what's for dinner?

Once a month or so, I like to leave the property and go somewhere - a boot sale, a doctor's appointment, a trip to town to fetch something, possibly even visit someone!

Once a year, I like to push my comfort zone a little and go into a supermarket.

Today I really pushed myself - lunch in a food hall in a shopping centre. With revolving doors and escalators and lifts and things!!

We found a table and I sent the boys off with instructions to choose me something very Portuguese, and interesting enough to tell a story about. This is what they brought me - Porco à Alentejana, aka pork and clams.



Chunks of fried potato, marinated pork chunks, pickled vegetables, black olives, clams and coriander.

But if you were expecting a lovely rustic and homely story about how it came to be, you are going to be disappointed. This dish was created as the Portuguese equivalent of a ducking stool., devised during the Portuguese inquisition to test if the Jewish and Moorish population had in fact completely converted to Catholicism or were just pretending. Neither pork nor clams are kosher, so anyone suspected of being not fully Catholic would be obliged to eat this dish in public. Failure to do so would likely result in being burned at the stake.

There is a local sausage known as alheira which looks just like chouriço but in its original form contained no pork, created by the local Jewish population for similar reasons. The absence of home-made sausages smoking near the fireplace would be considered highly suspect, so they very sensibly improvised an identical looking version.

The dish itself is delicious and I thoroughly enjoyed it, despite its rather disturbing history. I even rescued a couple of the shells so I can give them to my little pink plushy dragon to clean up and put in the display cabinet with the other shells and things to remind me of my mini adventure.

I was a bit under the weather yesterday and did not eat much, so tonight I fixed my tarragon beef braise with baked potato (small pat of butter, no salt) and a small serving of red kale and arugula with lemon juice.
Served at the table upon one of my mothers quilted place mats, no linen as I was wearing a long sleeve shirt in case of any drips.
Hey I'm a pagan not a barbarian !

Peace

Buffalo chicken, tonight. Didn't even bother with sides, other than pickles.

Serbian stuffed peppers.

last night I worked late (my husband plays soccer on Tuesday) and dinner was a banana and a piece of cheese.
Tonight, however, will be Turkish lentil soup, some whole wheat flatbread, strained yogurt with garlic and poached eggs, some chickpea dip (not hummus-- made from chickpea flour, Ethiopian shiro, which while not Turkish goes REALLY well with Turkish flavors), and something invented with a bit of beef I found in the freezer. Maybe just sliced fine and fried up with garlic and carrots and a bit of red pepper. Oh and with paprika/pepper butter, of course, and whatever kind of fresh salad I can wrangle up.

I culled some of our roosters on Sunday. So last night Lynae made a 100% grown-at-home chicken dinner. It was mashed potatoes, squash caserole, canned green beans and chicken with gravy. We've been close to this point before. But this is the first time we've had everything homegrown.

that squash casserole looks nice, what's in it, Jeremy?

Whole lemon-roasted chicken (Wednesday). The carcass is in the slow cooker, with about 2/3 of the meat pulled from the bone & in the fridge, to make soup, after the broth is done.

Last night I made nachos! It’s a little junk-foody, but my family’s favorite.

- Start with a carefully arranged bed of the finest tortilla chips you can obtain. Probably you can't get good ones*. If you make tortillas, the air-fryer is your friend for this.
- Add a healthy layer of cheese. You can definitely put on too much, but it's easier for me to put on too little. You want the first layer of cheese to form a matrix of the chips.
- Top that with whatever you like: beans, meat or "meat", chiles, onion, olives, leftover chili, salsa, hot sauce, other stuff.
- And top that with another layer of cheese.

We serve the crispy outside edge for dinner and then eat the insides the next day after recrisping in the air-fryer for lunch (or breakfast)

I only have a small sample -- maybe ten people, but everyone who tries my nachos agrees that they're better than whatever other nachos they used to like best. I'm sure someone must prefer stale chips dipped in canned "cheese" sauce, but not us.

