Weekly Dish

See, I knew it was a bad idea to post a menu with designated days. I never seem to stick to the chronology of a meal plan. Here’s how the switcheroo starts: I decided I wanted to have my friend Casey over for dinner one night this week because her husband is in New Orleans working on a movie for the month of May and she’s all alone. If she’d come last night, the paneed catfish would have been perfect food for company, and all would have been well. But, we didn’t catch up with one another until last night was out of the question, so at the last minute, I had to postpone the paneeing and opt for something else. Something quick too because I wanted it to be ready before the season finale of Grey’s Anatomy began (our guilty television pleasure).

Thursday’s meal slides into Monday’s spot, Monday gets bumped to Tuesday, and well, who knows what the rest of the week holds.

At any rate, the salad was simple and delicious–the pepper jelly added just the right sweet-spicy kick to a basic vinaigrette, and the combination of bacon, strawberries, and goat cheese is really hard to beat in my opinion.

I wanted to toast the goat cheese, you know, like they do in restaurants sometimes, where the top is all brown and crispy and the inside is perfectly creamy? Can someone please tell me how they do that? I tried to stick mine under the broiler (a bad idea), and I ended up with puddles, which I then had to reform into balls. They tasted good, but were not exactly what I had in mine. Next time, I’ll stick with the un-toasted cheese. And I’m sure there’s a more complicated version of Pepper Jelly Vinaigrette out there, but this simple one did the trick for this salad, and it comes together in a snap.

Strawberry Salad with Pepper Jelly Vinaigrette

For the dressing:
2 T. hot pepper jelly
1/4 cup cider vinegar
1/4 cup olive oil
1 t. coarse salt

Whisk the vinegar, jelly, and salt together in a bowl. Whisk in the oil, a drop at a time, until the dressing comes together.

Salad for 2:
Enough garden greens to cover two dinner plates
4 slices bacon, cooked and cut into slivers
Half pint of strawberries, washed and sliced
1/4 cup (2 ounces) goat cheese

Top the greens with the sliced strawberries, slivers of bacon, and mounds of goat cheese. Drizzle with vinaigrette and serve.

As strawberries, peppers, and greens are all rich in vitamins and anti-oxidants, this salad makes a great contribution to ARF Tuesdays at Sweetnicks.

Notes: Pepper jelly is a quintessential southern condiment. Made from the many varieties of hot peppers that grow down here, pepper jelly is served on everything from black-eyed peas to biscuits to ham. I’ve never been a huge black-eyed pea fan, but I love pepper jelly, so I was happy to find this alternate use for it. The jelly I used is made by one of the farmer’s wives at the Saturday market, but you can sometimes find commercially made pepper jelly in the condiment section of a grocery store (at least in this part of the world).

In other news: Today has been designated Save the Internet day by Chez Pim. You can read more about the threat to internet democracy here or on Pim’s site; she has a list of great resources. Instead of writing a long involved post about it, I plan to do some more research and write my congressman.

Sometimes I simply crave salad. I’m sure it’s my body’s way of telling me I’m not eating enough vegetables, or I’m eating too much other non-vegetable fare. Or maybe I hunger for something bright and crisp and raw in place of the usual warm cooked meal. Whatever the reason, ever since Alanna, who writes A Veggie Venture, posted a lovely watercress salad last week, it has been on my mind.

I had seen watercress, both at the farmer’s market and at my local grocery the week before, so I was excited to have a recipe to try with the peppery little green. Unfortunately, this week, the watercress at the market was missing (or gone by the time I got there) and the two sad little bunches at the grocery were brown and wilted. Alas.

I couldn’t get the combination of sweet, tangy citrus and rich, salty blue cheese out of my head, so I made the salad with spinach instead. Arugula would have been a better substitute for watercress, but we used the last of it from our garden a few weeks ago. And Alanna’s recipe called for clementines, but satsumas were the best I could do (they are both sweet, diminuitive relatives of the orange).

As I was already tinkering with the recipe–albeit reluctantly–I decided while I was at it to add a few chunks of avocado and a slightly different dressing. I’ve never been one to mix up dressings anyway–I usually just drizzle the ingredients right onto the salad. If you want proportions and an exact recipe, you should head over and check out Alanna’s version. What I have to offer is really more of a suggested toss, which turned out to be delicious, although more free form.

