what's for dinner?

Hamburg Steak with Onion Gravy

This is a comfort food my grandmother would make when I was young that I now enjoy making today. Hamburg Steak is made by combining ground beef with some breadcrumbs and spices. You sear each side for around four minutes and then remove the patties. Cook down some onions until soft and then add some stock and flour to form a gravy. Return the patties to the pan and let it simmer for around fifteen minutes.

It is delicious over a bowl of rice which is exactly how we had it for dinner.

Broccoli “beef”.

We spent the weekend away and last night I had a hankering to cook.
My mother in law gave me two huge (pound-and-a-half) blocks of okinawan tofu, so i sliced it up, threw it in the air fryer to get dryish, and made chinese home style tofu (with peppers, carrots, chilis and a brown sauce).
i also did some garden work and had to pull out several good-sized shiso plants to make space, so i made two shiso dishes- a chinese stir fry with cucumber and shiso (with red pepper and soy sauce) and a japanese one with charred onions and a sweeter sauce.
i also found half a napa cabbage in the fridge and that got pan-charred with some chinese chicken boullion granules, sesame oil and salt. it's amazing how flavorful cabbage can be.
tonight my husband plays soccer and i usually craft and skip dinner. today i found tomatoes on sale everywhere, though, and bought 12 kg to make passata for sauce in the future. i may water bath can it, since my mother in law also gave me a bunch of large jars. dinner will be whatever fits well with sauce making!

Roasted sesame green beans, mashed potatoes with portobello gravy, two vegan roasts, cranberry conserve. Apple pie and ice cream is waiting till later and maybe till breakfast.

Alas, Canadian Thanksgiving was over a month ago, so we had homemade spaghetti sauce over drill bit noodles.

Just use your imagination!

Our girls are producing at least 6 eggs every day and although there are 4 families in the co-op, there are more than enough to go around.

So dinner tonight was a quiche with caramelised onion, sharp cheddar in a homemade shortcrust pastry.

Plenty left over for lunch tomorrow.

Frito pie! Third and final night of chili leftovers.

I sliced and baked a Kombocha squash and used a Japanese dressing recipe with it, called Sesame Ginger Dressing.

The dressing was super easy to make, tasted lovely on the squash, and I think would taste equally great on a baked potato or a salad.

Recipe here: https://www.loveandlemons.com/sesame-ginger-dressing/

The only problem was that I didn't have Tamari sauce, but it suggested soya sauce was an OK substitute. We've since picked up Tamari sauce as it sounds like a good one to have in the cupboard - less salty than soya, and a byproduct of making miso paste.

Last night’s was boring but good. Onion, potato, and sweet potato soup with some greens.

Oh, wait! It wasn’t totally boring, I added lichen stock (Umbilicaria mammulata)!

seemed too soon to fall back on spaghetti our fave--especially since I like to put a little sausage in it and it seems like we've been eating a lot of meat lately, just finished off the last package of sausage. But I was advised to eat fish once a week, so I opened the last can of tuna fish, stirred in some mayonnaise and celery seed and finely minced onion and my husband is going to make tuna melts with it (I just made bread yesterday so fresh bread will help.) So maybe tomorrow I'll make spaghetti, and then a little more of the pound of sausage will likely go on a pizza soon, probably with leftover spaghetti sauce. Here's another leftover trick--open a quart of venison and add carrots and potatoes and onions and garlic and spice and celery, make a good stew. Also make enough dough for a two-crust pie. Then the next day--or a subsequent one--roll it out, dump in the leftover stew, adjust the liquid level if necessary, and bake. Two good meals that are both pretty easy.

Frittata of onion, purple potato, and jalapeño peppers. It’s a great quick and easy meal when I don’t feel like a lot of work, and works with whatever I have to hand.

My husband cooked eggplant parmigiana and salad for our dinner.

Two portions left over for my weekday lunches.

I'm making pumpkin soup out of a medium pumpkin I was given, for lunch, before getting outside, wet, sweaty, start going in and out like a cat but changing clothing

... while I do the main job right now, which after freezing a bunch of pumpkin purée, I am now dealing with all the skin and tougher outside flesh, which is roasting in the oven at 200F with rice and red split lentils and ground fennel, for the dogs.

I will add some Mexican spiced veggie páté to my soup once I have finished with today's dog food  on the stovetop

... Dog food du jour made out of some of what's in the oven, some water and frozen dog dinner. My old boy is almost finished, and his 6 month son is complaining about the
slow service lol!

