Everybody. Today I ate lunch, and then I finished George’s lunch, even though I wasn’t hungry, and then I went directly to the most spectacular tea party/bridal shower and ate everything there, and even though I skipped dinner (unheard of!) I still feel so gross. I basically ate four meals in the span of two hours and I’ve disgusted myself. And you too, I’m guessing. It’s all so gluttonous. And now I’m looking at pictures of all the food I cooked last week and I feel like it’s going to be hard to talk about a massive slow-roasted pork shoulder.  I’m sure I’ll change my mind in the morning, but right now I feel like I want to only eat raw vegetables for a week. And oh my god what a week. It’s the last week before my little sister gets married! The next time I write a blog post she’ll be a wife! I’m all over the place, let’s just get to the food.

Also, our chickens were old and not laying all that well and their food was expensive and my brother-in-law Javi took them to add to his flock and now I have to buy eggs at the farmers market, like a sucker.

Mango and Avocado Sushi, Miso-Glazed Eggplant, Sunomono. Sushi for Henry, because he loves it. My favorite roll to make at home is mango + avocado + cilantro + sesame seeds. I really suck at rolling them- I don’t know how people manage to have the stuffings centered in the rice- mine are always at the edge. And oh do I love miso eggplant! This is the dish that taught me that there are good ways to cook eggplant. Before that I thought it was watery and bitter and I hated it. The eggplant here goes all soft and smooth, and the miso stuff on top is crispy and salty and sugary. And you can see quite plainly that I burnt it and we still ate all of it, because it is that good. The sunomono was delicious- maybe my favorite way to eat cucumbers.

Crispy Pulled Pork Shoulder. I just don’t want to talk about this pork. It was delicious, but I’m too full to think about a big crispy salty hunk of pork right now. Would it be enough to say that you should make it? Cuz that’s all I got.

Pulled Pork Tacos, Beans. Still don’t want to talk about it. The leftover shredded pork was great in a taco though, y’all.

Focaccia Sandwiches with Pesto, Grilled Vegetables, and Mozzarella, Tempura Fried Green Beans with Ranch Dip, Cucumber Peach Salad with Lemon and Mint. This dinner! Oh, it was the best.  The focaccia is probably one of my favorite things to cook. It takes three days to make, but the whole process is so easy, all the more so if you have a stand mixer. And it’s such a well-written recipe, and really teaches you about bread baking. I’m shocked it’s so far down on the list when you search food52 for focaccia- it is the queen! The ne plus ultra! As good, and soft, and crispy-edged, and oily as it gets. I love to eat it with grilled or roasted vegetables, mozzarella, and pesto stuffed inside like a sandwich. My sister helped me make dinner and we decided to tempura fry the green beans and dip them in ranch dip, and this was one of the better decisions of my life. And she made a gorgeous cucumber salad with the first cucumber from our garden, and mint and lemon and a tiny little peach. I think she used a good amount of champagne vinegar too. It was just magical, the whole thing. A perfect summer dinner.

Creamy Alfredo-Pesto Fettucini with Broccoli, Bruschetta. We had leftover pesto from the focaccia sandwiches, and I also had all the stuff to make alfredo, so what the hell. Put your hands together and make both. I made the linked-to alfredo recipe, my favorite, and then just mixed in the pesto right before tossing it with the noodles and broccoli. I wish I had had tomatoes to top the bruschetta (NB: they’re at the farmers markets this week!), but it’s still spectacular without it. Slice a round loaf of country bread thickly, and grill it over charcoal. When it’s toasted, rub each slice with raw garlic, and drizzle with plenty of olive oil, salt, and pepper.

Avocado and Radish Sprout Sandwiches, Green Salad with Cashew-Tamari Dressing. If you have been to Mother’s Cafe here in Austin then I don’t need to sell you on how outrageously delicious this dressing is. It makes me crave green salads, a sort of magic. And this recipe replicates this shit exactly! And in 30 seconds. It is so easy and I’m going to make it every day from here on out. If you haven’t been to Mother’s, please believe me when I say you will not regret trying this. Leave the cashews a little chunkier than shown in the picture. Store the dressing in a mason jar, shake it just before serving, and make sure to scoop out some of the cashews from the bottom of the jar to add to your salad- they don’t pour out easily. The sandwich is the perfect hippie accompaniment to this salad.

