I bought a whole chicken and ground chicken this week too, but there wasn’t room for them in the shot. They were crowded out by the beets that I roasted and then turned off the oven and left there for 10 hours (so I didn’t eat them- was that the right call?) and the collard greens that are still in my fridge and will, regrettably, likely end up in the compost pile. Let’s see! Here’s what we did eat.

Roasted Chicken, Asparagus with Salt and Pepper Whipped Cream, Corn Muffins. Poor predictable Saturday roast chicken. It’s the usual kind. You can read about it on literally any of my other posts if you’re so moved. But look- something crazy! It’s a food52 genius recipe for asparagus with savory whipped cream. We all thought it was interesting but ultimately, weird. The cream on top is too rich. I know I put a big dollop on there, but even the spears with just a tad felt like too much. Also, the whipped cream is cold, which feels jarring with the hot asparagus. I won’t make it again, but it was fun to try something new. The corn muffins are leftover from a few weeks ago. I just popped the frozen muffins into the still-warm oven while the chicken was resting and then put unseemly butter pats on top (not pictured, too incriminating).

Crispy Coconut Kale, Ridiculously Easy Macaroni and Cheese. In addition to near-weekly roast chicken, I make a lot of mac and cheese. The boys love it and I feel guilty for forcing them to eat so many weird dinners throughout the week, so I usually throw them a mac and cheese bone. This recipe is the one I always go for when the stars align and we have American cheese in the house (a rare treat for Andy!). It is ridiculously easy and delicious. I use more cream than the recipe calls for. This kale is fantastic- I piled mine right on top of the mac and cheese. It’s chopped and tossed with a coconut oil/tamari/sriracha/sesame oil dressing and roasted, then drizzled with a bit more of the dressing. The roasting does wonders for kale- half the pan ends up tender and soft and half of it ends up deliciously crunchy like kale chips. Henry will eat the crispy bits but not the soft ones.

Mango Lassis. I’ve been making one of these for Henry on the daily. Henry loves mangos. Cute story- a year ago, as Henry was falling asleep he said “I’m so excited it’s mango season.” And then this year, the same thing happened! Except he said “I’m so fucking excited it’s mango season.” I really really have to cool it on the language. Anyway, the big glass is for Henry, the small glass is for me, and the tiny small glass is for George, who won’t touch the stuff but I’m hoping if I keep serving it to him one day he will. The kid runs exclusively on breast milk and pretzel rods.

I make mango lassis by peeling an ataulfo mango, cutting all the flesh off the pit and adding it to a blender with a couple big spoonfuls of full fat yogurt, a splash of milk, and a small squeeze of honey. Blend till smooth and that’s it y’all.

Chicken Enchiladas Suizas, Beans, Avocado. I don’t really use a recipe for enchiladas, but what I do is similar to the one I linked to. Instead of dipping the tortillas in salsa to soften them like the recipe calls for, I fry them one at a time, super quickly (like a second or two per side). Then I just put some of the green sauce in the bottom of the baking dish, roll the enchiladas and nestle them in the pan, and then pour more sauce on top. Frying the tortillas is always a good move. I filled mine with shredded chicken leftover from Saturday’s dinner, grated monterrey jack, and a little bit of grated raw onion. Served with sour cream and a mountain of cilantro and avocado.

Cumin-Scented Chicken Meatloaf, Mashed Potatoes, Apple Salad. I can’t type meatloaf without first typing meatload. Every damn time. And hell if that doesn’t sound horrible. I blogged about this meatloaf (I typed meatload again) back on ye olde blogger site, but I didn’t share the recipe in a move that was designed to try to get you to buy Jennie’s very fun cookbook. (She’s a former boss/friend of my sister). But let’s be real- my only readers are my facebook friends (hello!) and I’m not going to be able to help her sell cookbooks. So I’m gonna type up this recipe for y’all because it’s nowhere on the internet and it is spectacular.  It’s made with a pound of ground turkey (I use ground chicken because it’s $2 cheaper at the farmers’ market and just as good) and is leaps and bounds better than the standard meatloadddd. It’s got oats in it! Jennie calls for quick cooking oats but I use the old fashioned rolled oats cuz that’s what I keep in the house and it works great. The oats, as Jennie says, give this meatloaf an almost creamy texture. The tiny bits of sauteed carrot and celery add a little crunch, the addition of cumin is perfect, and I just love everything about it.

