salads

Dinners This Week and Last
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Dinners This Week and Last

Last week, I created a poll so that you could vote on which meals from my meal plan would not end up being eaten. First of all, I love a poll so I hope you enjoy it. Secondly, I can only see the results of the poll by submitting another vote, which is a) stupid; I am the poll creator and should be able to see the results and b) misleading, because I can either click on a random item or use my knowledge as The Person Making the Meals to choose how to vote, but either way, I’m skewing the results. There has to be a way for me to see the results without voting, right? This is totally user error.

Anyway, these are the (slightly skewed by me) results of the poll:

Poll results showing Japanese Curry as the leading meal likely to fall off the plan with 17 votes, followed by arugula salad with 13 votes.

Clearly you don’t know me AT ALL. The Japanese curry was the only meal I ended up making from that list!

What did I eat instead? Mainly chipotle chicken tortilla soup, which lasted the entire week, despite my eating it sometimes twice a day. I may… be a teeny bit sick of it.

One night, I ate a Red Baron pizza-for-one. One night, I ate panang curry from the local Thai place. And then this weekend, I made honey chipotle chicken in the crockpot and used it for enchiladas. (Jenny mentioned enchiladas recently, and it got to me.) Which means delicious enchilada leftovers for at least another day. YUM.

But what else should we eat???

Dinners for the Week of November 9-15

  • Coconut Curry Chickpeas with Pumpkin and Lime: This is not my favorite meal, but my husband requested it and my philosophy is to make something if my husband requests it because that’s one less meal I have to come up with. Bonus: This is one of the few vegetarian meals my husband likes.
  • Quinoa Salad with Apples and Sweet Potatoes: This is one of those times when having a blog turns out to be AWESOME. I have no recollection of eating this before, or even having heard of such a meal before. But it turns out – at least, according to my blog – that we have eaten this before and loved it. In my notes, I said this: “I lost my nerve/energy to make the hummus dressing, so we stuck with the boring old oil and vinegar. I think the salad would have been better with more interesting dressing. Aside from that, this salad was AWESOME. I included goat cheese and chopped walnuts as toppings, and the salad was very hearty and satisfying. PLUS it produced enough leftovers for at least two more meals. So good! Definitely a keeper.”
  • Szechuan Stir Fry: I am putting stir fry back on the list because I am so very in the mood for stir fry. The bell pepper situation at my grocery store hasn’t been super lately, though – and bell peppers are essential, in my mind, to a good stir fry – so we’ll see how things turn out.

I’m also in a baking mood, although a mood does not always translate to action. I really want to make another batch of pumpkin cream cheese muffins but this ginger cake sounds amazing.

Let’s do a poll again, just because I find them delightful. You know what? Let’s go crazy and do TWO polls, one for dinners and one for baked goods.

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Dinners This Week and Last

All right, last week, I planned to make three meals: fried rice, pork chops with something green, and Guinness beef stew. Somehow, even though I only made two of those meals (plus two others), we have an ENORMOUS amount of leftovers. Some of which have already outlived their time and must meet the big garbage disposal in the sky. I mean, in my sink.

The first meal I made was pork chops. I’d planned on pairing them with broccoli, but the broccoli I’d purchased the previous week had gone moldy. So I made some roasted potatoes and sautéed some peas and shallots to go alongside the chops. (Confidential to Allison: They were nice and thick, but not quite as thick as they could have been.) The meal was good!

Next, I made fried rice with sautéed shrimp. It was fine! I was in the mood for fried rice, and it definitely scratched the itch. My husband ended up having a work meeting that night, so I made him a chicken breast and had plenty of fried rice for him to eat when he got home… and then it turned out they’d eaten at the meeting. Neither of us has eaten any of the leftovers, which have long since reached the point where I need to toss them.

Next, I made roasted salmon with roasted asparagus and mango salsa and rice. My daughter had a big test the following day, and I figured salmon was good brain food. Not only does Carla LOVE salmon, she requested that I make the asparagus! Um, yes, I will make you asparagus anytime, my love. I bought two mangoes and one was ripe but all grey inside and the other was beautifully yellow inside but not ripe, so the salsa was fine but not great. We have some of that leftover as well. I also made apple crisp, which was quite yummy.

My husband was not in the mood for beef stew. As an alternative, I suggested chicken tortilla soup. That did not appeal to my husband. He was in the mood for chicken pot pie. I am not sure if this will surprise you or not, but I do not like chicken pot pie. So we made a compromise: I made a vat of chipotle chicken tortilla soup and he made chicken pot pie. We now have leftovers for this week (and beyond; we both froze a LOT of leftovers) and we each got to eat something we wanted.

Of course, there are still multiple days of the week to account for, food wise. So I suppose it’s time to plan a few meals.

A bowl of soup topped with sour cream and cilantro, surrounded by tortilla chips, on a blue plate with the text 'Dinners this week' overlaid.

Dinners for the Week of November 1-8

Jenny suggested that I make a poll and allow you all to vote on which meals you think I’ll make and which I’ll skip, which I find hilarious. Let’s give it a try.

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Three Things Thursday

I am incapable of launching into bullets without some sort of preamble.

New Summer Salad

I made a new-to-me summer salad to take to a friend’s dinner party the other day. A+, delicious, automatic new fave. Of course, because I am incapable of following a recipe as stated, I added blueberries as well. The other slight variations I made, based on recipe comments: I used nectarines instead of peaches, walnuts instead of pinenuts (walnuts are $5.99 at my grocery store; pinenuts are $8.99) (I forgot that I could use pinenuts to make pesto, so maybe I should have shelled out the $8.99), and I added a half teaspoon of honey to the dressing.

