Usual Meals

Week Six, Saturday and Sunday

I cooked dinner both nights, but I barely used any foods from Fair Shares.

Saturday felt like summer. It's Memorial Day weekend, I wore shorts and my Birkenstocks all day, we ate out on the deck again. I did some supplemental grocery shopping, and I bought corn, another summery food. I made roasted chicken and baked onions. The only thing from Fair Shares was some olive oil I used on the chicken. But, the baked onion recipe comes from my Alice Waters cookbook, so that's pretty new as well.



On Sunday, I was out shopping and running errands. I came home long enough for us to decide to go to a movie that night (Iron Man 2). I had to make a quick dinner, so I made chicken spaghetti. The spaghetti sauce is from Fair Shares.


We didn't have salads either night. I'll need to make sure we eat more this week.

Grilled Strip Steak

Week Six, Friday

This was probably the least successful of my meals and the most stressful cooking experience. It was still edible, but really frustrating. Before I started getting food from Fair Shares, the only meat I usually cooked was chicken. I'd used ground meat and I made steak a couple times. But I don't have that much experience with other meats.

This week, the meat choice was pork. I was able to trade it for something else, so I got an 8 oz. NY strip steak. This had a list value of $17, so it's an expensive cut of meat. (The 8 ounces was big enough for both of us to share.) I had such good luck with cooking chicken on my grill pan, I decided to cook the steak that way too.

I read up on it and followed the directions: I seasoned it and left it out of the fridge for an hour to come down to room temperature. I preheated the grill pan.

The instructions for the pan (which is really a panini press) say to cook everything on medium to medium-high heat and to brush olive oil on the pan after it has pre-heated. I found that medium-high makes the oil splatter, so I've been using medium. The grilled chicken turned out wonderful several times cooked this way.

The meat turned a gray color, never getting brown. Roy thought the blame went to using a grill pan, that there wasn't enough contact with the meat. He thought I should use a frying pan next time. I don't think so though, because the chicken turned out so well on it. Maybe it wasn't hot enough? Both sides got gray.

I also don't know how to use a meat thermometer. Roy mentioned to our neighbors that I was cooking a strip steak, and they told him that a meat thermometer is helpful with this. I recently bought an instant read thermometer, but this was the first time I've used it. The meat was only about an inch or so thick. The thermometer wouldn't stay upright by itself. I held it up, and it only registered to about 120 degrees. Should I have held it in longer? I wanted to stick it in the thickest part of the meat (towards one end) but Roy told me it would be better to stick it closer to the center.

I ended up cutting into the meat to see that it was gray most of the way through, with a little pink. I'd say it went from medium to medium well. I ate the less well done part.

All the while I was trying to cook the meat, I was also steaming broccoli for the first time. I had a steamer insert, but I only used it once before. That time didn't turn out well - all the water boiled away. This time, I couldn't get the water to boil.

This is a picture of my kitchen from the day we moved in. I don't know how well you can see it, but there's an air vent on the ceiling near the stove. When the AC is on, it blows air onto the stovetop and counter. Some days, we just turn the AC off when I'm cooking there. Too hot today. (We're also on the top floor of the building, so it gets hot up here.) Even with my big pot on the stove, the AC was pushing the gas flame around. And the little bit of water in the pot wouldn't boil. (This finally pushed me to do something. We bought a $1 air vent deflector at Home Depot on Saturday. I hope it works.)


And there was so much noise from the steak cooking, the TV on, the lid was on the pot, I couldn't tell if the water was boiling or not, so I had to keep taking the lid and steamer insert out to check. All this was going on while the steak was turning gray and the timer went off for the potatoes in the oven. I was freaking out.


I made a little cheese sauce for the broccoli by melting some cheddar cheese and butter. By the time we ate dinner, the meat was luke-warm and gray, the broccoli was okay but cooling, and the potatoes were fine. I made salads earlier, after I put the potatoes in the oven. I ate mine then, but Roy was exercising at the time. He ate his with dinner.

I used the following Fair Shares foods: strip steak, cheddar, broccoli, lettuce, radishes, scallions, olive oil.

I decided I'd feel a lot better after this meal if we had one of my favorite foods, movie theater popcorn. So we saw Princess Kaiulani at Plaza Frontenac and had some popcorn.