Oatmeal Cream Pies. These have five sticks of butter in them. Obviously, they’re amazing. There’s bourbon in the cookie part, and you can really taste it in the finished product. I thought it was a neat touch. The cream in the middle is made with browned butter, which tastes great, but adds a few steps to the whole production because you have to brown the butter (you probably figured that part out on your own) and then chill it so it firms up again before beating it with another stick of softened butter plus cream and sugar to make the frosting, so yeah. These definitely don’t fit into my newly adopted all-raw vegetable diet.

And here we go, full-steam into Operation Have a Wedding in my Backyard During Monsoon Season! See you on the other side.

Lots of firsts this week- first potatoes, green tomatoes, eggplant, and basil of the season, for us anyway. This week was sort of the last week of normalcy before the prep for my little sister’s wedding (in my backyard!) kicks into high gear, so I planned a few more complicated/labor intensive meals knowing that things are gonna be too crazy to cook like this in the next two weeks.

Fried Green Tomato and Bacon Sandwich, Pesto Potato Salad with Hard Boiled Egg. I fried up some bacon, then sliced the green tomatoes, dipped them in beaten egg, and then in a mix of half flour and half cornmeal, and fried them in the bacon grease. The bacon and tomatoes on thick-sliced brioche with a swipe of mayonnaise is pretty much as good as it gets, I think. The potatoes were cubed and boiled, then tossed with basil pesto and some chopped hard boiled egg. I liked it, but next time I’m going to toss the hot potatoes with a few splashes of vinegar before dressing them with pesto because they needed an acid.

Chou Family Potstickers, Chinese Cucumber Salad, Rice. China dinner! I’ve been wanting to try to make potstickers for forever, but have been intimidated by the process. But reading through this recipe made it seem pretty easy, and China was next on our list of country dinners, so I went for it.  The recipe is a good one, but is flawed in the instructions for rolling out the dough- it calls for cutting the dough into 4 sections and rolling each into a log 5 inches by 1/2 inch in diameter, which doesn’t make sense for 4 cups of dough (there’s way more dough than that). So my first few dumplings used way way too much dough. It takes so little, maybe about a teaspoon, to make the 3″ round wrapper for the dumplings. Once I got the hang of it, it was a pretty simple process, but it took for-fucking-ever to shape them all. I thought the taste was great though, and I got to freeze half the uncooked dumplings to cook another time, so I’m happy with the process overall, I think. My friend Raven said a rice porridge and a jellyfish/cucumber salad would be traditional accompaniments to potstickers, but you’ll notice I flaked out and did a plain old cucumber salad and regular steamed rice. Everybody loved everything, though! Except for George, but he doesn’t like anything (except for *spoiler alert* risotto).

Thai Salad with Grilled Eggplant and Sesame Noodles. The linked recipe uses skirt steak, but I subbed eggplants for the meat. I brushed sliced eggplant with the marinade just before tossing them on the grill (brushed instead of tossed in the marinade to ensure that all the pieces got coated, otherwise the first few might’ve soaked up all the liquid). I grilled them until they were nice and brown and then chopped them up a bit more. I liked it! The eggplant is nice and meaty, and the warm/grilled bits were great with the mountain of cilantro and sesame noodles.

Beef Fajitas, Beans, Guacamole. It’s been raining here all week, and maybe all month? But the clouds parted long enough for me to grill up some skirt steak for dear ole Andy. I love the super simple marinade from the linked recipe (that torta is good too!). Beans and guacamole, I’m sure you’ll recognize, dear reader, are my favorite accompaniments to anything vaguely Mexican.

Butternut Squash Risotto with Rosemary, Lemon, and Walnuts. Henry’s, and possibly George’s, favorite dinner. People say they’re scared of risotto, because of all the stirring, I think. But it really doesn’t bother me much. George was super clingy while I was making this so I had to pull a stool up next to the stove and nurse him while I stirred. I didn’t mind because I like sitting so very much. Anyway, risotto. Saute the allium of your choice (I usually use onion instead of leeks because it’s what I’ve got), add the rice, skip the wine if you don’t have it (I never have it), and ladle in a half cup of hot chicken stock at a time, stir and add more as the rice absorbs it, repeat for 25 minutes or so, until the rice is just cooked. The butternut is grated and added at the same time as the rice, and it magically melts into the risotto and makes it creamier and gives it a subtle sweetness that works great with the parmesan and other garnishes. Henry ate three bowlfuls, and George finished his serving, making it pretty much the only meal that he’ll eat from start to finish.