To accompany the salad, I topped some French bread with feta cheese, thin slices of tart green apple, and a drizzle of honey, and popped the toasts under the broiler. Minus the honey, this concoction is frequently what I have for lunch, and when Rorie at Milk & Honey posted about a similar snack last week,–plus honey–I decided to sweeten up my recipe with her addition. Yum! The salad was refreshing and healthy, the feta toast a little more decadent, and together, they made for a filling supper. If you need more protein to make a complete meal, I imagine that citrusy grilled chicken would make a great addition to the salad. As vague as it is, here’s my very approximate salad recipe:

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This week’s menu:

• Monday: Paneed tilapia with spicy lemon spaghetti
• Tuesday: Flank steak with cilantro pesto and roasted acorn squash
• Wednesday: Fish cakes with red and green tomato tart
• Thursday: Butternut squash soup with spinach salad

This week marks my post-holiday return to regular meal-planning and dinner-cooking. In thinking about the new year and our diets, I like to think of things I can include in the menu, not things I should take away. For instance, I tried to do the low-carb thing a couple of years ago, but I found myself imagining pasta dishes and big loaves of homemade bread all day, and I went through a phase where I really didn’t want to see meat at all. It’s purely psychological, I’m sure–I was probably one of those kids who never wanted to touch the stove until my mom told me not to. (Over at Sweetnicks, she’s encouraging food bloggers to participate in the same kind of logic by including more Antioxidant-Rich Foods in our diets on Tuesdays. I don’t think this recipe qualifies; maybe next week!)

The two things I have decided we need to eat more of (which automatically means we will eat less of other things, right?) are fish and vegetables. Last night’s menu was a stab at the former; the rest of the week, I’ll concentrate more on the latter.

In the past, I have had a difficult time with fish in my kitchen. I’ve tried different kinds and different preparations, but rarely liked the fish that I cook. For this dish, (armed with inspiration from Beyond Salmon, a delightful blog about fish) I followed all the rules: I bought very fresh fish, cooked it the same day I bought it, seasoned it well but simply, and didn’t overcook it. I’m happy to report that it was a success! Paneeing the fish gives it a nice, brown crust, and leaves bits of the crust stuck in the pan perfect for a deglazed wine sauce. I paired it with a simple lemony garlic pasta topped with toasted Parmesan and finished the whole plate with the wine sauce.

By using the same skillet to cook everything, the vegetables that you cook to flavor the pasta will also flavor the oil for the fish, giving everything a nice consistency. The toasted Parmesan is optional; it’s a trick I’ve been wanting to try and thought the cruch might be a nice complement for the pasta (I’ll use the leftovers to garnish the soup later this week). It was…but definitely not necessary.

The trick to paneeing is to get the pan really hot–the fish will cook quickly, especially if you have thin fillets, so make sure your pan is hot enough to brown the crust before adding the fish. I also use mostly olive oil with a tiny bit of butter for color and flavor, but any combination of fat will do the trick. You have to be careful if you use all butter because it will burn easily if you get the pan too hot.

If you are trying to watch your carbs, this fish would also sit nicely on a bed of spinach, which I imagine you could wilt and flavor with the garlic, jalapeno, and lemon zest in the same manner as the pasta. Maybe I’ll try that next time and hit both the fish and vegetable in the same night!

My favorite part about the dish is that once you get the prep-work done, it cooks very quickly. I’ve written the recipe for the fish and pasta out in steps because that’s how I had to think it through in order to have everything ready at the same time.

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One of my goals for the beginning of this year was to begin afresh with this endeavor called Weekly Dish. The site began really as a way to post recipes for friends and family and to learn about technology. The more I’ve learned, the more I’ve realized I have been doing this the hard way!

So, I’m taking this week to learn about the new software I’m using and to convert my Archives. I have much holiday cooking to report, but until I have time to concentrate on new material, I thought it might be fun to look back and see what I’ve been cooking since I’ve been in school. From left to right, my first week’s worth of meals included a Grilled Margarita Chicken with Grilled Corn and Apple-Avocado Salad, Corn and Tomato Risotto, Taboulleh Chicken Salad, and Asparagus Soup. Ahhh, summer. Oh, and I also made a vegetable platter with stuffed tomatoes and corn pudding, but none of the photos turned out. Clicking on any of the photos below will take you to that week’s worth of recipes. Wow, my photos need some improvement!

