Tag: broccoli

What’s for supper? Vol. 181: Omnipod, oyakodon, and Eggos

They tell me it’s Friday! Here’s what we apparently ate this week:

SATURDAY

Even though we had just come back from vacation that afternoon, I really put myself out there for my family and came up with an entire four-course meal, including chicken, mashed potatoes with gravy, coleslaw, and biscuits.

Man, am I a good mother! 

SUNDAY
Grilled ham and cheese on sourdough, chips

Corrie helped with ham placement.  

MONDAY
Spaghetti with sausages

A request from the kids. I remember cooking this, but not eating it. I  think maybe Damien and I went running and then got half price sushi at the half price sushi place? That sounds right.

TUESDAY
Oyakodon on rice noodles, sesame broccoli, spicy honey cucumber salad

Almost a really good meal, if I had been just a smidge more competent. Oyakodon is apparently a staple in Japan. It’s chicken and onions cooked in a savory broth with a little runny egg on top, and served over rice. It turned out we didn’t have rice, but only rice noodles. And then I couldn’t find dashi, so I substituted beef broth with a dash of fish sauce. Since I don’t know what it’s supposed to taste like anyway, I figured it couldn’t hurt. But then I also, um, accidentally tripled the amount of sugar it called for. 

It was still a tasty, cozy dish. You slice up chicken thighs and onions and cook that in the broth, then drizzle beaten egg over that and let it cook just a minute, and then slide it over your rice with some scallions or whatever, and spoon broth over it.

I may make it again, but probably when it’s cold out. I made a recipe card but somehow lost it. Bah! Here’s the more authentic recipe I based it on. 

I cut the broccoli into spears, spread them in a pan, drizzled it with sesame oil and a little soy sauce, and sprinkled it with sesame seeds and pepper, and then roasted the whole thing. This is ridiculously tasty and takes, like, six minutes start to finish. 

The cucumber salad is a snappy, refreshing summer side dish, also very fast. Vinegar, honey, red pepper flakes, kosher salt, and a few other things. Recipe card at the end if I can find it.  Here’s a terrible picture. 

I feel like we went to the beach after supper. I must really be feeling the pressure to end summer right. 

WEDNESDAY
Chicken burgers, corn on the cob

I really don’t remember Wednesday. I was doing . . . something. I remember a lot of driving around, like a lot of driving around, some unpleasantness at Home Depot, and then I think we had a guilt trip to the playground, so we ate late. What an exhausting week it has been. I keep accidentally staying up until 2 a.m. and then dreaming I’m pregnant. 

THURSDAY
Pulled pork sandwiches, french fries

Thursday was a bit nutty. We were gone for many hours for the training for Lucy’s new insulin pump. Damien took a small detour because the town we used to live in was cordoned off with a naked man shooting at police, and that’s his territory. The town, I mean. Not being naked and shooting at police. Then we dashed home, gobbled up supper, and went to Mass. I remember behaving rather badly, I forget why. 

Lucy’s pump just has saline solution in it now, not insulin, while we learn how to use it. So she is pretty pleased to be a daughter of Neptune, with salt water running through her veins. 

I made the pulled pork by dumping a hunk of pork into the crock pot with some Coke, cooking it all day, draining it, shredding it, and dumping in a bottle of barbecue sauce. It was indeed food. 

FRIDAY
Birthday party!

I cleverly got Clara to bake the cake on Thursday night before staying up till 2 a.m. and dreaming I was pregnant. Then I frosted the cake this morning ,and then I dropped it on the floor. Actually I dropped it, rescued some of the layers, reassembled what was left, and then dropped it again. Why? Well, WHY NOT?

So I ran out for a store-bought cake and it came together pretty okay. 

The candles are grouped around the letters “L-U-C-Y.”
I knew this party was coming, but somehow didn’t really make any plans. Happily, I did have garbage bags, paper bags, and thumb tacks. Voilà, The Gate. 