*Maybe you can get the Frontera orange bag -- that's the best I can buy currently. When I lived in Chicago, getting better than that was as trivial as walking into the nearest Jewel and looking for the plainest label. But in semi-rural Minnesota, I feel grateful that I can get something pretty good. (And I haven't yet found better at the tortillarias in the Twin Cities.)

Oh, look! It's forever soup! Sigh.

Just color me jealous.

Two of my chicken eggs, sunny side up, on homemade sourdough rye bread, with a carrot as the token vegetable.

The boys did the usual Friday night supermarket run yesterday. My son did his usual thing of picking up a surprise bag from the too-good-to-go app, which gives a minimum of €9 worth of surplus groceries for €2.99.  This time it included a lot of pre-cut veggies, too much for him to use, so he donated a bag of shredded galega leaves (ever heard of the phrase 'selling sand in the Sahara'?) and a big box of finely sliced leeks and carrots. Which I suspect mean that soup is going to happen in the very near future. He also donated a box of bacalhau com natas, which translates as codfish-with-cream.

Bacalhau is salted cod, and is very popular in Portugal but I'm usually very reluctant to buy it because of the sustainability concerns. But this box had already failed to sell, then been offered at 40% off and had still failed to sell, and had finally been put in a box of 66+% off too-good-to-go bag. Which in my books flips it into the Very Sustainable category of things I'd happily eat.

We figured it was probably best to eat it as soon as possible seeing as it had been hanging around and failed to sell, so we had it for lunch today, with sweet potato, green beans and buttered mushrooms.



Here's a page with a recipe - Bacalhau com Natas – Portuguese Codfish with Cream

And here's a page telling a bit of the history of why bacalhau is such a popular dish here - Bacalhau: Understanding the Portuguese Obsession with Code

Jay Angler wrote:

Deane Adams wrote:...  But it's kinda hard to make it for just one, so like rice I end up eating it for days.  

Some dishes you've just got to go big or go home! I hope the homemade Mac and Cheese is yummy and filling! My son considers it comfort food.

I like spaghetti but with a chunky sauce. SO, I make a huge pot of sauce starting with two quarts of purchased spaghetti sauce and using all kinds of veggies. I make sure to keep stirring it until I think it is all done then I package it away in square-ish 16 oz containers and put away in the freezer. For a meal I just pull one of those out, drop the contents in a bowl and stick in the microwave to thaw out. In the meantime I'm cooking the spaghetti and buttering a couple of slices of bread for my meal.

These worked great, especially when I was teaching at the local community college, but it still works well when I need a good meal.

John's upscale version of a Tuscan dish, with Italian sausage, parmesan, mushrooms, black olives, garlic, onions, diced tomatoes, spinach, and a hit off heavy cream. If we weren't still doing keto, it would have been over pasta. Funny thing is that I have a couple of volunteer spaghetti squash in the kitchen, and he didn't think to use one... Not that it needed it - so good!

I absolutely could not be bothered to cook dinner... And somehow ended up putting on some rice and lentils with a bit of olive oil, adding veg from the garden or this year's harvest - celery, green onion (I have so many), garlic, mushrooms*, tomato, aubergines fried with cinnamon, the last small zucchini of the year, yellow habaneros, yellow sweet peppers, New Zealand spinach - all just thrown in the pot topped up with water and boiled until done. I topped with some more tomatoes. Greenhouse still producing and expecting more, despite it just hitting freezing overnight outside. Next week should be a bit warmer but wet.

*Mushrooms were from the shop, though there are loads here, I would need to expand my recognition skills!.I didn't bring back shaggy inkcaps yesterday due to not having a bag to put them in!

There's enough for tomorrow too.

My housemate had tomatoes on some kind of dense German wholegrain bread with loads of butter.

My cat Felix had half a tin of meat - haven't seen him with any prey today, but he does his job very well!

Here in Orkney, Scotland we are having roast vegetables again, as we do around 3 or 4 times a week. Potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, cabbage or leeks all from our croft and picked around 10 minutes before going into the oven. It’s a real treat.😄 warmest regards to all at permies.com

Am thinking about some kind of fish boil for tonight. I have some stuff to use up that would fit into one nicely.

