Dinners for March 18 - 24, 2012

Sunday: Family dinner party at Mom's house

Monday: Roasted salmon with brussel sprouts and parmesan quinoa

Tuesday: Mini meatloaves with broccoli and mashed potatoes

Wednesday: Chicken orzo soup with bread

Thursday: Veggie strata with hashbrowns

Friday: Dinner out

Saturday: Dinner with family

Hash Leftovers A Go Go

Prepping the cabbage

We may have exhausted our corned beef quota for the season, but there is only one way (in my opinion) to use up the leftovers - Corned Beef Hash. I had a sneaking suspicion this would be a hit because my kids have never met a salted, cured meat they didn't like.

There are a zillion ways to make this dish, but I simply sauteed a small chopped onion and one diced red bell pepper in about two tablespoon of canola oil till soft. Then I added two cups of chopped corned beef, two cups chopped roasted cabbage and two cups diced cooked potatoes and let it warm through, browning and crisping the potatoes along the way. The adults fried an egg and plopped it on top of their bowls, but the kids inhaled theirs with a side of When Will You Be Making This Again?

Anatomy of a Menu

Sometimes when friends ask me about how I put together a dinner menu for the week their eyes glaze over when I babble on for more than a minute. I think they were hoping for a quick, simple explanation to it all and there is, but it may not sound like it at first.

It took a few years to find a dinner groove with my first child and then the whole system had to be tinkered with in 2009 when my daughter was born. I needed to change our dinners to suit a new eater and I found the easiest way to do that was to make dinners that could be segmented for picky little people. I also kept in mind that while I may be easing a new eater into the routine, I still needed to make dinners that I want to eat, as in, "This had better be worth my time to make as well as eat."

Over the years I have collected a little library of reliable books, magazines and blogs to use in my menu planning. 

My menu arsenal

On any given Saturday or Sunday, I look at our calendar for the coming week and see what evening commitments we have and note it on the menu. Then I flip through my library for inspiration to cobble together dinners for the rest of the week.

These are my favorite resources:

How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman
Dinner a Love Story by Jenny Rosenstrach (Jenny graciously sent me a galley copy of her book and let me tell you, it is worth every penny, so pre-order it now! What can I say? Being an early, gushing fan has its perks.)
Everyday Food magazines (more on my collection here)
Sunset Weeknight dinners (2005 edition, co-edited by my friend, Emma Bland Smith)
Sunset Fast & Fresh
Time for Dinner by the Cookie editors
Real Simple magazine

With these wonderful resources at my disposal, I keep a few basic guidelines in place.

1) I try to do most of my shopping on Sunday, but I supplement with extras from Trader Joe's during the week. I am very fortunate to work two blocks from TJ's so I go there during the week for extra's on my lunch break.

2) To avoid repeats, I organize the menu by the main dish. So in a given week we'll have one or two poultry dinners, one pasta dinner, one vegetarian dinner, one soup dinner, and one get-out-of-jail-free dinner (aka the frozen something or dinner out) and then I find recipes to fit into those parameters. I believe this kind of thinking comes from my mother and my grandmother, but then again she would never approve of having chicken twice in one week. C'est un scandale!

3) The seafood chosen for a dinner during the week will always be made by Monday or Tuesday. This is almost always amended by frozen shrimp, which is a must-have in our freezer due to my shrimp-loving son.

4) On Sundays I typically put more time into what I make, mainly because I have the time! I try to make it a little more special than my usual 30-minute-dinner-wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am type of meal. Even better if I can do double duty and get something else ready for later in the week, especially if I have a twofer in mind. This particular week I roasted a butternut squash to be used in soup for the next day.

So as you can see this is not rocket science. It may seem too rigid for some, but for me it's just how I like to do my dinners. I like a plan, but I like it be flexible and as a result, I rarely encounter rotting vegetables in the fridge. An extra bonus is that we eat pretty good leftovers the next day at work.

What else can I say?

"I love it when a plan comes together."

About that Flank Steak...

