Day 34

Last day! My post title numbering went awry at some point.  I had vaca frita and kale sauteed with a squeeze of lemon, a dollop of tahini, and plenty of salt.  If I had thought of it, these two things would have been beyond delicious wrapped in corn tortillas.

Day 30

I made these meatballs with squash and quinoa from the Guardian.  Subbed beef for lamb, potato starch for corn starch.  We had them with these sweet and spicy carrots.  I also tried these granola bars from Half Baked Harvest.  They're very tasty but very crumbly, I think I used too much oil.

Day 29

We were visiting my mom this weekend so I don't have all her recipes but the dishes were pretty simple.  She made carrot ginger soup by sauteing onion and garlic (maybe?), ginger, salt, pepper, and carrots, simmering in water, and whizzing with the stick blender.  Nice bright innards-warming lunch with some rice cakes.  For dinner we had pan seared ribeye with potatoes and asparagus that had been roasted in olive oil, salt, and pepper.  Note about long drives while on LID: eat as heartily as you can before you set off.  By the time we got home the thought of eating another raw almond was very depressing.

Back home we had the Crispy Lamb with Cumin, Scallions, and Red Chilis from the NY Times.  I misread the recipe and used rice wine vinegar instead of rice wine and I was out of cornstarch so I used potato starch instead.  My guess is the latter substitution was the reason why it didn't come out all that crispy but it was still good.  We ate it with brown rice and string beans that had been blistered in the wok.

Day 25

I love the stir fried beef and celery dish in Fuchsia Dunlop's Every Grain of Rice (recipe posted here), it's so quick and satisfying. I was out of pretty much everything except ground beef and celery but filling out the basic template with chopped scallions, chilis, and garlic still yielded tasty results.  I didn't realize until I started eating it at work that it could have used a dash more salt which of course I couldn't do with the office salt shaker, so in the future I'm going to try to remember to have some non-iodized salt stashed in my desk for office flavor emergencies.

Under normal circumstances I sub balsamic vinegar for Chinkiang vinegar.  If you could give a source for gluten-free Sichuan chili bean paste it would be life altering for me; in the mean time I use a combination of gluten free gochujang and doenjang from Crazy Korean Shopping.

I also made the peanut butter cookies from the Thyca cookbook.  Very tasty (especially good spread with jam) and did not, as I feared they would, get too crumbly from being knocked around in my bag.

Day 21

Lunch: I cooked brown rice in chicken stock and warmed up some leftover shredded chicken.  We ate the chicken and rice with the ginger and chili sauces from this Roast Hainanese Chicken Rice which really zipped up a simple meal.  The full recipe is also great.

Dinner: Porterhouse steak prepared by husband; baby kale and tomato salad with vinaigrette made of olive oil, red wine vinegar, minced garlic, salt, and pepper.

Day 19

I started my mid-week cooking catch-up evening by roasting some chicken thighs in olive oil and salt and pulling them apart when they were done.  Some of the chicken went into this stuffed pepper recipe from Marc Matsumoto substituted for the marinating and frying steps.  I assembled the rice and chicken mixture in the peppers, stuck them in the fridge, and did the final bake the day we ate them.

The rest of the chicken went into this Serious Eats roast chicken and kale salad with tahini dressing.  I didn't have any apricots or almonds handy but I've made it with the apricots too and it's pretty delightful either way.  A great lunch, very flavorful and hearty.

Finally, I made Laurie Colwin's pot roast (I've seen a few different versions, this one comes closest to what I did) subbing fresh chopped tomatoes and two cups of chicken stock for the tomato sauce. Ate with pasta.

Day 9

Breakfast: Vegan almond meal banana muffins prepared by very good natured visiting friend.  Beef and Bayley Hazen Pie from A Girl and Her Pig.  For breakfast, you say? It was meant to be for dinner the previous night but this recipe was quite a bit more involved than I had bargained for.  I left out the Bayley Hazen, used Cup4Cup flour, greased the pan with oil instead of butter, and skipped the milk and egg wash.  I got the tutorial for preparing suet here and let me just say, that was a trial even for someone who usually finds rendering fat deeply satisfying.  The smells and the leftover bits are far less appetizing than working with pork or chicken fat.  Thank goodness I could shred the suet in the food processor for rendering. I grated it by hand when I was preparing the solidified rendered fat to make the dough.

I'll definitely make this recipe again with Stilton or Bayley Hazen and probably some other filling variations.  If I make it while on LID I would up the salt by a few teaspoons.  Maybe throw in some carrots.  I might also try a different flour blend, the Cup4Cup was a little bitter.  Most importantly, I will start the prep at least two days before I intend to serve it!

Lunch: Pie.  There's still a lot. It's going to be in my life for a while.

Dinner: Brown rice. Eggplant and chickpeas with tomato.

Day 7

Breakfast: Apple, peanut butter.  Oatmeal, jam, almond hazelnut meal.

Lunch: Another pureed soup.  Chopped carrots, a fennel bulb, and half a butternut squash, tossed with olive oil, salt, and pepper, roasted until the squash was soft.  Sauteed garlic, added roasted vegetables, homemade chicken stock and about half a cup white wine, simmered for a little while.  Zapped with the stick blender.

Dinner: Ribeye prepared by extremely thoughtful and considerate friend who came to visit even though it is bitterly cold here and we weren't going to be able to eat out.  She cooked it in a cast iron pan in olive oil for six minutes per side with a bit of salt and pepper.  I am pondering whether I can just eat it for dinner every night between now and the end of the LID.  Also had Barilla GF spaghetti mixed with shredded zucchini, a drizzle of chili oil from Fuschia Dunlop's Every Grain of Rice, and a spoonful of Chinese sesame paste (tahini would have been fine too).  Skittles.