I mean, it does look ominous. I briefly considered tearing up bits of paper and threading them on threads and hanging them from the ceiling so you got that Upside Down effect with the drifting ashes or whatever it’s supposed to be, but even I could tell that was a bad idea. 

The kids are upstairs at this very moment making a Scoops Ahoy sign. The guests will be here in a little bit, and then we’ll have ice cream, then have a little beach trip, and then come home for pizza and cake. Phew. 

Okay, here are some recipe cards, quick, before the guests get here!

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Sesame broccoli

Ingredients

  • broccoli spears
  • sesame seeds
  • sesame oil
  • soy sauce

Instructions

  1. Preheat broiler to high.

    Toss broccoli spears with sesame oil. 

    Spread in shallow pan. Drizzle with soy sauce and sprinkle with sesame seeds

    Broil for six minutes or longer, until broccoli is slightly charred. 

 

5 from 3 votes
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spicy cucumber salad

A spicy, zippy side dish that you can make very quickly. 

Ingredients

  • 3-4 cucumbers, sliced thin (peeling not necessary)
  • 1/4 cup rice vinegar or white vinegar
  • 1+ tsp honey
  • 1 tsp sesame seeds
  • 1 tsp sesame oil
  • 1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
  • 1/4 tsp kosher salt

Optional:

red pepper, diced

  • 1/2 red onion diced

Instructions

  1. Mix all ingredients together. Serve immediately, or chill to serve later (but the longer you leave it, the softer the cukes will get)

 

 

What’s for supper? Vol. 161: Taste the rainbulgoki

Lots of color this week! It didn’t stop being February, though. Here’s what we had this week. Recipe cards at the end.

SATURDAY
Burgers, chips, salad

Nothing to report. Except that I had mine without salt, because of my fershlugginer blood pressure. Next time I’ll either put a little salt, or skip the burger and just go straight to the blasted heath.

SUNDAY
Beer can chicken, berries, home fries

Damien made a couple of beer can chickens, using more or less this recipe. He wasn’t happy with how it turned out, but I’m not sure why. I thought it was delicious and very juicy.

It could be just that ineffable essence of someone-else-cooked.

You know, the first box of blueberries I picked up at the store popped open and blueberries spilled all over the place, and all I did was just make an actual, audible growling sound, like a possum, and kick them under the shelf. When did I become a terrible person? Probably longer ago than I realize.

MONDAY
Gochujang bulgoki, rice, roast sesame broccoli

You put in some effort mixing up the sauce and slicing the meat and carrots and onions in the morning or even the night before, and boy does it pay off. This dish will warm you up inside from your guggle to your zatch.

Gochujang (fermented pepper paste) is now one of the thing we always have in the house. It is ready to please. Well, ready to grab you by the scruff of your neck and then please.

The broccoli dish is nice and easy, too. Just chop it up and toss it with sesame oil, drizzle on soy sauce, sprinkle on sesame seeds, and roast. Yum.

I made the rice in the Instant Pot using the 1:1 method. You can make this meal with either seaweed sheets or lettuce leaves, and make little bundles of rice and meat to pop in your mouth. It’s so good.

TUESDAY
Beef barley soup, pumpkin mumpkins

Not everyone in my house like beef barley soup and pumpkin muffins, but those who do love it so very dearly. I put a few minutes into trying to work up some kind of extended King Lear/Cordelia grateful child joke here, to follow up on the barely-perceptable Shakespeare joke in the first paragraph, but nothing happened. Hey look, soup.

Bizarrely, we were out of wine, so the broth was based in beef broth and tomato juice. It was still good, but wine would have been better. For my heart.

The pumpkin muffins turned out perfect, as always. These are the most tender, cozy muffins imaginable. I skipped the toppings this time.

I made thirty-six of them, and Benny ate probably thirty herself. She kept taking another muffin, cramming it in her mouth, and then shouting, “People keep eating all the muffins!” and we kept shouting, “You’re the one who keeps eating all the muffins!”

