Green Kale

What I Made – Week 1

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Egg roll in a bowl is what would happen if you only ate the egg roll filling without the wrapper. I like to cook the ground pork until it is crispy (almost like sausage) to give a bit more texture.
Oh look, a salad. This one with lentils, beets, and creamy feta tossed with a Dijon vinaigrette!
The only time I really notice the limitations of our current stay-at-home situation is when I forget to pick up a topping or ingredient. Imagine avocado down in the bottom quadrant of this quinoa bowl ☹️
This slow-roasted green garlic chicken would have been a lot more attractive if I had remembered to baste it. It was still tasty, even if a bit pale.
We scrapped the idea for pasta and made calzones with pepperoni, mushrooms, and the leftover marinated kale. The best part was dipping it in marinara sauce we canned last year with tomatoes from our garden.
Next up in our dough pockets from around the world are these bierocks made with cabbage and ground elk and delicious topped with mustard.
This is a chocolate tart with a roasted rhubarb filling. It was absolutely amazing, but so is anything topped with a thick layer of chocolate ganache!
I also made this chocolate rhubarb babka. The New York Times says quarantine baking babka is the new banana bread? I think this is way most delicious than that, especially warm from the oven.

We did a good job using up our ingredients this week. The only thing still hanging around are the beet greens and lots more rhubarb!

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What I’ve Planned – Week 1

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This week’s basket offers a nice, though I assume temporary, break from salad greens. We had a beautiful warm weekend, but there’s another drizzly, cool work week ahead, so my menu definitely leans towards comfort foods!

I’m hoping to be a bit more ambitious with my breakfast and desserts this week, too. I found two recipes to help use up my rhubarb that look delicious.

That’s a lot to do! I better get baking!

What I Made – Winter Week 14/15

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I mostly forgot to take photos of what we ate this week, but here’s a sampling of what we had.

Elk Steak Diane with a roll and mashed rutabaga and potatoes.
Ramen. I steamed the bok choy while I soft boiled the egg. The pink are pickled radishes.

Underneath all those olives, feta, and oven roasted tomatoes is a kale and freekeh “tabbouleh” with radishes.

What I Made – Week 20

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Good planning this week let me reuse a lot of the components of different meals in new ways later in the week. I’m not usually this good at meal planning strategy so this is a small victory for me!

Every time we get a small winter squash like acorn squash or this week’s fancy Robins Koginut squash, I stuff it with sausage and grain following the basic techniques of this recipe. To make it for a crowd, I cut the squash into slices and arrange them on a plate or platter with the grain mixture in the center.

The peanut sauce in this Thai pork quinoa bowl wasn’t my favorite, but it was a really easy, fast dinner. Marinating the kale in the chili garlic sauce gave it quite a spicy kick!

I reused the edamame and bean sprouts in this sushi salad with tofu and kale chips. I always forget how easy kale chips are to make! I don’t bother with the flavorings, I just tear, toss with olive oil, bake them and then sprinkle them with kosher salt. Half of them don’t make it to dinner because I shovel them straight into my face!

Another go-to recipe I’m not sure I’ve ever posted here are these herbed turnips and greens with pork tenderloin. The baby turnips are sweet and mild and are delicious coated in the spice-cheese combination.

What I’ve Planned – Week 20

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This is a week where I’ll be home later than normal several days, so I’ve planned meals where I can make some or all of the components ahead of time (roast veggies or grains), and then finish the meal the night I want to eat it. Or at least that’s the plan, after spending most of the weekend canning tomatoes from our garden, we’ll see how much more time I feel like spending in the kitchen!

What I Made – Week 10

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  • Another week where I think I made a pretty good effort at using all my veggies. I still have a few zucchini left as well as half a cabbage, and I didn’t use the carrots yet, but they don’t look nearly as sad hanging out in my crisper as two heads of lettuce might have earlier this year. Here’s what I was able to use up and how:
  • This recipe takes a bit of time since the dough has to rise, but is I serve this Stromboli with Banana Peppers with some marinara sauce on the side for dipping. I couldn’t use up the whole bag I got, so I pickled the rest of the banana peppers.
  • This wasn’t my first time making a baked zucchini casserole but it was my first time making Zucchini and Chicken Enchilada Casserole. I’ve found enchilada sauce sometimes hides wheat ingredients, so this recipe that amps up a can of plain tomato sauce until it tastes like the pre-made stuff was a great find. To keep my zucchini from getting the casserole too watery. I threw the sliced rounds on a baking sheet and broiled them until they were slightly browned in spots, a trick I’d learned making zucchini lasagna.
  • I was pleasantly surprised by the flavors in this Lightened Up Pad Thai with Cabbage. The real key was the lime juice, the flavor was definitely missing something when I first left it out.
  • These Wax beans and chorizo are one of my favorite easy recipes. Crisp tender beans, crunchy salty chorizo (the Spanish dried kind, not the hearty links more typical in Mexico or El Salvador), and the tangy vinegar all go so well together.
  • I guess I’d been missing salads, because I was absolutely craving this chicken caesar kale salad. It was actually much better the next day, as the kale had time to soften and the dressing flavors came together.

    • My trick for recipes like these Thai drunken Zoodles is to let the ground pork in this case cook a bit longer than you think it should, so that it gets really crispy. It’s tough to wait that long when dinner time is coming fast, but the texture contrast is needed in a dish where everything else tends to be a little mushy. I loved the flavor of the sauce in the recipe, it would be good on real noodles too!

  • I also made Fridge dills but haven’t tried them yet because I don’t like pickles!

    • When I have time later this weekend, I’m going to try making these amazing looking almond blackberry sweet rolls.

    What I’ve Planned – Week 10

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  • The basket brings a wide variety of ingredients this week. I think the biggest challenge will be using up all these zucchini! We smoked two whole chickens for July 4, so this week’s meals will make the most of having an abundance of pre-cooked, shredded chicken ready to use.