The site will inevitably change over the course of the next few weeks; I hope you’ll bear with me while I’m in transition. In the meantime, I wish you all a happy, healthy, and peaceful 2006.

Until I get all of my posts from last year converted to Wordpress, they won’t be searchable or categorized in this new format. In the meantime, here’s a list of the weekly menus I’ve posted, arranged by date. I hope this menu will be helpful for those of you who are searching for recipes until I get everything moved to this location. Happy hunting!

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When I was making my first attempts at meal planning, I often ended up buying lots of ingredients that I used only a little of, and then I wouldn’t know what to do with the rest before it went bad. This resulted in expensive grocery bills and a crowded fridge. One of the ways that I learned to compensate for such excess was to plan a week’s worth of meals using similar ingredients and flavors. Planning this way also allowed me to become comfortable with one method of regional cooking by practicing on it for a whole week. Italian week was one of my earliest themed endeavors, and it has stuck around. Tomato-based sauce is so versatile, and so I make a ton of it at the beginning of the week, and use it for different dishes as the week goes on. This week’s menu also serves to prove that I can, indeed, go at least one week without cooking chicken!

Here’s the basic sauce recipe, and then, as the week continues, I’ll tell you how I modify it:

Oven-Roasted Tomato Sauce

3-4 large tomatoes, chopped

Olive oil

Kosher salt

Cracked black pepper

1 large yellow onion, chopped

4-5 cloves garlic, chopped

1 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes (I like the Contadina roasted garlic ones)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Arrange the tomatoes on foil-lined baking sheets in a single layer. Drizzle olive oil onto the sheets, and then toss with your hands to make sure all the pieces are coated with oil. Sprinkle liberally with salt and pepper. Roast for about 45 minutes, until beginning to blacken around the edges and fall apart. Meanwhile, heat 1 tablespoon of oil in a large saucepan (this will hold all of the sauce, so use a big one). Add the chopped onion and garlic and cook over medium-low heat until very soft, but not brown–about 20 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. If they soften before the tomatoes are done, turn the heat off. When the tomatoes are done, scrape them and all their juices

into the pan with the onion and garlic. Turn the heat back up to medium-low, and stir, pressing the tomatoes with the back of your spoon to crush them. Add the canned tomatoes, and simmer this mixture for about 20 minutes.

This sauce will serve as the foundation for all the other mixtures this week. For the lasagna, you will need about 1 1/2 to 2 cups of sauce.

Italian Sausage Lasagna

1 1/2 pounds Italian sausage links (I buy a package of 5 links and use 2 1/2 of them)

2 cups oven-roasted tomato sauce

9-12 uncooked lasagna noodles

1 cup ricotta cheese

1 pkg. sliced provolone (6-8 ounces)

2 cups shredded mozzarella

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Remove the sausage links from their casings, and cook in a large skillet over medium heat until brown, breaking them into small pieces as you cook. Drain off all but about a teaspoon of the grease from the sausage, and add the tomato sauce to the skillet. Cook and stir for about 5 minutes, so that the flavors are combined.

Cover the bottom of a rectangular baking dish with 1/4 of the sausage-sauce mixture. Lay 3-4 noodles directly into the sauce, pressing a bit to make sure they are nestled down nicely in the liquid. Onto each noodle, spoon a few dollops of ricotta cheese. Lay Provolone slices on top of the ricotta, pressing to flatten it. Cover the Provolone with sauce, and start the layers over again. End with the ricotta, and cover the whole dish with the shredded mozzarella. Cover tightly with foil and bake for about an hour, until the cheese is beginning to brown around the edges and bubble.

This is an easy recipe to double and either freeze or take to a neighbor or friend. If we were in Jackson, I’d take the second one to Jessie and Jerrod, but we aren’t, so I took it over to my next-door neighbors who have been housing refugees from New Orleans. I usually make it in a disposable aluminum pan, cover with foil, and write the cooking directions on the foil. That way, the recipient can cook it whenever she feels like it, or freeze it for another occasion.