As I mentioned in my latest menu, we don't eat much red meat. I have nothing against it, I love a good burger and I drool over the menu weeks ahead of our once-a-year trip to the House of Prime Rib. I appreciate red meat for all its iron and goodness, but buy it at my local *Safeway? No way.

This past weekend was unusually warm and I had steak on the brain. It's a practically fool proof cut of meat and my mom's marinade recipe is always a sure fire winner. We were in Bernal Heights and I stopped by Avedano's and was disappointed not to see any flank steaks. But this is where an awesome local independent butcher can shine like nobody else can. This place beyond accommodating - if you don't see what you want in the case, they happily go and get it out of the meat locker for you. If you wonder aloud how much steak will feed two adults and two children, they talk with you about it. If you excitedly describe your mom's amazing flank steak marinade, they readily agree with you that yes, she should bottle and sell it.

Avedano's reminds me of Meats of the World, the fictional butcher shop from the 'So I Married an Axe Murderer' movie, which was filmed in San Francisco: Friendly, courteous, with a slight tinge of hipster (they have curing and butchering classes for crying out loud!).

Best movie ever filmed in San Francisco.

Also, I felt like I could take my grandmother's advice for once - talk to the butcher and see what they recommend. When she and I would grocery shop together, she would ask the grocery store butcher what he recommended and then she'd look at the price per pound and decide what to make from there. However, I think she would have keeled over upon seeing at the prices at Avedano's. She appreciated freshness, but she also pinched pennies like nobody else - so paying top dollar for a steak would probably break her heart.

Yes, Avedano's is expensive, but at least they give me the peace of mind that what they weren't selling was some funky piece beef just off the freighter, this was the good stuff.  We got six meals out of that two pound steak (four dinners and two lunches) which came to roughly $4.60 per meal. That is far, far less than dinner out for a family of four and still less than a sandwich, chips and a soda for lunch.

Mom's Flank Steak Marinade
Enough for 2 pound steak
This marinade does well with time, I usually let it marinate the meat for at least three hours

1/3 cup red wine vinegar
1 Tbls. EVOO
1 Tbls. grainy mustard or dijon
1 Tbls. worcestershire sauce
1/4 cup ketchup
2 Tbls. soy sauce
1 Tbls. chopped garlic
1/4 tsp. pepper

Mix all the ingredients and pour over your steak, marinate for at least three hours.

*Mini rant: I really can't stand the way my neighborhood Safeway has a completely pathetic selection  of organic poultry. They usually only have three very sad looking packages of organic chicken, all tenders for some inexplicable reason. Surely I am not the only person looking for organic meat in my section of the city.

Dinners for March 4 - March 10, 2012

Sunday: *Grilled Flank Steak with Fiesta rice

Monday: Apricot preserve-glazed drumsticks with Parmesan quinoa and steamed broccoli

Tuesday: Sausage, oriechette and spinach pasta

Wednesday: Sesame Orange Shrimp with rice and veggies

Thursday: Bean Burritos with avocado and tomato salad

Friday: Crock pot *Corned Beef with roasted cabbage - I can't wait for next week, I need it now!

Saturday: TBD - busy day

*Red meat two times in one week is so rare for us. It's like seeing a unicorn on my menu!

Mondo Muffins

It's amazing how one song can take you back to your college days. The other day I was doing errands in my car without the children in tow. Both kids were at school and for once (!) I got to listen to the music that *I* wanted to hear: No Raffi, no Led Zeppelin and certainly no Music Together ("Hello everybody! So glad to see you!") for this girl. Just some good old fashioned grunge music on KFOG. Pearl Jam's "Black" came on and immediately I was transported back to the pastry kitchen of the cafe that I worked at in college. I only lasted about three months as a pastry baker on the graveyard shift because I was also working as a nanny during the day and trying to hold down a full schedule of classes. You can guess what happened to my G.P.A. during that time. It sped downhill so fast that I had to use every extra credit trick in the book to pull it back up again.

