how do so few house guests produce so many dishes?

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Dinners This Week

Well, I am thoroughly exhausted after the first week of school. WHY was it so exhausting? I mean, I was shuttling Carla to and from things every day (although my husband took her to her music lesson). But when she is at extracurriculars, I’m just… sitting there? I did go to two social events, which, as we all know, wipes me OUT. But… I was really careful about those. The first one was a one-on-one with a parent I really like, so it wasn’t as stressful/draining. The second social event was with more people, but it was mainly people I know and feel comfortable around, plus I set a timer and stayed for exactly 30 minutes and then skeedaddled. 

By Thursday, though, I was A MESS. Cranky and tired all day. I even tried to take a nap, TWICE, which is a luxury I never allow myself. Of course I was unable to sleep, so then I was even more cranky about “wasting time.” (I tried to repeat Nicole’s mantra that even if I wasn’t sleeping, I was still resting, but I have a long way to go before I achieve Nicole-level Zen. HI NICOLE.) 

The dinner thing, though, is going to have be scaled WAY back. I read all of your advice on my last dinner post with RAPT attention, and the core takeaway was make things as easy as possible. I am interpreting this in two ways:

1. I went to Trader Joe’s and spent an obscene amount of money on Throw Together Meals that are now waiting patiently in my freezer. 

I also really, really want to make leftovers work. I LIKE making dinner, and I don’t want to sacrifice things I WANT to eat just because this is a particularly hectic season of my life. So I am also…

2. Leaning into easy meals that produce leftovers. (This is tricky-ish, because my husband and I are big eaters and often have very little in the way of leftovers… and if we DO have them, I eat them for lunch. So we’ll see how this aspect plays out.)

To recap, the name of the game this week is freezer helpers and easy leftovers meals. Oh. But then there’s the long weekend, and I really REALLY want to make a street corn salad again. So we will have to have Something Fun on the list as well. 

Dinners for the Week of August 29 – September 4 

  • Chickpea Bowls: I can double this up and force it to become leftovers, I know I can.
  • Trader Joe’s Sweet Corn, Burrata, & Basil Ravioli with Baked Shrimp: The shrimp isn’t, technically, from Trader Joe’s; it’s from my local grocery store and it has little pats of herb butter in the package. It’s super easy though: thaw and bake. My basil plant is extremely voluminous at the moment, so I will add fresh basil and some lemon zest to the ravs. 
  • Crock Pot BBQ Pork with Coleslaw: An old standby. I like to dump my pork on a baked potato, my husband prefers a BBQ pork sandwich on a King’s Hawaiian bun. I think I can make this stretch to two nights. 
  • Trader Joe’s Mushroom and Spinach Quiche with Some Sort of Green Side: I don’t really know what possessed me to pick these up? Will my husband eat one? Will he consider it enough to count as dinner? Time will tell. It sounded good, it looks easy. Protein, green veggies. 
  • Something Grilled and Mexican Street Corn Salad: Here is where I reveal that my in-laws are staying with us for an undetermined amount of time, and have been around for three weeks already (but not staying with us). So perhaps that also adds to the feeling of exhaustion? Not because I dislike having them around, but because it’s two extra people to try to accommodate? Although they are being EXTREMELY kind about stepping back, especially during the first week of school, to let us do our thing. ANYWAY, I don’t know what the “something grilled” will be, because I want them to have a say. Burgers and hot dogs? Ribs? Chicken? We will just go with the flow on this one. I may also try to make another plum torte before the plum season bypasses us. 

What are you doing for the long weekend, if you are in the US? Wherever you are, what’s your favorite BBQ/picnic food?

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Recovering from Houseguests, Dinners This Week

My mother-in-law is doing great: her recovery from surgery has gone well, and there is no chemotherapy required, and maybe not even radiation – we are SO thankful – and so my in-laws have returned to their home state (temporarily).

I spent the weekend recovering. This involved washing all the linens and towels, and cleaning the bathrooms, and vacuuming the floors which assemble a LOT more debris when two extra people live here, especially because they are In-Home Shoe Wearers in their own home, and sometimes forget that we are a Shoeless Household.

I taught Carla how to clean a bathroom, and she was surprisingly enthusiastic about the whole process. We’ll see if she can do it herself next time. I don’t remember how old I was when I learned how to clean a bathroom, but it is definitely a skill that has come in handy over the years. And it’s so satisfying, to begin with a (small) dirty room and end with something pristine and sparkling. 

My energy seems to have ended there, with bathroom cleaning; I still have two loads of laundry to do and I need to put Carla’s duvet cover back on her duvet, which is always a bit like wrestling a recalcitrant caterpillar back into its cocoon. I got the duvet cover back on the guest bed duvet, so the bed is all ready for my in-laws when they return. (Although there is some talk of them staying in a hotel next time? We’ll see.) 

