What's for dinner?

I'm learning to make quick one-pot lunches in the instant pot.

Today I had spaghetti with lamb's quarters, pork scraps, creamy sauce and a bit of parmesan.

Chicken sandwiches from last night's lemon & onion baked, spatchcocked chicken. Wednesdays are busy, so an easy, fast, leftover-based supper is a bonus.

Getting home late to find nothing planned, so ....my first harvest from my new polytunnel! - salad greens topped up with small leaved lime leaves and sea cabbage flowers. Made a little potato salad, grated a carrot and dressed with (home made) apple cider vinegar and a little unrefined sugar, some colourful baby tomatoes (not mine, they're only just starting to flower!) and a tiny bit of cheese and home made rhubarb chutney. edit - I forgot a few walnuts on the side, and a sprinkle of raisins in with the carrot. A healthy meal on the table in about 15 minutes.

Eton mess for pudding!

Nice cauliflower at the veg store and freezing outside tonight, so i dug out some sausage from the freezer, fried it up with onions to make some gravy and made spatzle alongside the cauliflower and sausage.... Some nice carby goodness to keep warm!

Toasted chicken salad sandwiches - from the spatchcocked chicken, night before last. The carcass is in the slow cooker, with onion, celery, carrots, garlic, bay leaves, black pepper, and thyme, for the day - maybe the night, too.

there is a certain point in winter when I take more produce out of the garden than in the summer. We have just hit that sweet spot!!

Last night was the first dinner made from snow peas and cabbage from my garden.
(we are only two people right now but this dinner will be our lunch/dinner today and lunch again tomorrow, due to schedule silliness. Making a big meal with multiple dishes on Monday keeps things calm on Tuesday and Wednesday).

(snow peas with garlic and oyster sauce; miso hoikoro, a spicy chinese/japanese pork dish with garden cabbage, and korean braised potatoes and carrots. oh yes and a simple tomato/nori/scallion/sesame salad and jasmine rice [since we're out of normal short-grain]. What didn't come from the garden was a fridge clean-out campaign!)

Sunday night was all about the daikon radishes (also harvesting now): I made indian daikon-stuffed parathas. They were spectacular.

Japchae!

My Son showed up after work - can we have pasta salad for dinner? I got the pasta cooking while I cut his hair (yes - multitasking because the pasta pretty much cooks itself.)

I went and picked walking onion greens and parsley from the garden, but then had to go and deal with animals.

So my son did the chopping and building until he needed help finding a bigger bowl, then finished it off. Planned overs for the next two days.

Last night was Beet-Avocado tostadas from page 38 of the Vitamina T cookbook. (I didn't get the tostadas quite crispy enough and it significantly detracted, but all the goodies associated with the recipe were amazing!

We are in GreenLand! Not the North Atlantic, but the 'holy cow all the tatsoi, cabbage, daikon and napa are ready to pick right now' space.....

The other night we had sarson ka saag, pressure cooked greens cooked into a, uh, delicious sludge and served with corn flatbread that uses long kneading to make a delightfully creamy and corny bread with only plain old cornmeal. (no picture!!! LOL. My daughter's boyfriend was here for dinner and he wasn't the only one giving the sludge the side eye. Pressure-cooked blended greens aren't the most visually appealing, but man do they taste fine.)

We've had sooooo many stir fried greens, last night they were blanched and made into a Japanese goma-ae dish with ground sesame seeds and served alongside a Chinese chicken and snow peas (of which yesterday I picked 2 kg-- also having a great year).

Today the winter cold is back and we'll be having some soup and bread, watch this space!

Mushroom, onion, cheddar omelette.

Onions are tossed in toasted sesame oil and oven roasted. The “baby Bellas” were sliced and marinated in yuzu BBQ sauce and roasted. Then Cathy made the omelette in a special pan approved by Julia Child.

My mother-in-law brought me a block of Okinawan tofu (a rarity in these parts) and we're now pulling in at least a kilogram of snow peas per day, so I decided to make home style tofu.  It is probably the takeout dish I loved the most when I was young, didn't know how to cook and had access to takeout food (the lucky trifecta). Now where I live, this isn't a takeout option, so I make it myself. And it's really no big deal.
https://omnivorescookbook.com/home-style-tofu/
(extra bonus: the tofu is supposed to be deep fried. the air fryer does such a fine job that you really can't tell the difference. another win!)

First two nights of chili was served with cornbread but now it’s chili-dog night. (Tomorrow is either nachos or baked potatoes.)

Carla Burke wrote:Toasted chicken salad sandwiches - from the spatchcocked chicken, night before last.  

Glad I'm not the only one. Mine was a little rooster I culled which I roasted a couple of days ago.

Sourdough bread, mayo, chicken breast, home pickled onions and homegrown tomato slices.

Simple but yummy. I needed simple as I'm busy processing Italian prune plums. The humidity has dropped - maybe I should try filling the dehydrator with half plums?

