What's for Dinner?

We have been eating well these past several months

...I just haven't been writing about it.  Along with cooking, I nurture several other matronly hobbies, including needlepoint and the Junior League, and the needlepoint in particular kept my spare time pretty knotted up (see what I did there?) to the point that I spent all my free time finishing up a couple of Christmas projects rather than writing.  (I've also resumed updates at my main blog.) 

Praises be, I kept track of most of my menus for the past couple of months.  Here are the recipes and meals that stood out:

• Chocolate Chili, from Stop and Smell the Rosemary, one of my all-time favorite Junior League cookbooks.  I made this right around the start of football season when the Redskins, bless their hearts, were on Monday Night Football.  A friend of mine gave me a bar of fancy-schmancy chocolate laced with ancho chili, so I used a few ounces of that rather then the bittersweet chocolate chips I usually melt into the chili.  I have yet to find a chili recipe that I like more than this one.  I've tweaked it over the years - I always saute the onions while I brown the meat - but it remains a cold-weather mainstay.  And (it is a Junior League recipe, after all), it freezes beautifully.
• Farfalle with Turkey Sausage, from Everyday Italian.  It was surprisingly good for something made with so little fat.  Plus, Adam loved the leftovers.
• Mini meat loaves, from The Dorky Yankees, Part II: The Dorkening.  My lord, I love meatloaf.  To be honest, I am suspect of people who don't love meatloaf.  And this recipe made some mighty good meatloaf, which I served with buttermilk mashed potatoes. 
• Lentil soup with pounded walnuts and cream, from the NYT magazine, adapted from Deborah Madison's Vegetable Soups.  Wow - just, wow.  I need to make this soup again, because it was sublime.  Chris tackled the task of pounding the walnuts and garlic with the mortar and pestle, and his efforts were well worth it.  I know I'm talking about lentil soup, perhaps the most peasant of peasant soups, but seriously - this recipe is that good.  I also think I need to go ahead and buy a copy of Vegetable Soups, as I am a big fan of both Deborah Madison and this recipe.
• Ratatouille, from the Gourmet Cookbook.  Here's the thing about ratatouille: I love it when someone else makes it, because even the simplest recipe requires Herculean prep work, and while ratatouille is indeed tasty, this recipe just wasn't worth the effort.
• Eggplant Parmesan, from the Dorky Yankees.  Yum, yum, yum - and it freezes beautifully, so it only makes sense to divide the recipe and freeze half of it for later.

We've also eaten ten of the twelve meals I assembled - assembled is definitely the word I'm looking for - a few weeks ago when a friend of mine organized a party at  our local Dinner A'Fare - but that's for another post.  Also for future posts - the Favor Road taco truck and other Cobb County gems, and Trader Joes!  In Atlanta!

With Apologies to Mark Bittman (A la!)

So, while grill-roasting the Vidalia onion and the garlic cloves for Mark Bittman's eggplant salad with yogurt dressing produced really good onions and garlic, when combined with the eggplant, the finished product was tasty but watery.  Very, very watery.  I also think that, while simple, grilling the eggplant whole wasn't the best thing to do, as it also resulted in slightly watery eggplant.  I'm surmising that splitting the eggplant in half lengthwise and then grilling it is the thing to do, because maybe some of the eggplant liquid evaporates during the grilling process?  I don't know - I'm no food scientist. 

Here's the plan for the next go-round: while I think that I'll use Vidalias, but I'll keep them raw.  I'll grill-roast the garlic cloves in foil, though, because I really do prefer roast garlic to raw, and I don't think that roast garlic will put off anywhere near as much water as it would take to make the entire salad watery.  We'll see how it goes.

This week's menu is fairly abbreviated.  I'm roasting a chicken tonight, brined a la the Dorky Yankees, and roasted a la Marcella Hazan.  I have several leftover baked potatoes in the fridge, along with some buttermilk, so I'm going to make a batch of mashed potatoes a la A New Way to Cook.  I have two ripe, gorgeous Georgia tomatoes in my pantry, some basil on the back porch, and some buffalo mozzarella in the fridge (leftover from last night's pizza), so I think I'll also make a caprese salad, which doesn't necessarily fit with the rest of the menu, but should be delicious.

The best laid plans

Sunday night's dinner was a success.  The kids weren't wild about the creamed spinach (more for me, then), but they loved the potatoes.  For dessert I made a strawberry crisp but since there were no fresh strawberries at the supermarket I substituted frozen, and I deeply regret that choice, especially when I think about all the quarts of gorgeous blueberries that were available at the market.

Monday night's gumbo z'herbes was good, too, but it took some tweaking.  When I went to re-heat the defrosted gumbo, I tasted it and thought that while the flavor was good, it was a little thin, if that makes sense.  I figured that I had about a third of the original quantity that the recipe made, so I decided to make a new roux with a third of the flour and oil called for by the recipe. I also added a third of the seasonings and thyme to the roux, but opted not to add anymore onions or celery, since the gumbo had plenty.  I did add a couple of minced shallots and a minced garlic clove, if only to have some cool vegetables to add to the roux when I was ready for it to stop cooking. 

The original recipe called for a "peanut butter" colored roux, but that felt too light to me, so I let it darken to a nice maple syrup color before I added the vegetables, the seasonings, and, once the vegetables had a chance to soften in the hot roux, a little of the gumbo liquid so I could dissolve the rough into a thick paste.  I then added the new roux to the defrosted gumbo, and yum!  Great gumbo.  Chris actually told me that he wasn't expecting much from meatless, "Friday" gumbo, but he ate two bowls, so there you go.  I have another gallon-sized ziplock of the stuff in the deep freeze, so I'll be sure to re-roux that batch when the time comes.

Sadly, though, there was no ratatouille on Tuesday night.  I was unwell in a digestive-tract way on Tuesday, and couldn't bear the thought of entering the supermarket, much less cooking.  Chris picked up a tilapia sandwich and I ate toast.

Yesterday, while I felt 110% better, I didn't quite feel up to gratineed gnocchi.  I decided to stick with the gnocchi and make a batch of my new favorite tomato sauce recipe.  God bless you, Giada, for your tasty sauces.  Problem was, when I opened the package of fresh gnocchi that I bought earlier in the day, I noticed that while it was dusted in flour and cornmeal, it was also sprouting teeny blots of mold.  Penne it was (and tasty, too)!

Tonight, I'm making tandoori-marinated chicken thighs, basmati rice cooked with a chunk of lemongrass (a tip I gleaned from a friend yesterday), and Mark Bittman's grilled eggplant salad from last week's NYT.  I made it last week when the recipe first ran, but I'm going to do some tweaking tonight.  First, I'm using regular globe eggplants, because while Mr. Bittman can apparently find no local globe eggplants in the city, our market had mounds of Georgia globe eggplants (because food is the biggest part of our household budget ((after the mortgage, of course)) my rule of thumb is to buy local first, then organic, then whatever looks prettiest, and then cost - bonus points if the produce in question is all four).  Second, while the recipe says to butterfly the eggplant and then to slather the minced onion and garlic in the eggplant, un-butterfly it, and then grill it, turning it occasionally, I found that doing this required all kinds of physics-defying moves, plus, the remaining raw onion and garlic that I mixed in with the yogurt was good, but boy howdy, did we taste it the next morning.  So this time, I'm going to quarter the onion and separate the garlic cloves, wrap them in foil, and roast them on the grill them while I grill the whole eggplants.  Then I'll just chop everything and mix it with the yogurt and the mint. 

Of course, I'll report back with the results.