Blueberry Pancakes with Blueberry Lemon Sauce, Sausages. It was late Friday afternoon and Henry and I were talking about dinner. I told him we were going to have roasted spring onions with sage pesto and a big kale salad. His response: let’s have pancakes and sausages. Well ok! We didn’t have any syrup, so Henry and I made a blueberry syrupy thing for them instead. He said it tasted like gummies (highest possible compliment) and we ate every last drop. Henry loves sausages so much that he said he wants his sixth birthday to be a sausage party, where you just eat sausages all day. His fifth birthday party is to be a bowling one, if you’re keeping track.

Avocado Toast, Northern Spy’s Kale Salad. I ate the spurned kale salad my own self for lunch the next day, along with avocado toast. It is a truly delicious salad, kale though it may be. For the avocado toast, here’s how I roll: toasted bread/smear of whole grain mustard/sliced avocado/squeeze of lemon juice/drizzle of olive oil/flaky sea salt/cracked black pepper. I think it’s just wonderful. The fellas ate ham sandwiches and potato chips.

You guys, my sister is getting married, and in lieu of the traditional bachelorette party we sat around in sweat pants in a bohemian tent made out of floral sheets that filled my living room and ate snacks for seven hours and had our oracle cards read by a crystal lady.  I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, it was the best. For the snacks, I sort of did my sister’s life story through food. I had all our trashiest childhood favorites (scooby snacks, nutty bars, oreos, cheez-its, dump cake (more on this later), etc). I had foods from the restaurant she worked at and loved in LA, including a sundae bar because Helen was famous there for making over the top insane sundaes. And then I had some of my sister’s current favorites- grilled vegetables with pesto, a cheese platter, seven layer dip, and tons of fruit. It was a lot. Too much, as it turns out. There were several dishes, like a beet salad, that never made it out of the refrigerator, and I had all the leftovers. So, I turned them into this week’s dinners. Here’s how it worked out.

Leftover Meatloaf Sandwich, Mashed Potatoes. You’ll recall last week’s meatloaf- the one that I urge you to make whenever you next want meatloaf. Anyway, I had a little leftover and was going to use it for tiny meatloaf sandwiches at the party (since the meatloaf is from the restaurant in LA I mentioned), but this is another dish that never made it out of the fridge on the party day. So we ate them for lunch instead and hell yes. Instead of the classic ketchup, this meatloaf sandwich sports a swipe of mayo and a good pour of some of that heated-up leftover gravy.  Yes.

Leftover Helen-Style Tortellini Pesto Pasta Salad. My sister is famous for this pasta salad, and it is truly spectacular.  Boil, drain, and rinse cheese tortellini to cool it down. Toss it with basil pesto, tons of grated parmesan, artichoke hearts, olives, and maybe a green vegetable or halved cherry tomatoes. It is one of my favorite things, and Henry’s too. He was, frankly, pissed when we got home from the store after buying the ingredients and learning that we had to save them for the bachelorette party. He kept saying how much he hates bachelorette parties. Anyway, I saved some for him and all was right with the world.

Leftover Roasted Vegetable, Mozzarella, Pesto, and Pea Shoot Sandwich. With the leftovers from a platter of grilled vegetables with pesto and mozzarella, I, not very inventively, made sandwiches with grilled vegetables, pesto, and mozzarella. I added pea shoots, because I had bought some for the beet salad that never happened. No way around it, this is delicious.

Russian Dinner: Pseudo-Borscht, Potato Klotski, Apple Sharlotka. I had those leftover roasted beets that I’ve been droning on about, and Russia was next on our series of country dinners, so I figured I should make borscht. I read lots of recipes for it, and decided I didn’t really like the look of any of them.  Too chunky.  I wanted a smooth, cool soup. My limited research shows that this is completely inauthentic, but hell. So I pureed the beets with water in a blender until it was smooth, drizzled in about a 1/4 cup of olive oil while the motor was running, and then finished the soup with a swirl of yogurt, a pile of pea shoots, more olive oil, sea salt, and cracked pepper. I was really happy with it. And bonus it makes your pee a pretty color.