WEDNESDAY
Roast chicken and salad

A DIY meal, with mixed greens, grilled chicken, cucumbers, feta cheese, toasted almonds, diced red onion, blueberries, and tomatoes.

The blueberries and tomatoes didn’t really go together, but they were both so cheap, I couldn’t resist.

I toasted the almonds in the microwave. Spread on a plate, two minutes, stir, one more minute.

Perfectly fine salad. I had mine with wine vinegar.

THURSDAY
Shish kebob, except not; pineapple, rice

Pork was super cheap, so I bought three large hunks of it. The first went to the bulgoki, and the other two were destined for shish kebob. But it’s a lot of trouble to thread all that stuff on skewers, so I was gonna do deconstructed shish kebob, and just roast them under the broiler. I expressed this plan by writing “deconst-o-bob” on the dinner blackboard. I did this because the kids were already treating me like an idiot, but I felt like this would be a good means of getting them to treat me even more like an idiot, and it worked!

So when I preheated the broiler, the heating coil made a thrilling blue flash and a puff of magical smoke, and then it — oh, I can’t resist — it shuffled off this mortal coil. Ha.

So I decided to mix up some quick spiedie marinade and just mix it up with the peppers, onions, mushrooms, and meat, and cook it on the stovetop. I know from experience that it gets less pretty after cooking, so I took some lovely meat rainbow pics while it was raw.

Cooked it up in a little oil, and it was fine. Nothing to write home about, but a decent meal. We had some pineapple and rice on the side.

We spent the rest of the evening addressing the concerns of children who had eaten more pineapple than their soft palates were prepared to handle.

FRIDAY
Fish tacos

Gonna go shuffle off to the kitchen and make this now. I’ll keep it basic, just frozen batter-fried fish on tortillas with avocados, shredded cabbage, sour cream and cilantro. I feel like I bought some salsa.

Here’s the recipes for the things that aren’t self-explanatory:

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Sesame broccoli

Ingredients

  • broccoli spears
  • sesame seeds
  • sesame oil
  • soy sauce

Instructions

  1. Preheat broiler to high.

    Toss broccoli spears with sesame oil. 

    Spread in shallow pan. Drizzle with soy sauce and sprinkle with sesame seeds

    Broil for six minutes or longer, until broccoli is slightly charred. 

Print

Gochujang bulgoki (spicy Korean pork)


Ingredients

  • 1.5 pound boneless pork, sliced thin
  • 4 carrots in matchsticks or shreds
  • 1 onion sliced thin

sauce:

  • 5 generous Tbsp gochujang (fermented pepper paste)
  • 2 Tbsp honey
  • 2 tsp sugar
  • 2 Tbsp soy sauce
  • 5 cloves minced garlic

Serve with white rice and nori (seaweed sheets) or lettuce leaves to wrap

Instructions

  1. Combine pork, onions, and carrots.

    Mix together all sauce ingredients and stir into pork and vegetables. 

    Cover and let marinate for several hours or overnight.

    Heat a pan with a little oil and sauté the pork mixture until pork is cooked through.

    Serve with rice and lettuce or nori. Eat by taking pieces of lettuce or nori, putting a scoop of meat and rice in, and making little bundles to eat. 

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Chicken berry nut salad

Any number of variations. Use whatever fruit is in season and whatever nuts are on sale. Dried fruit is also fine. 

Ingredients

  • chicken breast, seasoned, cooked, diced
  • salad greens
  • blueberries, strawberries, cranberries, fresh or dried
  • toasted walnuts, pecans, almonds, etc.
  • feta or blue cheese, crumbled
  • diced red onions
  • balsamic vinegar or other light dressing

Instructions

  1. To toast the nuts: Spread them in a single layer on a plate and microwaving them on high for three minutes. This is the easiest, most reliable way to toast nuts, which improves the flavor and texture immensely for salad. 

    You can also toast them in the oven in a single layer on a pan in a 350 oven for 6-7 minutes, but watch carefully, as they burn quickly. 