Reserve the rest of the sauce for the linguine marinara, calzone, and eggplant parmesan.

The weekend of Katrina, our friends Jerrod and Jessie were supposed to come stay with us. With Katrina and Jessie’s baby on the way, we decided to postpone the trip. I planned to make this chicken dish for them while they were here; it’s one of my favorite things to make for a small group of guests. Chicken and potatoes sounds simple, I know, but one of the things I really like about this recipe is that the flavors are surprisingly strong. The rich, citrus flavor of the roasted lemons adds just the right bite, and the capers and artichokes mingle nicely with the white wine to add some depth. I usually make the potatoes with a lot of rosemary too, but, well, you all know what happened to my rosemary. If you have some, please chop it and add when you sauté the potatoes. The trick to making this dish is timing, but if you follow these steps, it isn’t hard:

10-12 very small new potatoes, scrubbed

4 lemons

4 chicken breasts

Olive oil

4 cloves garlic, minced

2 tablespoons capers

1 14-ounce can artichoke hearts, diced

1/4 cup white wine

2 tablespoons butter

1. Preheat the broiler.

2. Place the potatoes in a large pot and cover with water. Bring the water to a boil. Boil potatoes until fork-tender, about 20 minutes.

3. Halve the lemons, and place in a flame-resistant dish (or in a foil packet). Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with Kosher salt and cracked pepper. Broil the lemons until the edges begin to darken, about 8-10 minutes (but watch carefully). When they’re done, set them aside to cool.

4. While the lemons are broiling and the potatoes boiling, flatten each chicken breast to about 1/2-inch thickness. Dredge in flour; salt and pepper.

5. Heat about a tablespoon of olive oil and a tablespoon of butter in a large skillet on medium-high. When the oil is hot, lay the chicken in the pan and cook for about 4-6 minutes per side, until brown and crispy. Remove the chicken to a platter and cover with foil.

6. When the potatoes are done, drain, cool, and cut into quarters.

7. In the skillet, add 2 cloves of garlic, and stir briefly. Immediately add the potatoes, and sauté, stirring occasionally and scraping up the brown bits from the bottom of the skillet. Here is where you would add the rosemary if you had it. Sigh.

8. Cook the potatoes until all sides are brown; remove them to the platter with the chicken.

9. Add to the skillet one tablespoon of butter and the remaining garlic. Sauté the garlic for just a minute, making sure not to burn it. Add the artichoke hearts and capers, and stir-fry for another minute or two. Deglaze the pan with the wine, and cook while stirring. Add the juice from the roasted lemons and cook for another couple of minutes; the sauce should reduce a little.

10. Pour the sauce over the chicken and potatoes; serve with any extra sauce. Serves 4.

DELICIOUS!

This week’s menu is the one I fixed after the hurricane, so it represents a new start (at least in my refrigerator, which had to be completely purged). We came back from staying with friends in Mississippi to a city where groceries were hard to come by (at least that’s what we’d been told). So, I sent David to the grocery store to pick up a few things, and this is what we ended up with: chicken, chicken, and chicken again. So, if you find yourself with a whole bunch of chicken and you don’t know what to do with it, this week’s menu is for you. With just a few other purchases, you’ll have a week’s worth of meals at your fingertips (even if they are all, well, chicken).

For this first one, David grilled all but 4 breasts, and I used the leftover grilled chicken for the Strawberry-Goat Cheese Salad and the Pesto Chicken Salad. I made the focaccia bread and mayonnaise for these sandwiches; the mayonnaise I divided in half: one half for tonight, and one half for the pesto chicken salad. Now, I have to admit that I was a bit skeptical about the balsamic mayonnaise, as I am particular about the use of both balsamic vinegar and mayonnaise. My Aunt Prissy forbids the use of store-bought mayonnaise in anything but comeback sauce, and I don’t like the taste or texture of the congealed, eerily white store-bought stuff.

