Weekly Meal Plan and a Broccoli Kielbasa Frittata

Broccoli Frittata

Goodness, everyone is looking all sparkly and shiny at the Grammy’s tonight. I’m firmly planted on my couch, with a portable heater trying to warm up. Sherlock is being recorded because I want to watch it when I have time to properly squee at the screen. Yep, that’s a thing I do. I also talk at the television. I try to hold back in movie theaters, but sometimes I’ll start laughing at the wrong parts, and that’s pretty much just as bad in terms of theater going etiquette.

This afternoon I was on top of my meal planning game! I find that it makes for a better Monday when I’m not starving and I’m prepared for at least three days of quality eating. I prepped a few meals, made a batch of hard boiled eggs, planned out most of our lunches, chopped carrots, cucumbers, and bell peppers, and broke down a whole pineapple instead of wasting my money on the pre-cut stuff.

And then I made my breakfast of the week: the broccoli kielbasa frittata. If you look carefully, the picture above of my prep work isn’t the same as the finished frittata below. That’s because I’ve been making this dish once a week for the past month, and I haven’t shared it with you yet, and finally I’ve come to the conclusion that you probably should know about it. First, I preheat the oven to 400 before prepping the ingredients. I steam a bag of Trader Joe’s organic broccoli florets – it’s 12 ounces – and nestle them in a cast iron pan lined with tinfoil which I’ve oiled. [The first time I did it with tinfoil that I hadn’t oiled, and it stuck. The second time, tinfoil oiled, and it came out perfectly. Today, I forgot the tinfoil, oiled the cast iron, and now I have egg plastered to cast iron. Say it with me: oiled foil. Butter would probably work just dandy as well.] Then I cut up half of a Trader Joe’s smoked fresh turkey kielbasa – 6 ounces – into tiny cubes, and scatter them around the pan. I season the broccoli and kielbasa with a healthy sprinkling of salt and pepper. I prepare my egg mixture – anywhere between 4 and 8 eggs depending on how many I have on hand – with a few spoonfuls of water or milk, whisked with a fork. I season the eggs, pour them on the broccoli and kielbasa, and tap everything down with a spoon, making sure that egg has permeated between all of the cracks. I then pop it in the oven for about half an hour, until the frittata is set. I turn it out, cut it into four pieces, and let it cool, and then eat it for breakfast for four days. (This is flexible – you can really put any pre-steamed veg in here, or omit the sausage). As for the temperature – sometimes I cook it at 350F for 40-50 minutes if I’m cooking something else in the oven at the same time.

Broccoli Kielbasa Frittata

This week’s meals are made up mostly of the bits and bobs that needed to be finished up in my fridge. Last week I made a large pot of chicken stock that I hadn’t used up, so two soups are on the menu.

Week of Sunday the 26th

Sunday: Tomato soup and spinach salad. By tomato soup, I mean a half a jar of Rao’s, simmered with my home made chicken stock. I cooked a little bit of orzo and added that to the pot. Salad had a quick balsamic vinaigrette.

Monday: Pork tenderloin, with roasted cumin carrots, greens, guacamole and salad. I’ve been sitting on this pork tenderloin for a few days, and finally decided to cook it. I chopped the carrots into wedges, and tossed them with cumin, chile powder and salt, and roasted them for 40 minutes before adding the pork and roasting it until done.

Tuesday: Chicken tortilla soup (minus the tortilla). I simmered a pot of Rancho Gordo black beans with a shallot, then added the chicken stock, cumin, salt, and some leftover salsa. Everything cooked for about 40 minutes, and I added some rotisserie chicken that I’d saved in the freezer from the last time I got those two-fer chickens at Whole foods. Okay, it’s buy one, get one half off, but two-fer sounds more exciting than BOGO. I hate that acronym.

Wednesday: Girl food. Devon will have already eaten by the time I get home from the gym, so it’ll likely be a massive heap of garlicky greens topped with some tomato sauce and whatever protein source I have lying around. 

Thursday: Burgers over salad. Lots of herby freshness – mint, parsley, whatever else is left in the fridge, and some crumbled pancetta bits that I made a few days ago.

Friday: Out. 