5 from 1 vote
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Beef barley soup (Instant Pot or stovetop)

Makes about a gallon of lovely soup

Ingredients

  • olive oil
  • 1 medium onion or red onion, diced
  • 1 Tbsp minced garlic
  • 3-4 medium carrots, peeled and diced
  • 2-3 lbs beef, cubed
  • 16 oz mushrooms, trimmed and sliced
  • 6 cups beef bouillon
  • 1 cup merlot or other red wine
  • 29 oz canned diced tomatoes (fire roasted is nice) with juice
  • 1 cup uncooked barley
  • salt and pepper

Instructions

  1. Heat the oil in a heavy pot. If using Instant Pot, choose "saute." Add the minced garlic, diced onion, and diced carrot. Cook, stirring frequently, until the onions and carrots are softened. 


  2. Add the cubes of beef and cook until slightly browned.

  3. Add the canned tomatoes with their juice, the beef broth, and the merlot, plus 3 cups of water. Stir and add the mushrooms and barley. 

  4. If cooking on stovetop, cover loosely and let simmer for several hours. If using Instant Pot, close top, close valve, and set to high pressure for 30 minutes. 

  5. Before serving, add pepper to taste. Salt if necessary. 

5 from 1 vote
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Pumpkin quick bread or muffins

Makes 2 loaves or 18+ muffins

Ingredients

  • 30 oz canned pumpkin puree
  • 4 eggs
  • 1 cup veg or canola oil
  • 1.5 cups sugar
  • 3.5 cups flour
  • 2 tsp baking soda
  • 1.5 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • 1 tsp nutmeg
  • 1/2 tsp ground cloves
  • 1/4 tsp ground ginger
  • oats, wheat germ, turbinado sugar, chopped dates, almonds, raisins, etc. optional

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 350. Butter two loaf pans or butter or line 18 muffin tins.

  2. In a large bowl, mix together dry ingredients except for sugar.

  3. In a separate bowl, mix together wet ingredients and sugar. Stir wet mixture into dry mixture and mix just to blend. 

  4. Optional: add toppings or stir-ins of your choice. 

  5. Spoon batter into pans or tins. Bake about 25 minutes for muffins, about 40 minutes for loaves. 

 

5 from 1 vote
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pork spiedies (can use marinade for shish kebob)

Ingredients

  • 1 cup veg or olive oil
  • 1/4 cup lemon juice
  • 1/2 cup red or white wine vinegar
  • 4 tsp red pepper flakes
  • 2 Tbsp sugar
  • 1 cup fresh mint, chopped
  • 8-10 cloves garlic, crushed
  • 4-5 lbs boneless pork, cubed
  • peppers, onions, mushrooms, tomatoes, cut into chunks

Instructions

  1. Mix together all marinade ingredients. 

    Mix up with cubed pork, cover, and marinate for several hours or overnight. 

    Best cooked over hot coals on the grill on skewers with vegetables. Can also spread in a shallow pan with veg and broil under a hot broiler.

    Serve in sandwiches or with rice. 

 

 

What’s for supper? Vol. 144: Chocolate garnicht

Welcome, again, to new readers! And also old readers, you old bats. Most Fridays, I write a food post, wherein I describe the meals I cooked over the past week. I have ten kids and not a giant budget, so if you’re here to find recipe ideas or just to gawk, please pull up a chair. That sounded rude. I didn’t mean it to be rude. I gawk at myself all the time.

Anyway, I haven’t written up the recipe cards for this week yet; will add them when I get back.

And my big kitchen revelation this week: I have needed a paella pan all my life. I got one on sale last week. I still haven’t made or ever eaten paella or fully understand what it is, but boy, is that a useful pan. It has a lot of hot surface area and high, sloped sides, which makes it ideal for cooking or heating large quantities of sloppy food for large quantities of sloppy people. Get you one!