The potato klotski are basically mashed potato balls in chicken broth. Henry hates mashed potatoes so also hated these. But he loved the apple sharlotka, a weirdo cake with no fat, and just a super simple egg batter poured on top of a heap of apples. I thought it was way too sweet, but the fellows of the house loved it. Or maybe they just loved it compared to beet soup and mashed potato balls.

Chard and Artichoke Dip, and Other Snacks. The salmon and cheese on this platter were still more party foods that never made it out of the fridge on bachelorette day. The artichoke dip worked really well to use up leftover artichoke hearts, a bunch of chard (I just blanched it, cooled it, squeezed all the water out, chopped it, and used it in place of the spinach in the linked recipe- it worked great), and leftover goat cheese, used in place of the feta. We ate it with pita chips and loved it. And Henry fell madly in love with smoked salmon, so we’re gonna buy more of that this week.

Marcella Hazan’s Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter on Spaghetti. I love this sauce. It’s easy as pie and has been blogged about a probably literal four thousand times. I have nothing else to say about it except that you should make it if you haven’t tried it yet.

Smoked Gouda, Mushroom, and Vidalia Onion Quiche; Orange, Pickled Onion, and Pea Shoot Salad. Hey, who’s sick of hearing about pea shoots? I swear I only bought a tiny bag but it was damn near bottomless. The quiche was something that my friend Christy told me about as she was packing away leftover smoked gouda after the bachelorette party. I followed my favorite quiche lorraine recipe (hello old blog, stay classy!), but instead of the bacon, I cooked onion and mushrooms (cremini and rehydrated porcini) with thyme in butter and olive oil until everything was deep and dark and crispy. I spread the shredded gouda in the bottom of the pie crust, added the mushroom stuff, and then poured the quiche batter on top and that was it. It was good, but crazy rich tasting. Better for winter time than on a 90 degree spring day.

Sheet Pan o’ Nachos, a Weird Little Bite, and Watermelon Agua Frescas. Leftover tortilla chips, leftover beans, leftover cheese were all piled on a pan and put in a 400 degree oven. When the cheese was melty, I took the pan out and added pickled red onions, avocado, cilantro, cotija, and red pepper, because that’s what we had. I still had more leftover grilled vegetables and goat cheese, so I made little stacks and doused them in a cilantro oil. The agua fresca was just watermelon, pureed with the juice of an orange as per Henry’s instruction, and strained into glasses. The nachos and the drink were swell, the goat cheese veg bite was packed full of goat cheese in an unpleasantly mouth-filling way.

Dump Cake with Cherries and Pineapple. This recipe is something my mom always made growing up. It is what one might call semi-homemade but it is THE GREATEST THING OF ALL TIME. I don’t give a shit that it’s powdered cake mix poured on top of canned fruit and covered in a stick and a half of butter pats. If you take this leap of faith with me and try it, I guarantee you that it will be one of the more delicious things you’ve ever had in your mouth. One of the first times Andy visited me and my family in LA, pre-engagement I think, my mom made this and we proceeded to eat the entire 9 x 13 pan, to Andy’s undisguised horror. He liked it a lot, but not the going-back-for-thirds level of liking that maybe only comes when you grow up eating the stuff. Anyway, it’s basically a really perfect buttery cobbler. Make it when you and your sister want to sit in a living room tent and eat snacks for seven hours- you’ll be glad you did.

I’m not going to share recipes at the end of every blog post now, because I hate typing up recipes. I’m just doing it when it’s the only way to share beloved meatloaf and cake recipes with you.

Dump Cake
from My Mom

1 package Duncan Hines yellow cake mix
1 20 oz can crushed pineapple, drained well
1 large can cherry pie filling
1 1/2 cups chopped pecans
1 1/2 sticks salted butter, cut in pats

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9 x 13 inch pan. Dump the fruits into the pan and stir to combine. Sprinkle the dry cake mix over this, then spread the pecans evenly on that, and top the whole thing with butter pats- there will be enough butter pats to cover nearly the entire surface of the cake. Bake until top looks like a crumb topping, about an hour. Let cool slightly and eat warm.