The best part of Thanksgiving

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leftovers, postaday2016

The best part of Thanksgiving, Jack, Lulu and Stanley will back me up on this, are the leftovers. If you are lucky, you can have almost an entire weekend of no cooking, I think this year we’re set up for precisely that, no cooking until maybe Monday. 

Stanley and Lulu adore laying on the big couch, letting it all hang out, they look extremely comfy, but don’t let appearances fool you, they can get up and get to the kitchen in mere seconds. It sounds like an army mobilizing their mess tent with pots and pans flying, because when Stanley and Lulu unleash their strength from their seated positions on the couch, you have a combined weight of about 200 lbs and that weight is slipping on wood floors, straining to make it around corners and not slam into a wall. It is quite comical to watch as long as you’re in the safety zone. 

Leftovers can be great

Tags

leftovers, postaday2016

There are definitely days when leftovers are a godsend especially if the original dish was something that you really liked in the first place. I am not the biggest fan of chicken, but when it comes to sautéed breaded chicken cutlets, that’s chicken I can say yes to, roasted chicken is another way I like it prepared, I guess I don’t dislike chicken all that much as long as it is cooked the way I like it. Tonight I don’t have to cook because I still have breaded chicken cutlets and sautéed zucchini in tomato sauce with onions, garlic and Parmesan cheese in the refrigerator and after a day of cleaning half of the house, I’m happy to know I can pop a plate into the microwave and viola dinner is served.

I remember when I was a teenager, I disliked leftovers, mostly because I wasn’t the one in charge of getting dinner on the table. Fast forward thirty years and leftovers have become a welcome friend in the household. When I was preparing the zucchini and the chicken cutlets, it took a while to bring all of the components together to make a finished product, but once finished I knew I had a few days of meals and I could relax at dinner time. 

Making the zucchini is so easy, all it takes is patience to chop the two onions into small dice, slice six zucchini into uniform slices, smash and chop four cloves of garlic, once that is done, you sauté the onions first, to get them translucent and then you add the zucchini slices and the smashed garlic and let it saute until done, I add the tomato sauce and the Parmesan cheese and I have a delicious vegetable. My mother taught me how to make the breaded chicken cutlets, it is so simple, I slice the chicken cutlets in half and pound them thin, I dredge them in Italian seasoned breadcrumbs and I saute them in olive oil. Like I said, it takes patience to slice and pound all of the cutlets, then dredge them and then saute them but having several days worth of chicken to eat makes all of the work worthwhile.

Bon appetite to me.

Leftovers no more, hello pizza!

Tags

leftovers, pizza, postaday2014, turkey

We did the leftovers justice, nothing got thrown away and I can comfortably say that our turkey and all of the fixings were well honored this year. But all good things must come to an end and pizza was such a welcome relief after all things turkey and turkey inspired.

I made my usual pizza dough which includes whole wheat flour mixed in with the unbleached flour; 2 cups and 1/4 unbleached and 1 and 1/4 whole wheat flour is the ratio that I use. All of the usual suspects were used; the Cento Pizza Sauce, fresh mozzarella, shredded mozzarella, sliced onion and fresh basil. I had extra bacon left over from breakfast that morning and that went on top because as everyone knows; everything tastes better with bacon. 😀

I made two pizzas and of course that means leftovers, but I never mind leftover pizza.

Dinner is served

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cooking, cool weather, leftovers, postaday2013, weekend

Today I have made dinner and what will be dinner and perhaps lunch for the rest of the weekend. I am looking forward to not doing much of anything this weekend now that food has been squared away for the babies and my hubby. I don’t know if we are going to go to the movies because there isn’t anything that really rates spending the bucks over movies that we could easily wait until they are out on DVD.

Dinner is roast beef with roasted potatoes and a gratin of spinach. The roast beef, I cooked to almost medium rare and I stuffed sliced garlic throughout small slits int the roast before putting it into a very hot oven for ten minutes and then I lowered the temperature to 350 for an hour. The gratin is a simple béchamel sauce with sautéed onions, spinach and grated Swiss cheese browned on top, the gratin is seasoned with salt, pepper and fresh nutmeg before going into a 425 oven for 25 minutes. The kitchen smells really nice now and it suits the weather quite well.

Jack of course will be taken for his walks, he needs them and the walks aren’t very strenuous especially since Jack likes to sniff at every blade of grass that he comes across. Other than that, I will be sitting with my feet up on the couch watching movies on t.v and reading from my iPad.

Goodbye leftovers, farewell Thanksgiving

Tags

cauliflower, dinner, food, gratineed spinach, leftovers, postaday2012, saffron

Yesterday, I bid Thanksgiving a fond farewell until next year when I finished the last of the gratin of spinach. It was nice to be done with the leftovers because you do get bored eating the same thing day after day. On the other hand no more leftovers means more cooking, on the upside I had cauliflower in the refrigerator along with button mushrooms so I was at least prepared to cook something for myself this evening.

While walking Jack, I was going through the things that I wanted to do today such as; hauling more firewood, finish the Christmas tree, clean out the refrigerator and light bulb! cook the cauliflower in such a way as to be good and not boring. So I decided to caramelize two onions and four cloves of garlic and then throw in the sliced mushrooms and chopped up cauliflower florets and I seeped a nice pinch of saffron in hot water and added a little bit of chicken stock and put that in with the vegetables, I increased the heat for a few minutes and then put the flame on low and covered the pan so that everything can meld together as it slowly simmered. I figured that all this would take about ten minutes or so,

I figured that I would go in the living room, catch up on Sons of Anarchy and put the finishing touches on the tree. Why can’t I ever remember that I can’t multi-task? It isn’t a question of learning that I can’t multi-task, I know that I can’t do it. I just can’t remember that I can’t do it. I was lucky because, I think it was when I was about to fast forward through commercials that I realized that I had been doing something in the kitchen, then it hit me and I threw the remote control onto the couch and ran into the kitchen. It was a save, just in the nick of time. The vegetables were seriously caramelized but it was salvageable with some more chicken stock to help loosen any sticky bits.

It was good, the vegetables are for me only anyway so it wasn’t as if I had any pressure or anything. My deficient memory is becoming a theme here, but it does give me material to write about every now and again.