Here’s what we had this week:

SATURDAY
Chicken basil cutlets, garlic bread, salad, chocolate cupcakes

Birthday! The birthday girl — or technically birthday adult. We now have three technically adults children. Gevalt — requested Damien’s world-stopping chicken cutlets with fresh basil and provolone with homemade red sauce. If there were no heaven but only food, this is what the saints would be served. He made it with panko crumbs, too, cranking the scrumptious fluffiness up to eleven, and the sauce was bright and sweet and a little spicy.

You pound the chicken, bread it, and fry it, then lay a basil leaf on top, cover that with provolone, and ladle the sauce over all to make the cheese melt.

It only takes about eleven hours to prepare, and the rest of us who don’t spend eleven hours preparing it think we should eat it every day! So freaking good, especially since he cooked it in the wonderful, dark olive oil he found for cheap in this weird, off-brand store that carries such things for cheap.

The Birthday One requested chocolate cupcakes with chocolate frosting for dessert, but I had just been diagnosed with bronchitis that morning and knew that my already feeble and pathetic baking skills would dialed down to be nil; so I got boxed mix and canned frosting, and concentrated my efforts on the garnish.

Speaking of garnish, in German, gar nicht means “not at all.” This doesn’t mean anything; I just can’t stop thinking about it, and maybe now that I’ve told you, I can move along.

So I — well, I didn’t look up a recipe for some reason, but texted my husband to pick up a bar of Baker’s chocolate and some confectioner’s sugar. These I melted in a double boiler until it was more or less smooth. Then we put the melted chocolate in a sandwich bag (we had a pastry bag once, but do we have one now? Gar nicht.), lined a pan with waxed paper, and piped the chocolate into different shapes. Here she is, doing her magic:

She just piped out whatever popped into her head.

I was afraid it wouldn’t set, so we put the finished designs in the freezer for a few hours. They came out great! They peeled right off the wax paper and held their shapes perfectly when we stuck them in the frosting. Here are a few. A chocolate fishie:

 

a chocolate pumpkin:

a chocolate rose:

and of course a chocolate duck:

Changes I will make next time: I will use bittersweet or semisweet chocolate. The sugar I added barely made a dent in the baker’s chocolate taste! I will maybe add a little shortening, to make the chocolate smoother and a little more viscous. Or do I mean less viscous? I mean squeezy. And I will let it cool a bit in the bag before squeezing it (ow). Other than that, this turned out great. It was quite easy, and I’m sure we’ll be using this technique in the future. One friend said she doesn’t have much artistic talent, so she prints out designs and puts them under the wax paper to trace in chocolate. Brilliant!

 

SUNDAY
Basil chicken on spaghetti

There was so much food left over, we ate it again. Damien cut up the chicken and heated it up in the sauce, then served it all over spaghetti. Scrumptious.

MONDAY
Aunt Rosie’s Thai steak salad

Steak was on sale and my husband’s sister texted him about a salad that sounded good, so I took a stab at it. We had mixed greens, chopped red, yellow, and orange peppers, chili lime cashews, chopped cilantro, and mandarin oranges

and sliced steak, which I cooked under the broiler with olive oil, salt, and pepper, and then sliced thin. Okay, it was actually a roast, not steak. I realize there is a difference between different cuts of meat, but deep in the cheapness of my heart, I refuse to acknowledge that it really matters, especially if it’s the difference between pretending roast is steak and just buying pork again.

It was good. It was tasty and fun.

But here is where I went wrong: I made a dressing which would have been excellent as a marinade for the steak. But as a dressing, it was savage. I mean, I had seconds, but it was savage. The dressing was rice vinegar, sesame oil, fish sauce, minced garlic, and cilantro. I know, fish sauce. The children reminded me once again that it smells like cat frow-up, and once again, they were right.