Recipe follows! Join me next week as I cook a weeks worth of dinners from food leftover from my sister’s bachelorette party. True story. I made way too much food.

Cumin Scented Turkey Meatloaf
From Jennie Cook’s Who Wants Seconds

Prep time: 30 minutes
Cooking time: 1 1/2 to 2 hours
Makes 1-2 loaves, serving about 10

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 stalk celery, finely diced
1/2 yellow onion, finely diced (mince other half to use in creamy gravy)
2 carrots, finely diced
3 garlic cloves, minced
1 pound ground turkey (mix of white and dark meat)
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
1/2 teaspoon cayenne
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 egg, beaten
1/4 cup ketchup
1/4 cup milk (any variety)
1/3 cup breadcrumbs
3/4 cup quick oats
extra ketchup and onion slices

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a medium saute pan, heat olive oil and saute celery, 1/2 onion, carrots, and garlic until soft and slightly browned, about 10 minutes. Set aside to cool.

Meanwhile, in a large bowl combine turkey, salt, pepper, cayenne, cumin, egg, ketchup, milk, breadcrumbs, and oats and mix well.  Add the cooled mirepoix and mix again. Form into 1 or 2 free-form meatloaves on a sheet pan. Alternatively, smash flat in a 9″ x 9″ pan, like a pan of brownies. Cover with foil and bake for 30 minutes. Remove foil. Brush a thin coat of ketchup on top of the meat and garnish with a few raw onion slices. Return to the oven and bake until brown, another 30-45 minutes. An internal meat thermometer should reach 160 degrees in the very center of the loaf. Serve with Creamy Gravy.

Creamy Gravy
Adapted slightly from Jennie Cook’s Who Wants Seconds

Prep time: 5 minutes
Cooking time: 15 minutes
Makes about 3 cups

1/2 onion, minced
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons flour
2 cups chicken stock
1/4 cup milk
kosher salt to taste

In a medium saute pan, heat oil on medium heat and saute onion until slightly brown, about 8 minutes. Reduce heat to medium low, add flour, and cook, stirring, to brown the flour, an additional 1-2 minutes. Slowly whisk in stock and allow gravy to come to a boil, stirring constantly. Add milk and reduce heat to a simmer. Taste and season with kosher salt depending on how salty your stock is. Serve with meatloaf.

Every few weeks I try to shop minimally and instead eat down food from the freezer and pantry. Can you tell this was that week? It made for a sad farmers’ market haul pic. I had half a pound of ground pork, a pound of Mexican chorizo, and about a half a pound of bacon ends in the freezer, and dried beans in the pantry that formed the foundation for our dinners this week.  I didn’t realize until I started typing this up that I used very few recipes this week- it was a busy one, so I tend to fly by the seat of my pants more than in quiet structured weeks.

BLT, Miso Sesame Slaw, Strawberries and Leftover Cream Cheese Frosting. The first BLT of the season always makes me really happy. I had leftover red cabbage sliced up and mixed with cilantro from last weeks fish taco dinner, plus another head of green cabbage that I had bought with the intention of cooking for our Norweigan dinner and then forgot. So I sliced that thinly and added a bit to the purple cabbage and cilantro and made a sort of dressing by whisking together miso paste (shiro), sesame oil, rice wine vinegar, and a pinch of sugar. If I had had sesame seeds I’d have toasted those and added them, but I didn’t so that was it. It was a good slaw, I think! But I served it with pepperoncini kettle chips and these two things together were too vinegar-y and weird.

