another week

After an enjoyable weekend trip, it was back to cooking our meals this week. I did pretty well until last night when we couldn't resist the beautiful warm sunny fall day and met some friends at the Blue Door Pub for greasy yumminess in outdoor seating. So we started on Monday with chicken supremes with mushrooms and white wine sauce. My mom makes this. It's easy and pretty fast, and you just pound the chicken breast halves, coat them in flour and cook in butter, then take them out, sautee mushrooms and shallots or onions, then take them out, then make a sauce from the browned bits, with chicken broth, white wine, and cream. We had rice and peas with it.

On Tuesday, we had steak fajitas. I had planned to make my own homemade tortillas, but ended up running out of steam after I was inspired to make another pie with the leftover cream from the chicken meal. We had "Heavenly Chocolate Pie".


On Wednesday, one night before our greasefest, we had fish. The kale looks really dark in the picture. I love kale. I just had picked up some frozen vacuum-packed swordfish at Whole Foods, and used a recipe I found on allrecipes.com. It was marinated in white wine and lots of garlic, and I seared it with rosemary. Pretty good. It feels good to eat fish since we all know how healthy it is. For some reason I never truly savor its deliciousness in the same way as I do an awesome burger and fries however!

Now we've made it to the end of the week! TGIF! My plan for tonight is an Indian-themed vegetarian lentil-spinach deal. Must compensate for the fries!

bowtie pasta

We ate out last night. Tonight I picked up bowtie pasta on a whim just thinking it might make a pasta meal more fun. Otherwise I was going for a meal made from stuff we always have around... frozen peas, bacon, onions, cream, parmesan, eggs... didn't really need a recipe but found this one on the web and assigned dinner to Mike tonight! He did great. Here's the pictoral evidence. We also had a salad. And a big glass of wine for me. The weather was so nice we ate outside. Ahhh.

lasagna

I received 3 lasagnas as gifts after having my baby. Each was very welcome, uniquely delicious and I preferred all of them to my version of last night, basic, basic. Pretty much the standard Better Homes and Gardens recipe, though with about half the cheese. I'm again feeling low on ideas. I think we'll have another Spanish tortilla tonight since this way I will not have to visit the grocery store today.

forgotten fish!

We did have one new meal within the last week, worthy of repeating and recording. I used this recipe below for sauce, found under "barbeque halibut steaks" at allrecipes.com. Everything mixed together in a saucepan under low heat to melt the butter.

Like some of the commenters, I marinated the halibut steaks for a few hours, then just baked them. We had rice and broccoli as sides. Just a good reminder that it's handy to have vacuum-packed frozen fish in the freezer for easy meals.

• 2 tablespoons butter
• 2 tablespoons brown sugar
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• 2 teaspoons soy sauce
• 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
• 
  

niçoise-ish...

After being treated to a meal at our neighbors' last night it was back to home tonight. Back on track; we haven't been eating so well over the last week due to distractions. Here's my variation on a salade niçoise.

Pie!

I meant only to blog about dinners but had to take a picture of my coconut cream pie, which we shared with our neighbors after a wonderful meal last night. They grilled steaks and veggies and served homemade bread and homemade french fries. And they had great wine!

Lamb Meatloaf

So my friend's comment about gyros did provide some inspiration. It got lamb on my mind, and I thought, "what would be the easiest possible meal I could make with lamb?" I am not a person who can create meals without recipes. I might embellish here and there, but I stick to recipes and cookbooks. So I googled "lamb meatloaf" and scrolled through recipes until I found this one, chosen because it only called for 1 pound of ground lamb, where others called for lamb plus beef, or up to 3 pounds of meat! THIS WAS A HUGE SUCCESS! We loved it. We had some leftover feta, which I added to the meatloaf. I did not make the "spicy tomato dipping sauce" but substituted a cucumber yogurt sauce. We had rice and a green salad with an awesome fresh garden tomato from a neighbor. Of course the glass of red wine enhanced the experience!