They were lovely, so gracious and grateful and helpful, and I could tell that they were making an extra effort to not be any trouble. I appreciate the effort SO MUCH and also feel bad that they weren’t able to simply focus on my mother-in-law’s recovery. In any case, it was the pleasantest three weeks of houseguests I could have imagined. 

But I am still an introvert’s introvert. I work from home, by myself, and am used to long stretches of time with just me here. So having people around – even people who were trying very hard to be invisible – was a real strain on my Human Interaction abilities. And there is just inevitably so much more housework when you have added two extra humans to a house. Plus, I would say that my husband and daughter are also very introverted and so they were crankier than normal (perhaps I, too, was crankier than normal) and I think we all did the best we could but it’s nice to have our normal, quiet just-the-three-of-us routine restored. 

It makes me think a little about The Future, and whether we’ll have more times like this – parents requiring medical care who need to stay with us. One set of parents has A Plan, and that involves a retirement community with assisted living as they need it; the other set doesn’t seem to have that sort of plan at all. And I’m aware that in many cultures, elderly parents simply become part of their children’s household when they can no longer live alone, and I would want to be a home for any of our parents should they need it.

It does also solidify my desire for a dedicated mother-in-law suite, though. A privileged way of looking at life, to be sure, but also I am newly aware of the precious value of having One’s Own Space. 

The last thing I will say about no longer having houseguests is that I feel like I have my husband back. His parents are night owls, so we really never got any time together while they were here. I would say goodnight around ten, and all three of them would still be up watching TV or chatting. There were maybe two occasions when my in-laws went out with friends, but I think on those nights, we were both so relieved to be free of entertaining duties that we retired to our separate corners to be completely alone. It’s been so nice, this weekend, to just hang out with him. We finished the first season of Sacred Games and worked on a jigsaw puzzle together and watched football together. It’s been so nice to enjoy time with just him (or just him and Carla) again. 

Anyway, I am stalling because my family needs to eat and yet I am Tapped Out on food ideas. Literally the only thing I can think of to make this week is Crockpot Tortilla Soup. That should get us through two nights and possibly some lunches. I feel kind of tacoed out – we had the Crockpot Chicken Tacos last week, and I doubled the amount of chicken so we ate that for DAYS, and then one night we had burritos, and then another night we ordered takeout and I turned THAT into tacos for a couple of meals, too. So I think I will save tacos for another week.

Embarrassingly, I STILL have not made two of the menu items I shopped for a couple of weeks ago. So I suppose I will put them back on the menu, and hope that the cauliflower and herbs haven’t gone bad while I’ve been ignoring them. 

Dinners for the Week of September 20-26

  • Crockpot Tortilla Soup: Yum.
  • Lebanese Chicken with Charred Cauliflower: Hopefully the cauliflower is still edible but it’s been in the downstairs crisper since I bought it two weeks ago, so there’s always the possibility that it has grown legs and wings.
  • Follow Up: The salad was delicious – fresh and bright and just so so good. But paired with the chicken, which was fine, the whole meal was VERY lemony and got to be too much. I would pair the salad with something else entirely.
  • Steak and Potato Skewers with Rosemary Chimichurri: This really does sound yummy to me, I don’t know why I keep avoiding it.
  • Some Sort of Grilled Chicken with a Side Salad: I don’t feel like going to the grocery store today, so I will have to figure something out with what we have on hand.

How long does it take you to recover from houseguests? Am I the only one who feels like my insides have been scooped out and run through the washing machine?

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Dinners (and Assorted Other Meals) This Week

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate!

This is the first year that we’ll have Christmas just the three of us. I am rather enjoying the quiet coziness of it all. We are all still in pajamas. There is lots of lounging going on. I tried to win Carla over to the joys of Home Alone, but it turns out it’s a bit old for her yet. Elf is on the agenda for later. My only job today – aside from copious cuddling, and perhaps finishing my book – is to make some rolls for dinner Friday; I will freeze them after I make them.

Family arrives on the 26th. We are not doing a special dinner because we will all have already had a big Christmas supper the night before. Thursday we go out to celebrate a birthday. And Saturday half of the family leaves, so the rest of us will either get take out or munch on leftovers. Sunday, the rest of the family leaves, which means that I will probably head to the store or scrape together some sort of Franken-meal from what we have on hand.

Still! There are meals to plan and make, so the post will go up!

Dinners (and Assorted Other Meals) for the Week of December 24-December 29

Christmas Eve: Avgolemono from America’s Test Kitchen (paywall)

Note: We have never eaten this before, much less tried to make it. I admit that I am deeply suspicious of a soup with egg in it, as I am no fan of eggs. But neither of us much wanted to make Mulligatawny soup, which was my Christmas Eve tradition growing up, and it would be fun to have our own soup tradition. We’ll see. It may end up that my husband eats it and Carla and I eat bagels or chicken nuggets. I mean, Carla has never once eaten soup as it is, so I’m not holding out much hope that tonight will be the night.

