"Too much sausage!" you say? Perhaps. Two days in a row is a bit indulgent. But it is really a pretty small portion. I keep shrimp in the freezer and dry chorizo in the fridge, so that I can make paella whenever red peppers arrive in the produce box. This also makes good use of crock-pot stock made from last week's chicken.
Yes, the Super Bowl is today and our home team is playing! So of course we have to bring something to the party. This one is really quick, really unhealthy and really delicious. Best of all, the recipe is short enough to fit into a tweet, which I received from @CHOW last week.
Last year I received Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything for my birthday, from a dear friend. It is a big and impressive book and because of its heft and lack of fancy photographs, I lumped it into the same go-to-first category that Irma Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking and Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone occupy at my house.
We came home late from school, again today. I started Sesame Street at 5:00, hoping to have dinner on the table by 6:00 and finished by 6:15, which seems easy enough, since the kids either gobble it down or don't eat at all. Today's scheduled recipe was eggplant curry, using leftover chicken from tuesday's paella. But, I hadn't salted the eggplant beforehand, and now twenty minutes of letting salty eggplant sit and drain into the sink seems like an awful waste of time.
Today was a really good day. It started with a successful drop off of my daughter at her first day of Kindergarten, followed by a chicken fried steak with hash browns and a bloody mary. My 3 year old son had a cheeseburger topped with grape jelly. Then a little bit of back to school shopping, an episode of Sesame Street, an iced coffee at Blue Bottle's sunny Kiosk location, Kindergarten pickup and then a madcap dash through the Castro to Bi-Rite for ice cream, where the salted caramel is absolutely fantastic.
Tonight's chicken tacos were the best dinner ever. In addition to both kids eating it, my daughter ate five radishes. Five! I've been putting beautiful little radishes on the table and eating them with great relish around my family for years now, but I I've never seen her eat more than one tiny nibble, until tonight. Truth be told, I don't even like radishes that much. But I eat them anyway.
I have the most helpful children in the world, today. After a trip to the Bay Area Discovery Museum with their Dad, they came into the kitchen to assist me with dinner. The pasta needed breaking, the onion needed skinning, and my 3 year old son even chopped the onion with a knife from his play kitchen. He is a chef in training, I can tell, I just hope he doesn't grow up to do coke and smoke cigarettes like Anthony Bourdain.
To come clean, lemon chicken salad makes our dinner sound more special than it actually was. Ina Garten's recipe in The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook calls for grilled lemon chicken, which I'm sure is delicious, but was just not in the cards tonight. I used the remainder of our roast chicken from earlier this week, and while slicing it up, marinating it and then cooking it again on the grill was enticing, it was also too ridiculous.