Tonight was pork tbone steaks. They were yummy, but too big. Neither of us could eat the whole thing, even though John didn't cook any sides to go with them. So, now there are two halves in the fridge, waiting for our breakfast. Ok - mine might be a *little* smaller, in a an hour or so, because I'm getting peckish, and always have to have a small, high protein snack before bed to keep my blood sugar from bottoming out, over night (it's never good to wake up just to discover yourself about to slip into a coma, lol)

We are going away for the long weekend tomorrow (here both Monday and Tuesday next week are holidays) and so I'm on 'clean out the fridge' duty. There have been a lot of leftovers (my breakfast and lunch every day) as well as some good produce too.
Last night was some real frankenfood.
I had 3 leftover pork chops, thin sliced and already cooked from the night before. I sliced them into slivers along with a green pepper and an avocado that had seen better days and made a quick black vinegar and chili-crisp sauce for dipping.
I also had two ears of corn, so I sliced off the kernels and made korean corn rice (kind of like this, but without scraping/cooking the cobs, because the rabbits want them https://seonkyounglongest.com/corn-rice/ )
i have a lot of potatoes in the cabinet so i took the ones that looked most likely to go bad while we're gone and made braised potatoes https://mykoreankitchen.com/gamja-jorim-korean-braised-potatoes/ I really like this recipe, as I've found that if I cook them in the air fryer first (as the author suggests as an alternative to long braising) I can skip adding the water and the whole process takes much less time, which is good.

Today I need to use up a bunch of tomatoes and some fresh hard ricotta, I'm thinking of making sfiha flatbreads tonight, which will probably yield some leftovers which will be good for the road. It's a 6-7 hour trip, supposed to rain the whole time so even longer, more likely, and this time my daughter and her beau are coming with us, so we might want some car snacks.
We will throw a big party on Sunday, the day after we get there, so I'm going to birng whatever produce in my drawer that looks suitable for making a quick Japanese pickle (asazuke), everyone really enjoys that and I know there are a few cabbages and peppers that would do well with that.

But before that, run around like a monkey! Things to pick up, cars to sort, dog can only go into the kennel at 9 before we can hit the road, things to do....

Here in the US it’s Labor Day — the second most important national holiday by my reckoning . We take the day off and grill. So: corn on the cob, hot dogs, and grilled Vidalia onions tonight.

It may not look like a whole bunch, but my taco soup is pretty tasty.

Pinto beans, black beans, corn, ground beef, onion, garlic, chicken stock, tomato puree, diced tomatoes, jalapeno and a variety of spices make a delicious meal.

Dressed up with some shredded cheese, a little sour cream and served over rice. Delicious.

Another permies post or 2, that I read to hubby was the catalyst for tonight's dinner; pulled pork with avocado, limes, avocado hot sauce, queso fresco, and soft corn tortillas. John rolled his, taco style, I tore mine up and used them to pick up my food with my fingers. Oh - and a shared Modelo.

I have had a pork roast smoking for about 5 hrs; it's ready to come in.
Liz is making a nice ratatouille with homegrown veggies as a side.

The saffron thread reminded me to add a generous pinch to last night's quiche that we had for dinner.

https://permies.com/t/60787/planting-growing-saffron

The saffron came through despite the strong flavours of the caramelised onion and sharp cheddar cheese.

Megan, what a gorgeous quiche!!

I forgot I took pics of dinner last night-- one of my husband's clients brought him some fish (the only thing I miss about working with the public in person: presents!) and I took a pic of what I made for him to forward her, with my thanks.
These were small-ish sea fish, and I was exhausted yesterday from various small disasters so I wanted EASY.
I steamed them and then gave them the Chinese boiling oil treatment on top of scallions and slivered ginger, along with salt and a bit of soy sauce and sesame oil. The sauce is deceptively simple but gorgeous, so I served it all on top of an enormous head of escarole I harvested earlier. It takes almost no time to steam (9 minutes), the fish is super tender, the house didn't stink or get smokey (like it might if I flour and pan fry or grill). Served it with the last of my daikon leaf furikake, jasmine rice, and some kinpira (stir fried burdock root and carrot, with the non-traditional inclusion of sliced fennel and onion, which fit in really well. I only had one carrot and the garden is full of fennel, so needs must!)

Bangers and mash! (The taters are an unsettling pink because I had a beet to use up.)

Cauliflower and mock duck green curry on brown rice with all the goodies as toppings.

It's shepherd's pie tonight, made of beef,  and we used potatoes from the garden, and we will sprinkle the top of the pie with cheddar. This year we were given seed potatoes. Our potatoes are very white with very delicate skin. The potato bed looked very nice this year, as we defeated our annual ant problem early on using a mixture of sugar, water and borax.
Also, it is pumpkin pie for desert as we are feeling celebratory today.

Masala toast (which is Indian flavored French toast).

Last week we scored a giant bag of free meat scraps which turned out to be mostly fatty beef trimmings, and a lot of pork liver.

I pressure cooked the beef trimmings, then poured the resultant liquid into a big pyrex jug to cool. When it was cold and solid, I emptied it out and cut off the fat to use as tallow then reheated the jelly so it melted again and poured it into silicone moulds to re-solidify, then froze the little blocks to use as flavour boosts to any dish that needs it. I pulled any obvious fatty tissue off the meat to freeze into portions for making liver paté, then cut up the beef into nice little chunks and froze them down for using in meals.

Today we used some to make beef and mushrooms in black bean sauce, with red peppers, galega cabbage and onions, served with my usual rice-and-lentils cooked in bone broth.

Utterly delicious!