arielle clementine

My favorite chicken people were at the farmers market last week and I went a little off the rails. They haven’t been there in a few weeks so I bought all the chicken. Also my favorite red dragon carrots are back! If you peel them they just look like orange carrots again, so I always just wash them instead. Here’s what we ate this week.

Simple Roast Chicken, Creamed Rapidly-Aging Greens, Leftover Sweet Potatoes. The chicken is sold fresh, and while it freezes and thaws beautifully, I prefer to use it right away. This is that easy roasting method, Thomas Keller’s, where you heat the oven to 450, put the chicken in a cast iron skillet with kosher salt and black pepper, and roast it for an hour, then let it rest for 15 minutes and carve. We decided we definitely like this method better than the faux-tisserie one we tried a couple weeks ago. The greens came from one of those massive plastic salad greens containers at Central Market, which I had bought for Passover and then left half to spoil in the fridge. It was baby chard and spinach and kale, so I just picked out the saddest looking leaves and sauteed them with onions and butter and a splash of cream. It was ok but not great.

Perfect Corn Muffins with Strawberry Honey Butter and Bacon Scallion Butter. These were my first corn muffins! I thought they were ok. They taste like cornbread in a muffin liner, and for some reason I wanted them to be lighter or cakier or something. But the butters rocked my world. I enjoyed alternating bites of bacon-y butter muffin with strawberry butter muffin because sweet vs salty is my favorite. Like the fudgsicles+potato chips or microwave popcorn+lemon lime gatorade of my youth.

Soy Saucy Chicken and Eggs. We ate late, so the lighting was bad for this picture. We ate rice so Henry was thrilled. The eggs are hard boiled and then cooked in a simple soy-tomato sauce with the chicken for about half an hour- easy. The chicken comes out tender and flavorful, the eggs a bit overcooked. It’s a bit like nursery food, simple and kid-pleasing, except that my kids ignored the chicken and eggs for the rice, so I’ll probably wait a few years before trying this again.

Old School Swedish Meatballs (again), Lefse, and Store-bought Apple Cinnamon Mini Waffles with Whipped Cream and Lingonberry Jam. In spite of the Swedish meatballs and lingonberry jam, this was our Norway dinner (we’re very slowly working our way through dinners from a list of 14 countries Henry selected). I looked up a meatball recipe from fiveandspice, authority on all things Norway, and they look really similar to the Swedish variety, so I didn’t feel too bad about it. I did make fiveandspice’s lefse, which I had never had before. It’s a mashed potato tortilla and tastes exactly like a mashed potato tortilla. My sister went nuts for them but they weren’t my favorite. For the extra work, I think I’d rather just eat mashed potatoes. I looked through fiveandspice’s Norweigan Big Feast (it’s astoundingly gorgeous- you should click through if you didn’t see it the first time around) and wanted to eat her savory beer waffles with homemade sausage, blueberry ketchup, crisped onions, and edible flowers so bad. Do you see what I did instead? Store bought mini waffles torn apart, whipped cream, and a blob of jam. It is the saddest comparison, but you know what? We ate the hell out of them. That shit was delicious.

Carrot Cake Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting. This is my favorite carrot muffin, really an adaptation of Ina Garten’s carrot cupcakes, with frosting on top. I used all white flour because, delicious. You can make these gluten free by subbing a GF all purpose flour, and they’re naturally dairy free. I love them- they’re light and simple and super moist from the oil. They’re great after sitting in the sun for an hour (how we ate them for my mom’s belated birthday celebration) or straight from the fridge too.

Peanut Soba, Cabbage, and Chicken Salad. I’ve blogged about this dinner before and I still love it. It’s a great use for leftover shredded chicken (skip the boiling step), and is gluten free too. I always mean to buy salted peanuts to chop and throw on top, but I forgot again. One day!

Crispy Fried Fish Tacos with Beans and Guacamole. Ahhhh yes. Best dinner of the week. The beer batter is easy, the chili mayo is easy (mayo + sriracha, or in this case Yellowbird‘s jalapeno sauce), and the results are so fun. I got to use the rest of that cabbage and cilantro from the peanut soba dinner too.

Pasta with Pistachios, Meyer Lemon, and Broccoli. The title of this one grabbed me, but it’s really not any different than the pesto I usually make when basil’s not in season (parsley + mint), with the additions of broccoli and meyer lemon. But they’re good additions! I loved having a ton of broccoli in with the pasta (nearly equal amounts), and you just toss the broccoli into the boiling water in the last two minutes that the pasta’s cooking, so it couldn’t be easier. I skipped the step where you boil the pesto for two minutes (why would you do that?) and instead threw it all together and put a ton of cheese on top.

Next week, tons of easy dinners because we’ve got a busy week: first BLTs of the season, chorizo quesadillas, breakfast tacos, cabbage and pork ramen, and other stuff. See you then!