Anyway, this meal is definitely going on the list, but next time I’ll marinate the meat in the sauce, and then we’ll just have a little vinaigrette to dress the salad. And I won’t open the cans of mandarin oranges until dinner is ready; or else I’ll buy five cans just for Corrie. Conversation we had about the mandarin oranges:

Me: No more, now. We have to save some for the others.
Corrie: Awwwwww!
Me: Okay, two more, but that’s all.
Corrie: Siddy Mama. [helps herself to six more]

And I let her get away with it, too, because I’m just so old. So old.

TUESDAY
Honey garlic chicken thighs with broccoli, potato, and squash

Sheet pan meals! They’re the best. This one is really easy, and susceptible to many adaptions, depending on what vegetables you have hanging around. I’ve somehow turned into the kind of person that gasps in delight to see squash on sale at the supermarket, so I snapped up a nice big one.

Butternut squash is about as easy to peel as a cinder block, but I know a trick! Cut both ends up and chuck it in the microwave for three minutes. Then you can peel it. It’s also helpful to have one of those horizontal peelers, rather than a vertical one.

So you put the vegetables on the pan, put the chicken on the pan, make the sauce and slop that over the chicken, and cook it most of the way. Then add broccoli and finish cooking, then lay on table next to decorative gourds.

Easy squeazy broccolisi, and if someone doesn’t like some part of it (squash), it’s easy to pick it out.

I like squash, though, and I love this meal. The honey sauce makes the chicken skin crisp and tasty, and the sweetness of it seeps into the vegetables in a lovely way. You don’t have to season the broccoli, even though it sits on top, gar nicht! It draws up the juice like a sponge.

WEDNESDAY
Meatloaf, mashed potatoes, peas

Oh, the hosannas. I don’t know how many times I could produce this meal and still be considered a hero by my kids, but I haven’t hit that number yet. Behold the splendor of this meal above all other meals:

My meatloaf is nothing special. I used five pounds of ground beef and two pounds of ground turkey, seven eggs, four cups of bread crumbs, Worcestershire sauce, minced garlic, salt, pepper, and oregano. I form the loaves on a broiler pan with drainage, so it doesn’t get all soggy as it cooks.

Where I really shine, though, is in my mashed potatoes. I make them with potatoes, butter, and milk, and also salt and pepper, if you can believe it. For the peas, I used my special technique of grasping a bag between my fingers and then opening it. I also use a pot and some water, but I don’t want to overwhelm you, so I’ll tell you about that next week.

THURSDAY
Bacon, eggs, and Brussels sprouts in balsamic honey sauce

Another excellent sheet pan meal, very tasty and satisfying. We got home so freaking late because of a cross country meet, so I was glad I had halved four pounds of Brussels sprouts and chopped up three pounds of bacon earlier in the day. Then you just make up a quick sauce, mix it with the sprouts and the bacon, and spread it in a pan and cook. Once the Brussels sprouts are tender and the bacon is just about done, you crack a bunch of eggs over the food, sprinkle with parmesan and red pepper flakes, and let the eggs cook up. That’s it! It would be great with a crusty bread or maybe pita or even cinnamon buns.

It’s a shame the daylight was gone by the time we ate, because this doesn’t look nearly as good as it tasted (even though I did undercook the bacon and overcook the eggs).

FRIDAY
Pizza

And not a moment too soon.

Well nuts, I still haven’t put together those recipe cards. I’m not on trial here! This week, I’ve been to urgent care, my old therapist, my new therapist, adoration, and my new spiritual director. So this is basically me now:

However, I will get those recipe cards to you soon.