–– Sam

Asian Chicken Salad, v.5

Crunchy asian chicken salad

Tonight I made myself a really great dinner. It was a relief actually. The past few weeks I’ve been a little out of my element. We’ve had houseguests, and gone out to eat more times than prudent in January. I’ve missed one of my weekly cook-ups, and neglected my meal planning. It’s also been really cold in my kitchen. That’s sort of how it goes around here – sometimes I’m floundering around at the last minute putting something together, and other times things just click.

The salad above is the result of some last minute cravings at Trader Joe’s. I’ve been eating cleanly for all of January, which means I deny myself the pleasure of samples at Trader Joe’s – other than the coffee of course. On the plus side, this means that I don’t go home with mushroom mochi potstickers instead of a balanced meal.

So this salad. It’s one of my versions of a dinner salad with general Asian flavors. I do a riff on this on a regular basis – sometimes its Indian carrot salad with lamb, sometimes it takes on a more Vietnamese twist, maybe chicken with a cucumber salad and Nước chấm. This salad is made for versatility: meat, chopped veg, fresh herbs, and a punchy dressing. At TJ’s, I picked up broccoli slaw, a cucumber, mint and basil. In the case I found myself a pack of boneless skinless chicken thighs. I do love skin, but they don’t sell bone-in with skin chicken thighs at our outpost, and while I’d make a whole chicken, I really only like dark meat – it just tastes better. When I got home, I dried off the chicken (fully drying the skin allows for tasty Maillard reaction – browning! science! – to happen), and seasoned with salt, pepper, and garlic powder. Into the oiled cast iron, for six minutes on the first side. While the chicken cooked, I made my dressing: a few tablespoons of almond butter, the juice of a lime, a dash of vinegar, about a half tablespoon of Red Boat fish sauce, and some olive oil. I flipped the chicken, cooked for about four more minutes, and then let it rest off the heat while I prepped all of my salad ingredients. I chopped half of an English cucumber and added it to the bowl, then a few cups of broccoli slaw per person, and chopped mint and basil. I tossed with the dressing, tidied up, and then chopped up my chicken and added it to the bowl.

It was devoured while I watched some trashy tv. My 600-lb. life, followed by the first five minutes of Sex sent me to the ER. I had to turn it off. I wish I was making this stuff up.

Books in 2014, the beginning.

Laughter is the best medicine

If we’re going to discuss life resolutions, as one is wont to do around this time of year, I’d say that one of my top resolutions in life right now is simply to laugh more. Deep belly laughter is shockingly restorative, and as adults, we do much too little of it. 

The first three books I read this year were written by people who are funny for a living. Now, I should say that reading memoirs by people who are funny for a living is not the same as reading/watching/listening to their comedic work. These books were all funny, certainly, but they were also moving, thought provoking, and introspective. In some sections they were painful, dark, and sad. In each, the most fascinating parts were the stories from childhood, anecdotes about family, first jobs, awkward relationships, and weird career trajectories. Two of them featured bedwetting as a prominent plot point (Rob, Sarah). One, puberty quite early (Tina), another, quite late (Sarah). All three featured excessive body hair. The low points, I think, for all three books, were the bits about present day or recent history, specifically revolving around their current shows, or how they got the book deal, or what may be up next – these sections all felt like weird filler, without the passage of time necessary for true introspection.

Each had moments that I’ll continue to think about for quite some time – Rob Delaney’s honest discourse about both his depression and alcoholism, Tina Fey’s thoughts about management style, with examples of both her own, and Lorne Michaels’, and Sarah Silverman, on the absurdity of sexism in censorship.

I quite enjoyed all three.

#1. Rob Delaney: Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage. by  Rob Delaney
Hardcover, 208 pages
Published November 5th 2013 by Spiegel & Grau
Listened to audiobook – Random House Audio

#2. Bossypants by Tina Fey
Paperback, 275 pages
First published January 3rd, 2012 by Back Bay Books
Read paperback, as well as listened on audio read by author

#3. The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee by Sarah Silverman
Hardcover, 256 pages
Published April 20th 2010 by HarperCollins
Listened to audiobook, read by author

Winter Books

Honey from a weed

There are stacks of books at my bedside, hundreds on my to-read list. Books invade the living room and every empty surface in this house. And yet somehow last year I read less books in total than any year in my adult life. So I sat down last week and wrote a list of books I’d like to fall into in the next few months to make sure that I consume an adequate amount of literary prose this year. Some are on my shelves, and have been gathering dust for years, others I’ll take out of the library, some will be downloaded onto the phone to take with me on the go. I have a few on the list that I’ll be listening to as audiobooks – perfect for my thirty minute walk commutes.

