions
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In an electric mixer with a whisk attachment, whisk the egg whites on high until they are opaque and foamy.
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Add the sugar a little scoop at a time, continuing to whisk on high. Add the lemon juice.
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Keep whisking on high until the icing is as thick as you want it. Adjust how much sugar you add to make it as thick as you want.
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Keep the icing covered tightly, with plastic wrap touching the icing, until you're ready to use it because it starts drying out immediately.
So now what is the order of sacraments? First Communion and Confirmation together at age 9?
Yes, that is how they do it here now.
“Hot, salty and can be eaten with a fork” is right up my alley. I love that meal but I usually use Brussels sprouts instead of cabbage. They are great with the sausage and potatoes.
I see your recipe makes about 100 meatballs, and I’m just wondering who is the patient person in your house who actually rolls that many meatballs. I usually only make about 36, and even then, they get progressively larger as I get more impatient with the forming of meatballs until by the end, I may as well have made meatloaf. Maybe the secret is having children do it?
It is a pain, but I brown them and freeze them in batches of (however many you will need for a meal). I find the promise of premade meatballs in the freezer is enough to keep me going. And homemade are always better than bought. Recently I bought some from an Italian deli that I like, and they were okay, but I like mine better.