Edit: my soup was really blah so it got a can of chipotle beans and turned into ragout!
Edit: I should add the roasted seeds in the middle got sautéed until the stringy "meat" came away, and about 2tbsp went in with the dog food, and I have a container of seeds which easily peel away from the outside crust so I will be snacking on seeds later. All the juice went into the dog bake.
Nothing wasted except the stalk and a bottom flat 2" disk went in the kitchen composting.

Nothing fancy for me but there is a ton of snow with a crust of ice to move outside today! I have to see how my pumpkin purée plus vege páté  mix is going to taste with a little ginger... I eat pretty well anything

Monday I realized I had a kg of gobo (burdock) roots that had been in the fridge for a month (!!) and a container of spaghetti left over from last week when I made sauce, so I decided to make a mix of a few Asian things.
Pressure cooked the peeled gobo, then smashed it and mixed it with dashi, sugar, and ground roasted sesame (tataki-gobo).
Quick lomein with lots of charred onion and cabbage using the spaghetti.
Quick cucumber pickles (sesame oil, soy sauce, white vinegar, sesame seeds)
and a broccoli and pork stirfry. Enough leftovers for everyone's lunches, yesterday and again today.

Last night I took the night off and had popcorn for dinner, as I tend to do when the husband plays soccer on Tuesdays.

Tonight, we're having chicken biryani (chicken went into the marinade last night) with a quick chopped salad and mint/garlic yogurt. This will also yield serious leftovers for lunches.

Pizza with homegrown preserved artichoke hearts in the topping and salad with homegrown asparagus.

Roasted poblano stuffed with overly fluid black bean sauce.

Dinner tonight is venison skirt steak fajitas with rehydrated golden oysters and home grown peppers. We get about two deer every year for free thanks to friends looking out for fresh road kill. They know that if they call the sheriff and get the salvage tag I will happily butcher it and they get goodies like backstrap and jerky. I have mixed feelings about eating meat lately but road kill harvesting feels like fair game. No pun intended!

I tried using some of the pork scraps to make a soul-food type black-eyed peas, cooked up in bone broth.

I think smoked meat is preferred, but this is so much cheaper! I did use smoked paprika though, and we had buttered corn-bread with it. I think we'll be having it again as it's the best way I've ever had feijão frade as they are known here.

i am going away for a few days and realized i have a produce problem! so last night was a cleanout...

eggplant and peppers with sweet miso sauce
cucumber and wakame salad
some beautiful bok choy, blanched with some oyster/garlic sauce on top
Chicken with ginger and miso in shiso leaves (which sounds lovely but was actually disappointingly bland... new recipe  :-(

and someone gave me a bunch of small corn that was too much hassle for them to cook with, the runts of the litter. it is not the same as north american sweet corn, it is more like what i grew up calling "cow corn", needs to be cooked. so i sliced it off the cobs and cooked it with rice in the rice cooker, with a bit of sake and soy sauce (and the cobs on top), then tossed with black pepper and a touch of butter when it was done.

tonight the cleanout continues.... i have a broccoli that needs to go, and a cauliflower that i'll probably do chinese style with some pork belly i picked up.
I may make some steamed bread with a bit of cornmeal, as i'm so tired of pasta (we've had a lot of pasta lately) and my daughter called dibs on the leftover corn/rice. we'll do a japanese quick garlic/cabbage salad as a side (yamitsuki) and maybe a quick egg/tomato soup, since it's inexplicably freezing again today.

Burra Maluca wrote: I think we'll be having it again as it's the best way I've ever had feijão frade as they are known here.

this is interesting to know!! these are the cheapest beans we can get here, and for years i tried to make them in some way that the family would eat them. to this day the only success has been blended up to use in falafel or acarajé (a fried patty akin to a falafel, usually stuffed with shrimp or something interesting), otherwise they refuse the taste. maybe time to try again, with chili type tastes.

Tereza Okava wrote:these are the cheapest beans we can get here, and for years i tried to make them in some way that the family would eat them.

This is the video I based it on

We both loved it as a cheap and cheerful sort of meal but thought it would be better with a big heap of greens next to it. Smooshing up enough of the beans to make it really thick seemed to be important, as was the smoky flavour. I cooked up enough of the basic bean stuff so that we can have another go in a day or two and make a few modifications. I might let Himself play with it to see what he comes up with...

We had breakfast for dinner tonight, eggs from our girls are so golden, they look like they've got food colouring added🥰

My other half managed to pick up a bag of chicken offcuts. Not very big, but certainly worth having!

I sorted it out and put anything with bone in to make broth in the big crockpot and the skin and boneless offcuts in the small one. Usually for rendering I add half a cup of water but this was a different composition to my usual renders, which are usually  based on pork skin and fat trimmings, so I added a lot more water to make sure it didn't all just stick. When it was cooked I poured the juices into a pyrex jug and left it to cool then put it in the fridge.