Turnips

Week Six, Thursday

I think I've only eaten turnips once before, in a mixed roasted vegetable platter. I don't try to avoid them, but they don't seem to show up in too many restaurant dishes. This week, we were getting turnip greens, but they came with the turnips attached. (Bonus turnips?) I decided to use both the greens and the bulb for dinner tonight.


I found these pretty easy to work with. I treated the greens like spinach and sauteed them with an onion. I peeled the turnips and seasoned them like I do a potato. They just cook quicker. I made crunchy garlic chicken to go along with it.


I liked the roasted turnip bulbs. The consistency reminded me of a crisp apple. I didn't care too much for the greens, but Roy liked them. A bunch of the greens didn't look that great, so I discarded them. I was left with about half of the original total for this dish.

Another highlight is that we finally got to eat outside for dinner. I live in a condo building, and we have a deck looking over a small park in back.




I can't remember if I had a salad this night. The only thing from Fair Shares I used in the main course was the turnips. I also used the honey roasted peanut butter for breakfast, since I usually have an English muffin with peanut butter for breakfast anyway.

Broccoli and Mushrooms

Week Six, Wednesday

Looking back on entries in this blog, Wednesdays have been kind of stressful. I have to go pick up the new food from Fair Shares, figure out what to do with it, clean it, and then cook dinner. Even more stressful today, it rained heavily, pounding against our front window. Some of the rain made it through to our floor and damaged some papers. Roy was drying off things while I was cooking.

I made a salad first before I started preparing any of the other foods. I barely dented the head of lettuce I got last week. I used that for the salad.

It amazes me how my food habits changed since getting this food every week from Fair Shares. I used to avoid mushrooms and broccoli. I'd only eat them in a veggie lasagna where they'd be buried with other flavors and not be easily removed. And here I am, making a meal with both of those vegetables. They're not my favorite things to eat, but not as yucky as they've seemed in the past.

We got more eggs this week. I still had four eggs left over from last week, so we made omelets with sauteed mushrooms and broccoli.

The broccoli was scary though. These stalks were huge. I'd never bought broccoli before, but I cut most of the stems off.

I used the two smaller stalks for dinner tonight.


I used several foods from Fair Shares. For the salad, I used the head of lettuce, radish, scallions, olive oil. For the main course, I used the eggs, broccoli, mushrooms, and cheddar cheese. Roy used the last of the sun-dried tomato bread from last week.

Week Six Share

Week Six

New York Strip Steak
Berger Bluff Cilantro
Ozark Forest Fresh Mushrooms
Yellow Wood Turnip Greens
Blue Heron Head Lettuce
Yellow Wood Broccoli
Sunshine Strawberries
Pilgrims' Acres Eggs
Sappington Market Honey Roasted Peanut Butter
Marble Creek Maple Syrup

I did a trade this week. Our meat selection this week was pork sausage. I don't eat pork, so we were able to put the cost of the pork towards any of the extra frozen meats in the cooler. I chose a NY strip steak. I've never cooked that before, but we'll see how it goes.

I've also never bought cilantro, turnip greens, and broccoli before. (The same was true of mushrooms a few weeks ago!)

Sometimes Cooking Anything is a Big Deal

Week Five, Tuesday

Busy couple of days. Roy and I were out of town on Monday, eating every meal out. There were a couple nights of staying up too late and having to wake up early. I got home around 2pm on Tuesday, and slept for close to five hours. Roy figured I wasn't going to cook dinner, so he had a frozen dinner. I surprised him though.

I made chicken spaghetti, and I even used a Fair Shares food, the spaghetti sauce.

Lost Finale

Week Five, Sunday

I tried to make french toast for breakfast. I'd seen my dad make it when I was a kid, so it didn't seem like it would be that hard. I wanted to use some eggs and the apple syrup I got from Fair Shares a few weeks back. I wasn't all that happy with the results.

I made the batter using this recipe, except I used two whole eggs instead of one whole and two egg whites.


I used two slices of whole wheat bread, cut in half. These four half-slices soaked up all the egg mix. I wasn't expecting that.


I melted some butter in the frying pan before putting the bread in, but something went wrong. The bread stuck to the pan and made this mess. (This is why I'm calling this a disaster.)


I heated the apple syrup up in the microwave. It tasted good, but overwhelmed the bread. Everything was edible, but not as good as I'd get out.


This was a big night for us. Roy and I didn't watch Lost from the beginning. About a year or two ago, we borrowed season one from the library, and we got hooked. We caught up with the series just before this last season aired. I had a special dinner planned for the last episode.