Grilled Cheese and Tomato Sandwiches. More Slaw. Yeah, another sandwich. I’m not sure why I bothered photographing it, but I did, so here you go. This wasn’t a planned dinner, but it got to be six o’clock and I hadn’t done any of the legwork I needed for the scripted meals (defrost meat, cook beans), so grilled cheese to the rescue. I had extra tomato from our BLTs so I added it to our sandwiches. More of that slaw- leftovers of leftovers of leftovers. Please keep reading, I promise we didn’t eat sandwiches all week. O_0

Sweet Potato and Bean Tostadas, Sopapillas. I didn’t soak the beans overnight, but they  cook up tender and more flavorful when cooked without soaking.  These pinto beans were put in a big pot and covered with about two inches of water. I always throw in three peeled garlic cloves, a bay leaf, and as much salt as you would use for pasta water. Bring that to a boil and then cover and transfer to a 300 degree oven. My beans were done (and are done consistently without soaking) after four hours. In the last two hours of cooking I tossed a sweet potato into the oven. By the time the beans were done, the sweet potato was soft and roasty. I put a 1/2 inch of canola oil in the cast iron skillet on medium heat and fried corn tortillas one at a time until brown and crispy. I mashed the sweet potato and spread that on top of the crispy tostadas, and then topped it with beans, cotija, shredded cabbage, cilantro, avocado, and lime.

If you’ve fried corn tortillas and also have flour tortillas in the house, do yourself a favor and throw one of those in the oil while it’s still hot. It puffs up beautifully, and then you can sprinkle it with cinnamon sugar and drizzle it with honey and it is a thing not entirely unlike sopapillas. Fried and sugary works for me.

Migas and Beans for Breakfast. I had a few tostada shells left over from dinner, so I crumbled them up and stirred them into some slowly cooking scrambled eggs along with cheddar cheese and a couple spoonfuls of salsa. With beans and more cotija it made a delicious breakfast.

Banana Bread Muffins. I don’t include the espresso in the linked recipe, though I’m sure it’d be delicious, because Henry and George already go to sleep round about 10-11 at night and there’s no way I’m adding caffeine to the mix of our dysfunctional bed time. This banana bread is my all time favorite. I think it’s essentially Joanne Chang’s (of Flour bakery fame), but I got to it through fiveandspice. I think it’s the little bit of sour cream in the batter that makes the difference. Also the coconut oil. One or the other keeps these moist and lovely. Do people still hate the word moist? Even when applied to muffins? Is muffin also a term for vagina and I’ve gone down a crazy double entendre hole? Hole? I can’t stop myself.

Ground Pork and Cabbage Ramen with Soft Boiled Egg. I linked to the noodle soup recipe not because I followed it, but because it inspired this dinner.  I followed steps 9-14 in the ‘finishing the soup’ section- brown ground pork, brown the cabbage (leftover from tostada toppings) in the pork fat, serve on noodles (ramen in my case- Wheatsville sells an organic heirloom wheat variety. Let me know if you find a more hipster food item than organic heirloom wheat ramen noodles, cuz I’m definitely going to want that)  top with cilantro, scallions, and sesame oil. That noodle soup looks completely gorgeous, but it takes three days and I just did not have my shit together enough for it this week. Nevertheless, I had stock, miso, cabbage, and ground pork, and the resulting ramen-like thing was so good and took about half an hour. I am obsessed with the Japanese marinated soft boiled eggs for ramen, but again, didn’t plan ahead today and so just did the soft boil without the marinating for this dinner. It was still sublime.

Chorizo and Monterrey Jack Quesadillas, Beans, Guacamole. Crisp up some Mexican chorizo (Richardson farms sells a perfect not-spicy version). Put a tablespoon or two into a corn tortilla along with a little shredded cheese. Add a splash more oil to the chorizo pan and crisp the quesadillas in it and sprinkle with salt. Your house will smell amazing and you’ll have crispy, greasy, meaty quesadillas. Also guacamole, which I think I already wrote about. But I mash avocados with lots of lime juice and a bit of kosher salt. Add very finely minced garlic and onion (not a lot) and cilantro.

Next week! Also busy! Asparagus with salty whipped cream, enchiladas verdes, mac and cheese made with American cheese leftover from Henry’s birthday party sliders. See ya!

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!