Certainly the genres aren’t covered here, but I tried to go as broadly as I could stand. A few I’ve read chapters of here and there, others I’ve skimmed, but most are new to me – now excuse me, I must go off and read.

Classic: The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

Philosophy: Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

Current Fiction: The Circle by Dave Eggers, The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

Food Memoir: Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen by Laurie Colwin, Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of my Appetites by Kate Christensen

Crime: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Children’s Fiction: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones

Humor: Bossypants by Tina Fey

History: Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

Audiobook: Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Of course I don’t count cookbooks – they get read from cover to cover, but get their own category. Currently I’m deep in Vegetable Literacy by Deborah Madison, and Modernist Cuisine at Home.

Addendum, other book lists of note: for the past several years I’ve been ticking my way through the BBC Big Read List – I reckon it’ll take me the next five years or so to get through. I’m also enthused about the No Obligation Reading List over at the Knicknackery – if you are looking for some heavy hitting fiction that will keep you through the winter, and a few great non-fiction options, that’s the place to look.

Weekly Meal Plan: Barren Store Edition

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Yesterday I popped into Trader Joe’s to do the bulk of my shopping, and they were out of coconut milk. I much prefer their light coconut milk to other varieties – it has zero additives,  which for that matter, why is it that every brand of coconut milk at Whole Foods must contain guar gum? Because they were out, I decided that I’d just push my shopping trip to the next morning, thinking that they’d have restocked by then.

Alas, the scene at Trader Joe’s today was grim. Already a day behind on my grocery shopping, and after a late morning start, I turned into the parking lot to a five minute line to find a parking space. Ah, Sunday shopping, how you delight me! There were more people in the store than a downtown Manhattan Trader Joe’s at 5pm, and incidentally, the trucks had failed to arrive because of the snow storm, and the shelves were barren. There was no coconut milk. There was also no chicken. Nor canned tomatoes, cucumbers….

After several hours, and another two stores, I came home with very little on my main shopping list, so my week of braises and stews (that I really only have time to cook on the weekend) was foiled, and I had to scrap my meal plan completely. This is what I’ve come up with to replace it, but I’m feeling a little bit non-committal – gone are the Moroccan cardamom and apricot laced braises, the Thai fish curry, and the chili I was planning. At least we have enough cabbage in the house to last us a week.

Week of December 28th– 

Saturday: originally we had planned to go out on Friday night, but because of the storm, we pushed back our date night to Saturday. And then Saturday came around, and neither of us felt like leaving the house, so we had saladschicken soup, and a bowl of fruit.

Sunday: this was supposed to be a warm beef braise, but after my shopping debacle, I opted to make Kapuska (braised cabbage with lamb) – a mish-mash of a recipe I have for the traditional Turkish dish, and another for Marcella Hazan’s smothered cabbage. (Inspired by this.)

Monday: roasted pork tenderloin with apples, garlic cauliflower mash. I steam the cauliflower and garlic, and then make a puree with my immersion blender. You could probably trick someone into thinking it was a potato puree, but I love it for what it is!

Tuesday: Whole Foods hot bar. Yep, I’m weak. After two false starts shopping this weekend, and leaving with only vegetables and no real protein options, I’m guessing that I’m going to be tired and cranky on Tuesday and want seven little tastes of hot bar instead of a lovingly home cooked meal. Plus, their zucchini with tomatoes and garlic is always a winner.

Wednesday: mini burgers, roasted broccoli and sweet potato fries with aioli. The Cottage restaurant in Wellesley has this absurdly good paprika aioli, that I can’t come close to replicating. But I can try.

Thursday: seared scallops with Brussels sprouts and pancetta. This might be a different type of fish. Or it might not be fish at all. Or it might be something totally different. Are we seeing a theme here?

Friday: Out!

While I didn’t have the ingredients to make my braises, I did get a head start on the week of breakfasts, and baked a big frittata. Looking forward to a low key Monday to ease us back into the five day work week. Happy new year everyone!

–– Sam