The focaccia bread, I like with lots and lots of rosemary. But strangely, when I went out to cut some sprigs from my favorite evergreen herb–from the plants my husband gave me as GIFT, mind you–I discovered that they were all, well, dead. My idea was to leave them in their pot because they seemed so happy there, but no, my expert gardener husband just had to try to put them in the ground. Thanks, David, thanks a lot. (Do you sense the bitterness?) I had to use the sprigs in my window I’d been trying to root, which only amounted to about a tablespoon. If you make it, please use as much rosemary as you can get your hands on (and don’t let David anywhere near your rosemary plants).

My sister-in-law, Hannah (that’s her below on our trip this summer to Napa Valley), emailed me the recipe for these yummy sandwiches; the original recipe comes from Jane and Michael Stern’s Southern California Cooking from the Cottage: Casual Cuisine from Old La Jolla’s Favorite Beachside Bungalow, reprinted in The Splendid Table’s e-newsletter, The Weeknight Kitchen. Here’s my version:

Grilled Chicken Breasts

4 pounds chicken
1/2 cup balsamic vinegar
1/2 cup olive oil
1/2 cup soy sauce
1/2 cup rice vinegar
2 T. honey
Combine all liquid ingredients and pour over chicken breasts; salt and pepper well. Marinate at least a few hours, preferably overnight. Grill the chicken over a medium flame for a total of 12 minutes, turning every 2-4 minutes to prevent the honey from burning. Baste as you turn it.

Tomato-Basil Relish
This is best after it’s marinated for several hours, so I make it when I marinate the chicken.

3 ripe Roma tomatoes, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 tsp. fresh lemon juice
2 T. chopped basil
2 t. olive oil
1/2 t. Kosher salt
Cracked black pepper
Combine and refrigerate.

Focaccia Bread with Rosemary

1 pkg. yeast
1 t. sugar
2 cups warm water
5 cups flour (I used a combination of all-purpose and bread flour because I only had 3 cups of all-purpose in the house)
2 t. salt
2 T. olive oil
4 T. chopped rosemary (or more)

Mix the yeast and sugar together, and sprinkle the mixture over the warm water. Let it stand for about 5 minutes, or until the yeast dissolves. In a mixer, combine the water/yeast with the remaining ingredients with a dough hook until it forms a ball (or something resembling a ball). Remove dough to a floured surface and knead with your hands. (This is my favorite part–I love the feel of the smooth, elastic dough and the smell of the rosemary). Return to mixing bowl, cover, and let it rise for about an hour. Divide the dough into two balls and place in greased cake pans (some people use cookie sheets, but I think the bread stays more moist if you bake it in a pan). Preheat the oven to 475, and let the dough rest in the pans until the oven is heated. Stretch the dough to fit the pans, drizzle with more olive oil, sprinkle with Kosher salt, and bake for about 10-15 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.

Homemade Mayonnaise

1 egg
1 T. cider vinegar
Juice of 1 lemon
1/2 t. Kosher salt
1/2 t. paprika
1/4 t. cayenne pepper
3/4 cup salad oil (canola or vegetable or a combination), divided
Place all ingredients in the blender, but start with only 1/4 cup of the oil. After the ingredients are blended, with the motor running, add the remaining oil in a very slow, steady stream. The mayonnaise should emulsify, creating a very thick consistency. Remove one half of the mayonnaise from the blender, and reserve for the pesto chicken salad later in the week. Add to the remaining mayo in the blender 2 tablespoons of balsamic mayonnaise and blend just until the vinegar is incorporated.

To assemble the sandwiches: Cut the focaccia loaves into fourths. Slice open one of the fourths, spread liberally with balsamic mayonnaise, add a chicken breast, and top with about 2 tablespoons of the tomato relish. Serve the sandwiches with a green salad, or with chips and the remaining tomato relish.

Welcome to Weekly Dish! My good friend Jessie, who is expecting her first child in about a month, recently asked me for some recipes and tips for planning menus that would be both cost-effective and worth eating. I love good food, and especially since I’ve been married, I’ve worked hard to find a way to cook delicious dinners at night without spending exorbitant amounts of time or money. On this blog, I will record my menu plans for the week, some recipes and time-saving tips, and brief descriptions of how the dinners turn out. I do a lot of experimenting, but if a recipe turns out badly, I will tell you!