Follow up: This was NOT good. I can’t pinpoint why; maybe because it tasted heavily of chicken? Maybe because the lemony egg mixture you add to the soup gave the whole thing an unpleasant lemon-curd-with-chicken taste? In any case, I am not a fan. Even my husband, who eats pretty much anything, could not give this a thumbs up. I made a few of the rolls I prepared and ended up turning one into an impromptu pepperoni sandwich for my Christmas Eve meal.

Christmas Day:

Note: Neither of us has ever made a frittata. And, let’s be honest, it’s really for my breakfast-loving husband’s benefit. I don’t really like breakfast food, so I tend to defer to him. Usually for Christmas Day breakfast we make the Pioneer Woman’s overnight French toast. Last year we also made a savory strata. But that’s when there are more people at the breakfast table than the three of us. Carla will eat the sweet stuff, but nothing savory. So probably we’ll end up making her pancakes as per usual and my husband will end up eating most of the frittata and we’ll come up with something else for next year.

Follow up: This was delicious! I don’t normally like eggs, but this was very egg-light, with plenty of other tasty things. Our only complaint was that it seemed very salty. My husband and I agreed that next time we make it, we’ll add an extra potato, reduce the salt by at least 2/3s, and decrease the amount of bacon.

Note: Carla sometimes eats steak, so we are hoping that she’ll at least have a few bites of this Christmas dinner. When I grew up, our family tradition for Christmas dinner was a porterhouse spice roast, homemade Caesar salad, and lemony steamed broccoli. I LOVE that dinner. But a porterhouse roast seems overly ambitious for a group of three. Also, no one makes Caesar dressing like my dad, so I don’t really even want to try. Instead, we got a baby tenderloin and some mushrooms and we’ll be trying a new recipe. Who knows? Maybe it will become a family favorite!

Follow up: The beef tenderloin was wonderful — and super easy! You just smear it with some mustard and herbs and throw it in the oven. It cooks low and slow for a long time and then it is perfectly cooked and butter tender. We will definitely do this again. My mom’s mashed potatoes were, of course, amazing. And we ended up skipping anything green because we couldn’t agree on how to cook the beans.

Note: My husband loves dessert, and he is always super interested in the desserts featured on the Great British Baking Show. So we are trying a British-style dessert this year, just for fun.

Follow up: THIS WAS SO GOOD.

Wednesday:

  • Brunch: Bagels & Lox

Note: With cream cheese, capers, lemons, and onions. And fruit for the kiddos.

Note: Someone at my husband’s office has brought in this cranberry salsa a few times, and my husband is in love with it. I am deeply suspicious but I’m willing to try it.

Follow up: This was actually quite delicious! It’s super weird — a combo of flavors that don’t seem like they would work. But they DO and I found myself unable to stop. We ate this with Stacy’s pita chips, which are delicious in and of themselves.

  • Dinner: Tacos

Note: Easy and delicious. So what if it’s not typical Christmas fare? (For us. I don’t know your magical taco-eating life.) If my mother-in-law and husband hadn’t insisted on simplicity over fanciness, I would have made this pork roast from Food & Wine and possibly Ina Garten’s chocolate creme brûlée. Well, there’s always next time.

Thursday:

  • Breakfast: Pancakes, scrambled eggs, bacon, leftover frittata – whatever we can scrape together.
  • Lunch: Cold cuts and leftover smoked salmon
  • Dinner: Out

Friday:

Note: The BBQ pork is one of my all-time favorite SUPER EASY recipes. I throw a pork tenderloin, a roughly chopped white onion, and a minced garlic clove or two in the crockpot, then douse with my favorite BBQ sauce and a few healthy squeezes of Sriracha. Cook for 4 hours, shred, and eat. I eat my pork with a potato (which I liberally drench in sauce), but my husband prefers making little sandwiches, hence the rolls and coleslaw.

Follow up: The dinner rolls were easy to make and froze nicely. But they are NOT Parker House rolls, which is kind of what I was expecting. They are denser and… squishier than I anticipated. Still good though. Would definitely make these again.

Saturday:

  • This is where I completely give up on the pretense of cooking, not that I’ve been doing much of it. I can promise I’ll have been doing a lot of dishes anyway.

Follow up: Three loads of dishes EVERY DAY our guests were here. How is that even possible…?

Sunday:

  • Takeout????

If you’re bored this Christmas week, let me know what your traditional Holiday Meals include.

It’s beginning to snow – hooray! Happiest Christmas, Internet!

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