I loved the job even though the hours were brutal on me. I would go into the shop at 4 AM, prep and bake all the baked goods for the cafe and then go to classes at 10 AM, often with flour under my fingernails and butter hand prints smeared on the butt of my jeans. I felt this need to fill every moment of my life with "something" and I thought it felt wildly romantic to be up at 4 AM baking scones and croissants while the rest of the world slept. I loved the solitude of my work, being alone with Pearl Jam thumping through the kitchen stereo and having the authority to make whatever I felt like with the ingredients on hand. It was great to be creative for once and it was there that I discovered that I am a morning person - till I had kids and they redefined what a "morning person" really is.

The owners of the cafe were a young couple that had moved to my little college town right after they married in Louisiana. The wife had been a cook in the army and she knew a lot about cooking large quantities of food, she ran a tight ship with the college students as her employees. Her recipes for the cafe pretty much all came from her mother's kitchen and one of the most popular items we made were the Mondo Muffins. They were baked in oversized muffin tins and we always had several different kinds to chose from. Whenever I could swing it with the ingredients on hand, I would always made the Coffee Cake Mondo Muffin. It was packed with walnuts and I was very generous with the crumble topping because I thought it was the most delicious treat in the world.  I could not get enough of those muffins.

But as my grades and social life slipped (I was the only person leaving the bars as many of my friends were just starting their night out) I knew I had to find another job. I gave my two weeks notice to the cafe and they asked if I would consider working as a barista in the front of the cafe. I immediately accepted the job and worked there till I graduated.

I didn't have to give up my Mondo Muffins or the mean coffee addiction I created while working there, but I did have to give up making the call on what we would be selling that day. It was a bittersweet goodbye, but probably for the best.


I don't have the original recipe anymore because I lost it somewhere between here and 1996, but I recently combined an old Martha Stewart recipe with a crumb topping recipe from Smitten Kitchen and had great results. I highly advise eating these at 6 AM while driving a 1972 Volkswagon bug, listening to some Pearl Jam and wearing your boyfriend's flannel shirt and your brand spankin' new Doc Marten's.

Cafe Paulo's Coffee Cake Mondo Muffins
(Combined recipes from Smitten Kitchen and Martha Stewart)

Ingredients
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature, plus more for pans
1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour (spooned and leveled), plus more for pans
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup sour cream
1 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2 large eggs
1 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

For the crumb topping

1/3 cup dark brown sugar
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, melted
1 3/4 cups flour

Directions

• Prepare crumb topping: in a large bowl, whisk sugars, spices and salt into melted butter until smooth. Then, add flour with a spatula or wooden spoon. It will look and feel like a solid dough. Leave it pressed together in the bottom of the bowl and set aside.

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees. 

• Prepare muffins: Butter and flour a jumbo 12-cup muffin tin (or two 6-cup muffin tins). 

• In a small bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, and baking soda; set aside. Using an electric mixer on medium speed, beat together butter, sour cream, granulated sugar, and vanilla until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs, one at a time, until well combined. With mixer on low, beat flour mixture into butter mixture. Stir in walnuts. Divide the batter among the prepared muffin cups. Using your fingers, crumble the crumb mixture on top of the muffins. Bake 25 to 30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in center of a muffin comes out clean. Cool in pan 5 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

Loving: Lentils

The other day I was shopping at Trader Joe's and paused to look at the packaged cooked lentils. I have passed by this convenience item several times because I know I should just make them myself. I could practically hear my Depression-era grandmother's exasperated sigh at the laziness of such a thing, ("You can't find time to cook lentils? For heavens sake, Amanda!") But I really wanted to try these cooked lentils for a weeknight soup and I knew that cooking lentils after a long day of work and two hungry children nipping at my ankles was asking too much. I bought them thinking this was going to be a bust.

Holy Sweet Time Saver, Batman! I loved them and my kids ate them. I made my soup in 30 minutes last night and had plenty of leftovers to make a warm lentil salad with mustard vinaigrette to take with me to work. They were perfectly cooked with a slight bite to them. I am definitely buying those again. However, I still feel guilty about Trader Joe's frozen brown rice, but I'll get over it eventually.

Lentils are my new swoon.