The working idea for tonight involves smoked pork chops, roasted broccoli, and maybe some yellow potatoes that I have laying around. I do have a partial jar of chicken stock open so that makes me think I should make some rice up so I'm on the fence.

I'm finding that when I cook porkchops in my 12" cast iron skillet, I can use my other 10" skillet as a press in order to get a good sear. Who needs a dedicated press anyway?

We had a roast leg of lamb.

It served four with four portions of leftovers for week day lunches and two portions diced for shepherd's pie.

Puffball season has begun!

I picked the first one this morning from just below the house, then we went up to the top terrace to clear two fallen trees that were blocking the path.



When it was clear, he went to see what was happening further along and found another one. When we got back home I picked some galega cabbage leaves to go with them.



And we had an exceedingly frugal meal of rice, lentils, meaty bits, puffball and galega. All supervised and approved of by the new forest-spirit dragon who showed up a couple of nights ago.

This thread has gotten us out of our meal rut.  

Beef souvlaki with green bell peppers, onion, and button mushies. It was good, but needed more time to marinate, and the veggies were a bit too crunchy (seemed like they'd barely been waved over the heat, lol.). So, crunchy, but, tasty!

Black bean chili and corn bread!

Homemade pork and cabbage gyoza, a double batch with half frozen for future meals. With some tomato/egg soup and quick cucumber/kombu pickles.

Chili dogs!

Steamed buns, a slice of cheese, a vegan frank, a spoonful of strained chili leftovers, topped with: purple onions, jalapeño slices, and cucumber nukazuke.

Sausage and hash browns with onion, garlic, bell peppers and celery.  Along with a small serving of arugula and a splash of lemon juice.  And as a treat after the day's toilet of leaf removal a small bowl of fried golden delicious apples with cinnamon ( no sugar added).  There is a small plate in the fridge with the leftovers !!!

The house kind of smells like a home tonight.

Heddwch

Eggplant parm pasta! Tastes like eggplant parm and homemade red sauce, but with a tenth of the effort (maybe less): no breading, frying or baking. A magical recipe, and the leftovers are even better, other than the fight over who gets to take it for lunch!!

We try not to eat much pasta but I've had rice at every meal for a few days now and I needed a break.

Tonight was a classic Meat/Starch/Vegetable dinner.

Meat - Smoked pork chops
Starch - Wedge cut potato fries
Vegetable - Skillet corn

It was pretty good too!

Sirloin steaks (cost sits at about $4/lb, when we buy the muscle & cut our own!), buttered spinach,  & Mich Ultra. I keep hoping I'll remember to take photos, but...

The other day was a good one. I boiled lots of dame’s rocket greens, some garlic mustard, carrot greens and dock too, and stir fried with beans, scallions, and boiled acorns with butter. The boiling, while I try to avoid overdoing it, is a good way to make use of way too many greens as a protein source and something you’d actually want to eat as opposed to something that would make you sick.

Tonight—some salad and winter squash with some raw carrots. Not much hearty food to speak of, being ill prepared. That was not them, but I have been enjoying eating wild carrots, cooked and raw. They are more like parsnips in texture but are definitely carrots.

Bit of an experiment today. I still had half a sack of golden linseed from when I had to eat keto and wondered if I could mix it half-and-half with wheat flour to make biscuits. And then I thought I'd also see how it cooked up in the microwave so I don't always have to use stove-top oven.

It worked just fine! Not the same but quite good enough, and with more nutrition, more fibre, and it uses up the seemingly never-ending linseed supply that I bought just before lockdown to move house with us, in case the lockdown hit us harder than expected. Turns out whole linseed stores very well. I grind it up in the vitamix, about half a kilo at a time, so I have some on hand for biscuits and muffins and things but I've got out of the habit of using it since I had to give up keto.



So, linseedy-biscuits and gravy, with galega cabbage and parsley.