This was the result.



When the fat was as hard as it was going to get I lifted it off carefully and set it on one side to be used as cooking fat.



The stock underneath set really, really well and smells heavenly and is likely to be turned into soup in the very near future.

I went through the skin and meaty bits and sorted them out. The skin was cut into small pieces and laid out on a silicone tray to freeze. I can add a handful when I cook the next batch of rice-and-lentils. And then the meat went into a bowl.



Then for lunch today we used the chicken meat in with the second half of the black-eyed peas I'd cooked up a couple of days ago and added smoked paprika, onions and green peppers, and served it with some galega cabbage, parsley, and buttered corn-bread. Which went down VERY well!

Latkes again!

I grate potatoes and other roots (usually onions, garlic, sweet potato, carrot, etc.) and then knead them together with salt, like you’d make sauerkraut. This seems important for releasing starches that hold it together. Then I mix in an egg or two and fry them on medium or low heat, turning until both sides are browned.

That chicken stock got itself turned into leek soup yesterday.

Served in a giant mug with corn-bread croutons cooked in chicken fat.

Simple and delicious!



I couldn't resist just dumping all the croutons right on top of the soup. Much better like that...

Deane Adams,
I have merged your topic into this topic. I hope that helps.

We’re maing turkey soup with the leftover turkey we cooked on Christmas Eve. I made bone broth from the carcass. We’ll add some veg, noodles, and a bit of cream.

Yesterday, defrosted a deboned wild goat hind leg and made a stew for dinner.

The goat was one of several that was given to me earlier in the year that I skinned and butchered myself.

There was enough stew leftover to make a pie for the freezer.

Christmas biscuits and gravy!

The boys are out on an emergency digging job so I'm on cheap and cheerful comfort food for lunch, and finishing off the annual bag of brussels sprouts!

I'm testing the 'new' stove top oven, which unsurprisingly is just like the old one but with less danger of the glass in the viewing window falling onto the food as it cooks. The biscuits were made with half wheat flour and half linseed meal and worked very well. It also helps me use up my enormous stash of linseed... And I changed the method of making the biscuits, mixing them up in a saucepan then using the pan to make up the gravy so that the bits of flour left in there end up as part of the gravy-thickening. Which also means less washing up!

it's been volcanic in terms of heat here, so we've been on japanese summer food- zaru soba with ice cubes in the noodle dipping sauce, principally, chuka soba (another cold dipping noodle), grilled meat wrapped in leaves, onigiri, etc. Lots of veggie salads. My husband is home this week, so I'm also cooking lunches as well as dinners (usually he takes a boxed lunch he preps on sundays and I eat whatever I can scrounge).

Today it rained and it's a bit cooler. I have some leftover cooked sausage and impulse purchased a bag of masa harina a few weeks ago (it is something I used to have to bring back from trips to the US, but the recent influx of venezuelans into Brazil means we can find it here now)-- going to make arepas stuffed with sausage and cheese for lunch. Dinner will be korean chicken wings in the air fryer (soy/garlic sauce) and DIY temakis or some sort of rice/nori situation. Negimiso and ume seem like good fillings, and I have sooooo many pickles in the fridge to use up.
On Wednesday we'll go away for a week to celebrate the new year with extended family, so I'm also trying to 1) prep the new years foods I'll bring with us and 2) draw down our perishables and pantry. So far I've caramelized a crockpot full of onions for mujadara, my contribution to the obligatory lentils-for-new-year tradition, and made a kilo of azuki beans to make anko bread for my sisters in law.  Those beans will get made into anko tonight, maybe.
I still have about 5 kg of tomatoes (and a pantry already full of passata....), so maybe I'll make some quickie salsa to eat with the arepas today. And there's a lot of ripe plums, so maybe a plum cake to bring with us Wednesday, or to drop off at the dog kennel when I leave the dog. It's like Iron Chef around here....

The cold/flu/ick has descended upon my household so energy levels are low. I dug around in my freezer and found a small chuck roast from a blonde d'aquitaine beef purchase I made a while ago so I figure it was time to use it up!



I chopped up some local carrots, onions, celery and potatoes and layered them in the bottom of a slow cooker. The chuck roast spent a day with a dry rub in the fridge before going into the slow cooker. A little bit of stock and it was left to cook over the day.

A nice hearty meal with plenty of leftovers to sate hunger for a couple more days.

I am going back to Timothy’s November 22 post and making some version of Salisbury Steak. I also tossed some chili into a crockpot for tomorrow …or whenever.

Tonight will be ribs & Mexican street corn (off the cob).