Oh! Since I was taking this salad on the road, I had to experiment a little with the best way to keep the nectarines and basil from browning. For the basil, I coated the leaves in a tiny bit of olive oil and gave them a quick chiffonade with a pizza cutter. Then I threw them in a salad bowl with the dry arugula.

For the nectarines, I mixed together two tablespoons of honey and two cups of water, then added the cut nectarines to the mixture for five minutes. After the timer went off, I drained them in a colander, rinsed them with cool water, and laid out them out between two dish towels to dry. Then I popped them into a Tupperware container with the blueberries.

(I found both the honey water and oil coat strategies via multiple sources online, and I was very grateful they worked.)

About five minutes before dinner, I added the dressing to the arugula and basil and tossed everything together until the greens were lightly coated. Then I added half the fruit, nuts, and goat cheese, added a bit more dressing, tossed, and topped with the rest of the fruit, nuts, and goat cheese. It was very tasty and summery and light. I will say that the basil flavor didn’t really pop out at me. I wonder if it all fell to the bottom of the salad bowl? Next time I will do a better job of dispersing the basil throughout.

I was super pleased with how well the nectarines lasted. Here is a photo of them the next morning.  The honey/water combo did not alter their flavor or texture at all.

Hmm. This isn’t the most persuasive photo. I will have to try a before and after at some point. In the meantime, just trust me that they looked and tasted as fresh as the instant I cut them.

Plant Problems

I am feeling some botanical despair. I love plants, and I have accumulated quite a few over the years. But they are not loving their lives, and I feel responsible. I am responsible. They remind me of Heidi, wasting away in Klara Sesemann’s urban mansion, longing for the sun and sky and trees of her grandfather’s alpine cottage. (Why yes, I am reading Heidi to Carla right now.)

Our house is full of windows, and yet it is not particularly sunny. Worse, possibly, is that the areas available for plants are on the north side of the house and get the least light.

I have tried to do my research and buy only plants that supposedly enjoy low light. And yet… they are leggy and/or dead. Even the African violet I bought – which is supposed to thrive in very little light! – is just barely living.

While part of me aches for these poor living things that are trying so valiantly to hang on under my poor care, and wants to nurse them back to health, I have TRIED. I have googled, I have bought special plant food, I have moved them around to different parts of the house, I have repotted several of them. I have babied them, I have left them alone. Nothing is working. Perhaps it is time to replace them? That feels so harsh!!! And also kind of fruitless, because I fear that the replacements will just die anyway.

You know what IS thriving? This mystery plant in my backyard. We had some landscaping work done last fall, moving things around, thinning things out. This space used to hold an enormous hydrangea that was completely overgrown and so old only the very tips were green. We moved some hydrangeas from the front of the house and they seem to be adjusting well to their new home. We also planted a vibirnum in the place where the old hydrangea used to be. Then, this guy showed up.

Wow, two for two on really unhelpful photos today. This plant is approximately four feet tall (so far), has no scent or milky sap, a round stem, multiple stalks coming from the same base, has very gentle fuzz on the leaves and stem, and, from above, has non-serrated leaves with a very pronounced whorled leaf pattern. There are no buds as yet.

I have NO IDEA what it is. It’s acting like a perennial that belongs there, but I have never seen it before. It’s possible that the previous homeowners planted it a long time ago, but then the old hydrangea took over and bullied this guy into submission. Now that the old hydrangea is gone, this little guy can finally shine. This little imaginary scenario, plus some extensive googling, has me thinking it’s a plant and not a weed. My current very non-expert guess is that’s something called an “obedient plant” or some kind of phlox or maybe some kind of aster. I guess we just wait and see if it produces flowers. Unless… do you know what it is?

Physical Therapy Update

I have been seeing a physical therapist twice a week for six weeks for tennis elbow, and just this week I moved to one time a week for the next four weeks. The reduction in pain and the improvement in mobility has been tremendous, and I am so pleased with the experience. Physical therapy is MAGICAL. I mean, it’s also expensive and hard work, but MAGICAL.

It is not, however, a cure. My physical therapist said his goal was for me to see an 80% improvement in pain/mobility. I have zero idea how a person is supposed to quantify such a thing; I still have no idea how to answer the “what is your pain on a scale of 1 to the worst pain you’ve ever experienced” question. But I will say that my arm is greatly improved, to the point that sometimes I don’t even think about it. Sure, I still have some soreness in my elbow. Sometimes I wake up and my arm aches for a while. I definitely still experience pain if I grip something wrong or lift something too heavy or don’t consider the best way to pick something up. But it’s SO MUCH BETTER.

Despite the improvements, it has occurred to me that I may not be able to resume lifting weights for a long time. I miss lifting weights, but I am also not eager to reinjure myself. So I have been dithering a long time about getting some of the same strength training equipment I use at my PT’s office. Two products are currently in my cart: a set of resistance bands with handles and a set of superlong resistance bands. In the office, when I do the exercises the PT prescribes, my arms get pleasantly tired and my muscles feel like they are being challenged. Working with resistance bands really does feel like a workout, even if I’m not sweating buckets or, like, grunting with effort. I am sure I could find some more intense routines online that I could adapt at home.

I’m not really sure why I haven’t just ordered them already. Maybe today.

Obligatory feline