Purple potato gratin with fried onion topping.

(I have a lot of vole-damaged spuds, so I’m cutting off the chewed bits and using them up right away.)

Enchilada, rice with onions and jalapenos, and refried beans too! All smothered in cheese. Mmm mmmm!

Very mildly spicy pork and chick-peas with purple sweet potato and galega cabbage.

Pork cooked fresh for once, rather than rendered-out fatty bits. We'd bought a big bag of pork scraps for 25 cents a kilo and I'd 'rescued' a kilo of nice stuff by trimming the fat a bit better. This was some of that good stuff, which I'd frozen down separately. Though it turns out the two bags I'd put it in were a bit overly-generous so I have some to cook up into something else for myself tomorrow when Himself is out. I'm thinking satay pork with rice-and-lentils. And greens of some sort probably because they're good for you. And free!

Tuesday a client gave my husband a huge head of lettuce and an enormous bag of NZ spinach (tetragonia) from his garden.
Neither of these are things we normally eat, so I did some planning and last night we had a Korean feast- pork bulgogi wrapped in lettuce (and perilla/shiso, for me at least) and a whole load of banchan type dishes- spinach with sesame oil and garlic, cabbage charred in lard with sweet soy sauce and red pepper, some sad zucchini stirfried with onions, garlic and chinese bean sauce.... and the new batch of kimchi, of course. I had 7 types of homegrown greens on the table, which was impressive!

Tonight we'll be having Korean chicken wings in the air fryer with either yakisoba or chinese noodles with cabbage (not sure yet)- I scored 4 enormous cabbages (4kg+) for 99 cents each, so cabbage is in our future....

Another wonderful Meat/Starch/Vegetable dinner at the Norton household.

Pork Chops, Russet Potato, Peas

My local butcher had a pack of smoked boneless porkchops that I had to try. I paired it up with baked russet potato and some buttered peas.

I cooked the pork a touch too much in my cast iron, but now I know a better timing for the future.

We got a wild hair to make tlayudas. These are smaller than authentic ones but we have to decide if we want to dedicate the space in our great room that a new, large press would take up.

We haven't had burgers for a while so picked up a couple of kilos of brisket, minced it all and packaged up some 250g portions for future meals (baked rice, stuffed peppers/zucchinis, bolognese, cottage pie etc)

Combined the rest with a couple tbsp plain yoghurt, paprika, salt, fresh thyme, garlic and ground black pepper. Sometimes I add a dash of mustard powder and Worcestershire sauce.

Formed patties and free flow froze them.

Kept two out for dinner served with cheddar cheese, gherkins, homemade pickled beetroot, fried onions, avocado, tomato, oven baked chips and salad.

Couldn't finish my dinner so saved 1/3 of the patty and some salad for my lunch the next day.

today is my daughter's birthday, and yesterday was a slow day work-wise, so I spent it in the kitchen. I made four types of cookies for her to eat/take to work/take to school (ginger sparkle, peanut butter choco bars, oatmeal raisin, and double dark chocolate GF flax brownies, which sound nasty but are the best brownie i've ever had) and had a pot of beans on the hob to make pasta e fagioli. Used the hot oven to make a rustic italian loaf too. Got some nice local-ish country-style parmesan type cheese to eat with it.
Sunday my husband was sick and we spent the morning at urgent care getting himself looked at. Came home and had a boring Sunday, so decided to do something about the fish in the freezer. Small-ish white ocean fish (no idea what kind), too small for whole steaming/baking but not really suited for anything else. I separated the meat from the skin and bones and made kamaboko, a project I've been considering for years. The meat is pureed with an egg white, salt, sometimes some starch, and then formed into logs and steamed for half an hour.
Tonight I'll make some rice and miso soup and we'll slice them and try them out. For a while in Japan that was my breakfast every day, with a smear of mustard or wasabi alongside.

We had a Chinese meal tonight, chicken with cashew nuts with home grown asparagus and sliced duck breast with pickled mustard greens and steamed rice.

Froze leftovers for a weekday lunch.