Planning: My first step to stress-free meals is to plan well. My food week always begins on Saturday, when I survey my fridge and pantry to see what I already have, make a trip to my local farmer’s market to see what looks good, and then return to plan my week and make my grocery list. Now, I know this takes time, but when I first married, I tried to think about dinner on my way home from work, or to wait until I got home to see what we had. We ended up eating a lot of take-out. The time I spend planning my menu on Saturday frees me up during the week to follow the menu on the dry erase board without thinking about it. Now, it’s my Saturday morning ritual, and I enjoy it.

Grocery Shopping: I always buy too much and the wrong things if I don’t take a list. I have gotten in the habit of organizing my list by sections of the grocery store, so in the top left-hand corner I write down any produce I need; in the middle, pantry items; the right-hand side, meat and dairy; and bread products at the very bottom. This helps me to navigate the grocery quickly and efficiently–if I don’t need any baking items or canned vegetables or snack food or whatever, I avoid those aisles altogether. I also shop at a locally-owned grocery store, rather than at a large chain. And, I avoid Wal-Mart altogether.

Use It Up: The second thing I learned to help me save time and money is to try to find uses for all the food I buy. I hate a cluttered refrigerator, and my mother taught me not to waste food. So I try to incorporate any leftovers into the next week’s menu. For instance, this week, I am making Stuffed Cherry Tomatoes, and I know I will have more stuffing than I need. So, at the beginning of next week, I will probably use the leftover stuffing for an omelet or a pizza. I also will buy ricotta cheese for the stuffing, of which I will only use about half, so in the next couple of weeks, I will try to find a recipe that uses ricotta.

Planning Menus: I try to mix it up a lot because I love to experiment, and when I first started, I spent way too much money on groceries. Sure, we were having chicken one night, beef the next, shrimp the night after that, etc., but my weekly grocery bills were too high. So, now, I try to pick one or two main ingredients and center most meals around them. Chicken is an easy one because it’s versatile and relatively inexpensive. That doesn’t mean we have chicken every night, of course, but we will maybe 3 out of the 5 nights. Fill in with a non-meat pizza, pasta, or egg dish here and there, and you have a whole week’s worth of meals. I also have some basic recipes that use up leftovers well: frittatas, risotto, pizza or calzone, quesadillas or enchiladas, soup, and main-dish salads all work well with whatever you have in your fridge. I use these basic recipes often, experimenting with different flavors and textures.

I try to cook five nights a week, and we eat leftovers or takeout on the weekend. Of course, life is busy, so I try to be flexible; if I planned a labor-intensive soup for a night when I don’t get home until 8, I substitute something else on the list or throw together some sandwiches and fix the soup another night. Or, if we end up going out during the week with friends, I might cook on both Friday and Saturday nights. It just depends on what’s going on that week.

On the site: Each week, I’ll post a menu and write daily about what I’m cooking. On Saturdays, I’ll explain the method behind my menu madness, how I came up with my list and what I plan to do with any leftovers. I will be cooking a week ahead of the site, so the menu for this week will actually be what I cooked last week. That way, I can make sure I have my photos and recipes ready to go at the very beginning of the week. Monday’s recipes will be posted late Sunday night, and so forth. I am new to the blogosphere, so if something on the site isn’t working right, please let me know by email. Also, if you have a recipe you’d like me to try or an ingredient you don’t know what to do with, feel free to contact me by email: weeklydish AT gmail DOT com. I love to try new things.

Let’s get cooking: This week, the corn, enormous cherry tomatoes, and earthy new potatoes at the Red Stick Market caught my eye, and the chicken at Calandro’s (my neighborhood grocery store) was on sale. I have been wanting to try the Chicken Taboulleh Salad in The Barefoot Contessa Family Style cookbook because my sister-in-law, Hannah, highly recommends it. Instead of waiting until I’m having the salad, though, I’ll go ahead and cook all of the chicken at once. One of my favorite ways to cook a whole package of chicken breasts in the summer is on the grill. So, I’ll start with a grilled chicken recipe, pair it with a complimentary salad and some yummy grilled corn, and use the leftover grilled chicken for the Chicken Taboulleh later in the week. I’ll fill in with some vegetable recipes and add salad and bread and be done. After a quick trip to the grocery to pick up what I need, I’m all set for the week. Tune in to see how it all comes together.