Anyway, I love food. I love making food. I love planning what to eat and feed my family to surprise (and hopefully please) them, and I love reading recipes and looking at pictures of what my food might look like (and usually never does). I love grocery shopping with a list.
I do not love washing vegetables, chopping, or standing over a hot stove. I love seeing yeast proof and onions caramelize. I love making my weekly menu and I love it when I can stick to it.
Here's this week's deal: I'm still hearing cracks about putting Spam/Bacon Bits on everything, so there are two meat meals and only two vegan meals. I will continue with this until the mutineers are pacified. I hear you can do this with copious amounts of aspartame.
Dessert first. I made Mexican Hot Chocolate Snickerdoodles yesterday, which almost sent me into a coma of deliciousness. If you love chocolate with hot pepper, these cookies are for you. If you don't know about chocolate with hot pepper, get thee to a nunnery. Or at least somewhere that can offer you chocolate with hot pepper. I don't know if a nunnery can or not. Chocolove has a tasty, tasty bar. Or you could make these cookies.
Thursday African Pineapple Peanut Stew with Millet and Green Salad
I know. This is about the weirdest sounding thing I have ever made. Who puts pineapple, peanut butter, and kale in a pan and calls it stew? Apparently Moosewood does. And maybe Africa. That was some seriously delicious grub. I've had that cookbook for over ten years and have been afraid to make that stuff. Ten years lost, is what that amounts to.
Friday Pizza
Not just any pizza. I did the pork sausage, three-cheese supreme for the plebeians, but for me, a little caramelized onion/gorgonzola number that turned out to be pretty much heaven. Next time I'll put a little BBQ sauce down on the crust before spreading the onions. I anticipate food nirvana.
Note: busboy asked about the onions. I said they were caramelized. He didn't take to that idea much, which I thought was funny, given the previous day's fare. I guess the idea of cooking onions in a bit of sugar and oil until they taste like ambrosia isn't as appealing as peanut butter and kale. Whatever.
Saturday Leftovers
Mostly minestrone and pizza left in the fridge. It will be an Eye-talian sort of night.
Remember that paneer I made last week? I'm going to use the rest of it up in the saag. I predict there will be complaints about that, since I usually use lamb in the saag. I will shut them up with copious amounts of naan. That should work.
Still trying to make a dent in that monster bag of quinoa Costco talked me into. The chipotles should make daltonboy happy, even though the dish is vegan, and they should make Lola cry. Win, win!
Tuesday Brown Lentil Dal with Collards
My brother serves this with sliced tomatoes and avocados. It's yummy. I cook the collards in some sort of balsamic vinegar and agave sauce. Wow! And if the food budget goes any further over the top, we may just eat this for the rest of the month. Sometimes poor people eat good! If they have lentils, avocados, and collards available to them, anyway.
Wednesday Salsa Chicken
This is usually my busiest day, so I'm trying to use the crock pot. This recipe is a long-standing family favorite, but this time I'm going to try homemade tortillas to go along with it. Wish me luck. I don't have a great track record for rolling things out thin.
It's a bready week, which it will continue to be, as long as my gut holds out. So far, so good. I don't know what happened, but it seems to be tolerating the gluten. Thank heaven for small favors!
And speaking of poor people, I'm having a hard time with my new food budget. I've got $75/week for four people, which is a little over $10/day. I thought it would be enough, what with not buying a lot of meat and all, but apparently it's not. Turns out I need more like $100/week. So out of curiosity I checked to see what Uncle Sam feels is a reasonable amount of money to spend on food. A family like mine could receive up to $500/month for food stamps. This potentially means two things: 1) I might need to spend more money on food, and 2) people on food stamps could possibly eat healthy food with a couple of qualifications. They must have an adult at home pretty much full time to plan, shop, and cook. They must also have Internet access and the ability to research healthy lifestyles and recipes. And a well-stocked kitchen including food storage of staples. So maybe that's not as realistic as it sounds. Anyway, I need more food money. Looks like we'll have to have the electricity turned off.
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