What We Ate: a seasonal reminder of dinner at our house.

This meal is a go to in every season. It works especially well when: ~one has limp greens in the fridge that aren't yet ready for the compost ~there is an odd assortment of veggies that would not otherwise work well together ~time is limited and you still want to have some sort of meal It only requires pasta, butter, capers and veg. If you happen to have lemon or leftover chicken or a tomato on hand, all the better. Wilt and season (kale, spinach, chard, and/or bok choy) and/or sauté and season (broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, green beans... whatever). Make more than you think you'll ever eat. Might look like this I'll often do this in two frying pans but there isn't any reason to - you can do it in batches. One of the lovely things about this mean is that it can be served hot, cold, or room temp. It can be refrigerated for later or warmed up in the oven. While the greens are doing their thing, cook a pound of pasta in well salted water. (I cam...

I've been traveling a couple of days and it's January in Wisconsin. This combination can be brutal. Imagine my surprise when I arrived home to Lentil Soup with Sausage  made in the instant pot and ready to go! I found this recipe earlier this year because I'm still looking for instant pot recipes that make dinner easy. This once was a hit ~ easy to make, so satisfying, not overly heavy and perfect for cold, dark and snowy days.

We are not, for the most part, eaters of red meat. We have a great source for chicken (free range, anti-biotic free, rocked to sleep nightly with chicken lull-a-byes - you know the type), but have had a harder time finding a consistent and convenient source for beef. And also we were vegan last year for 7 months whenever we ate together as a family. But that's for a different post. All this means, I make chili twice a year. This recipe is just mine, based only on years of experimenting with lots of different recipes and figuring out what we like and what we don't. It's also highly dependent on what we have in the pantry. One whole sweet onion, chopped. One pound of grass fed, organic beef. 4 cloves garlic, minced 2 zucchinis - partially skinned - and chopped 1 can (or two cups) kidney beans, drained (haphazardly) 28 oz can of crushed plum tomatoes with juices. 2 t cumin 2 t chili powder 1 t salt (more to taste) 1/4 t black pepper freshly ground (more to taste...

This is a standard at our house. It often happens once a week and on weeks when things are really unwieldy, we might eat it twice. Here's how it goes. 1 package of extra firm tofu with the fluid pressed out (I do this by wrapping the tofu in a tea towel and put a cast iron pan on top of it for 10 minutes) diced into small pieces and fried in peanut oil with salt and pepper. All the veg in the fridge that is just on the edge of fresh. (Okay, it's beyond the edge. The cauliflower is turning brown - scrape it off. The broccoli has questionable spots on it - cut them off. The peppers are shriveling - slice them up anyway. The cabbage is dry - no worries. The last of the bag of peas. You get the idea.) also include onions (yellow, red, green it doesn't matter) ginger (diced, shredded, chopped, whatever) 1.5 cups of Jasmine rice in the rice cooker with 2.75 cups of water, a glug of oil and a pinch of salt. Saute in the wok in batches (onions first, then cruciferous b...

only Chipotle will do.

I'm sick. My throat feels like it's been roughed up by a nail file. And when that happens, there really isn't anything better than chicken noodle soup - good thing it was on the menu for tonight. I love this version by Nigella Lawson. The recipe is for one but I make the following modifications for the whole family. It's way more interesting than regular chicken noodle Chicken bone broth from the fridge (the better part of a half gallon jar), chicken in the instant pot (cause no one defrosted anything. again.) Throw 4x soy sauce and sherry in with the broth (instead of reducing it with the chicken). Add 4x the ginger.  Skip the corn and the spinach. Two Fresno chilis diced and whatever green onion is around. Dice the chicken and add it too. Because Roo had a concert tonight I put everything in the pot except the noodles and peas and let it sit for a couple of hours while we were gone. Ten minutes to bring it back up to a boil to add the noodles (I used rame...

I had the most frustrating experience today. I got home from work and all the after school rigmarole at 5:17 and needed to produce dinner. I made chick peas yesterday in the instant pot  (30 minutes with a teaspoon of salt) for our famous all the greens (recipe later) and was planning to make spicy chick peas - with the leftovers - and roasted veg and couscous tonight but COULD. NOT. FIND. THE. RECIPE. Since I have a New York Times Cooking subscription and felt certain that the recipe was housed there, I popped into my recipe box and searched "spicy chick peas" but the right recipe was nowhere to be found... I tried "spicy garbanzo", "spicy chickpeas", "roasted tomatoes, peppers, onion" to no avail. Nothing. I spent ten minutes trying multiple configurations of spicy and chick pea. Nothing. After abandoning the Times, I went to Google, typed in "spicy chick pea tomato pepper" and came up with EXACTLY the recipe I'd been looki...

We didn't get divorced and our kitchen has been done for more than a year. Documenting the process turned out to be more than I could manage ; ) Here's what it looks like now And here are the kinds of posts you missed (because I never wrote them).  4 (FOUR) visits from the city inspector  Ventilation is the MOST important thing How many days before we scratch the brand new floor (hint less than 3) Grilling eggs at 6am is really not that bad ~ as long as it's summertime Porcelain vs. Stainless - we made a mistake But mostly, we LOVE, love, love love LOVE our new kitchen and have been happily cooking in it.  Which is why this blog will now be called, What We Ate 

The question we've been asked most often is, "did you find anything interesting when you ripped out the walls?" We live in an older neighborhood. Most of the houses we're built in the late 1930s and early 1940s and it is common to find "insulation" of building scraps and newspapers.  Our "insulation" looked like this:  It's hard to tell from the picture, but it has the same weight and drape of medical gauze, but wider, and it's hard to imagine that it had any role at all in keeping our house warm or quiet. Also, as you can  see, it was badly deteriorated.  We found no building scraps, new newspapers, no lost toys or jewelry. It was all rather boring. Except.  There must have been a fire.  When we removed the cabinets, this is what it looked like.  The yellow/orange squares are the remnants of the adhesive of tin backsplash (which we painstakingly popped off one at a time). So best as we we could figure, th...