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Thai Steak Salad

Ingredients

  • steak
  • mixed salad greens
  • cashews (chili lime are good)
  • bell peppers (red, green, yellow, or orange)
  • mandarin oranges, drained

marinade:

  • 3/4 cup rice vinegar
  • 3 Tbsp sesame oil
  • 1 Tbsp fish sauce
  • 1 Tbsp minced garlic
  • 1/2 cup cilantro, chopped

Instructions

  1. Mix together all marinade ingredients and marinate steak a few hours. 

  2. Grill or broil steak; slice thinly. 

  3. Put together salad, add steak on top. Dress with more wine vinegar if you like. 

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One pan honey garlic chicken thighs with fall veg

Adapted from Damn Delicious 

Ingredients

  • 18 chicken thighs
  • 2 lbs broccoli in spears
  • 4-5 lbs potatoes in wedges, skin on if you like
  • 1 butternut squash, peeled and cubed

sauce:

  • 1/3+ cup honey
  • 1/3+ cup brown sugar
  • 3 tbsp dijon or yellow mustard
  • 9 cloves garlic, minced
  • 2 tsp oregano
  • 2 tsp dried basil
  • salt and pepper
  • 6 tbsp olive oil
  • olive oil for drizzing

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 400. Prepare the sauce. 

  2. In a large, greased sheet pan, spread the potatoes and squash. Drizzle with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. 

  3. Lay the chicken thighs on top of the potatoes and squash. Brush the sauce over the chicken skins. 

  4. Roast the chicken for thirty minutes or more until they are almost cooked.

  5. Add the broccoli, arranging it on top of the potatoes and in between the chicken. Return the pan to the oven and let it finish cooking another 10 -20 minutes so you don't die. The skins should be golden and the broccoli should be a little charred. 

What’s for supper? Vol. 100: Same as it ever was

Once, an single young man tried to persuade me that NFP was bad because you might not be able to have sex on Valentine’s Day. He had me there.

Along not-really-similar lines, here we are at this momentous occasion of my one hundredth “What’s for Supper?” post, and I’m just marking it by telling you what we had for supper. Hey, at least I know what day it is. I even put on this special potholder just for you.

SATURDAY
Grilled ham, apple, and cheddar sandwiches on sourdough bread; pickles; chips

It was so good last week, we had it again.

The pickles, sadly, were not Siberian this time.

***

SUNDAY
BBQ Korean pork ribs with rice and nori, roast broccoli, strawberries

I made a marinade with about 3/4 cup of gochujang, 1/3 cup of honey, 2 Tbs sugar, 2 Tbs soy sauce, and a bunch of minced garlic (which I’ve started buying in jars), mixed in some sliced onions, and let the meat sit and dream beautiful dreams about the future all day. Then my husband cooked the meat over the coals, and there was rejoicing.

I cut the broccoli into small pieces, mixed them up with olive oil, pepper, a little soy sauce, and sesame seeds, and put them in a shallow pan in a hot oven for twelve minutes or so, until it was a little blackened at the tips. Sesame oil is better, but I was out.

The rice was from the Instant Pot, using the 1:1 method. I prefer the Instant Pot if you want the rice a little sticky but are too cheap to spring for good rice. I ate as much pork as I could manage, then made a roll out of seaweed, rice, and the spicy onions. Hot damn.

***

MONDAY
Honey mustard chicken thighs with red potatoes and broccoli 

I actually didn’t have any honey left after the Korean pork (a worthy sacrifice), so I made sauce with a little maple syrup and brown sugar, plus dijon mustard, lemon juice, olive oil, and whatever, salt and pepper and garlic powder or something.

Probably I should have mixed the sauce with the potato wedges, then added the meat and seasoned it separately, and then added the broccoli near the end of the cooking, but I just tossed it all up together and put it in a greased pan and cooked it at 425 for about forty minutes. It turned out fine. The broccoli soaked up a lot of the sauce, which made it damp but tasty. Not bad at all.

I have a strong memory of taking pictures of this dish — the crisp chicken skin was especially pretty in the last dying light of afternoon — but I have no idea where they went.

***

TUESDAY
Egg-in-toast, grapes

So nice. Such a reassuring food. Use plenty of butter.

***

WEDNESDAY
Nachos

I says to my kids, I says, Someday you’re going to grow up and begin your own life and form new relationships, and then someone’s going to give you a tray of actual nachos, and you’re going to be very angry at me.

Just chips, ground beef, and pepper jack cheese. I bought sour cream, but it got pushed to the back of the fridge and froze. We had salsa, but it got pushed to the back of the fridge, and then it worked its way back up to the front, where it presented itself as fresh. IT WAS NOT. It was fermented. I spent the next three hours going “Phbbbbblehhh.”

***

THURSDAY
Spaghetti with sausage, salad

Just jarred sauce with hot sausage, peppers, and onions added in.

Everyone was hungry, so it went over well.

***

FRIDAY
Chicken shawarma and pita

It’s Friday, but it’s also CLARA’S BIRTHDAY! And when the birthday girl wants shawarma on Friday, she gets shawarma on Friday. She will also eventually get presents. Amazon Prime ain’t what it used to be.

Clara, however, will always be this:

in my head, anyway.

What’s for supper? Vol. 79: Asparagus me, Domine

Can’t remember the last time I’ve been so glad to see a week be done. Here’s what we had:

SATURDAY
Sausage, fried eggs, and muenster cheese on bagels

I will never complain when there are sandwiches for supper.

***

SUNDAY
Lamb lo mein with spaetzle; rice; pot stickers; rice

Probably the weirdest meal of the week. We had a nice meaty bone left over from last week’s lamb feast, so I cut the meat into bits and added it to this simple lo mein recipe from Damn Delicious.  I made it even simpler by just chucking in a couple of bags of frozen stir fry vegetables, rather than using fresh. Then I made it weirder by using a few bags of spaetzle for the noodles. The result was a multi-ethnicish meal that soared to the level of Not Bad At All.

No one in my family has actually tasted lo mein before, so they were the right audience, I guess.

The potstickers were frozen from Hannaford. Kind of a pain for frozen food – you have to brown them in oil and then steam them – but they were tasty. One kid ate just the wrapper, and left behind little bundles of steamed cabbage and chicken, which I of course ate also.

You are thinking, “Why did she also make rice, with all that other stuff?” The answer is that at least three of my kids are currently following a strict Rice and Tears diet.

***

MONDAY
Tacos

On Monday, I looked at my driving schedule for the week and let out a weak whimper. Seriously considering buying each kid a moped and just letting them get where they need to be on their own. I’ll take out a credit card in the choir director’s name. Add an entire extra concert with rehearsals every night for two weeks right when all the other teachers are realizing we need to squeeze in all those field trips and special projects and fundraisers, will you? EAT MOPED DEBT AND DIE.

Oh, so we had tacos. It turns out cumin can be fairly overwhelming if you angrily shake in half the jar, but you can disguise it with extra salt.

***

TUESDAY
Pizza

Nothing to report. Luckily, I have two pepperoni distribution specialists living in my very house.

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WEDNESDAY
Steak tips with mushrooms on noodles; rolls; roast asparagus

This is a slow cooker meal from Damn Delicious, and chuck roast is still on sale! The sauce never thickened up as much as it was supposed to, even with extra cornstarch, but the flavor was, in fact, damn delicious.

I mixed up the asparagus with a little olive oil, spread it on a pan, and slid it right under a hot broiler, then sprinkled it with lemon juice when it was done. Did you know you are supposed to eat asparagus with your fingers? Do you know it’s hard, but not impossible, to drive while licking your plate?

***

THURSDAY
Korean beef bowl, rice, roast sesame broccoli 

Still a great meal, still easy. In the morning, I cooked up the meat and then transferred it to the slow cooker; I set up the rice in the Instant Pot (affiliate link!) (the 1:1 formula works fine); and prepped the broccoli. So when I tore into the kitchen that afternoon knowing half of us had to be out the door again in 25 minutes, we still had a swell meal.

Have I mentioned how I love roasting vegetables? I drizzled the broccoli with sesame oil, spread it in a single layer, sprinkled it with sesame seeds, and slid it right under the broiler until the edges got a little blackened. So many veggies taste good this way.

***

FRIDAY
Tuna noodle

And tears, no doubt.