Tag: meals

Friday Cooking 4/16/21

Published on by RJLeave a comment

I know this post is a little earlier than usual. But I’ve been having some busy days and I have to write when I have the time to write. So here it is!

This Friday, even though Spring has been here for almost a month, the meteorologists are predicting a chance of snow for my area. Yes, you heard me correctly. Snow!

To be fair, it is not entirely unheard of for Connecticut to see snow in April. It just hasn’t happened recently. Plus, we’ve gone WEEKS without true “winter weather.” So snow in the forecast has most people feeling a little bummed.

In an attempt to perk myself and my family up a little with the possibility of snow, I decided to make dinner for us and maybe even dessert. I’m not quite sure what I will be making, but it will be a main dish and at least one side dish. I will also try to whip something up quickly for dessert.

Photo by Ksenia Chernaya on Pexels.com

Come back next week to see I ended up making.

For those of you who are long-time readers of this blog, you may have noticed that the posts have been fewer and far between more recently. For that, I apologize. I hope that soon I can get back to my regularly scheduled program, meaning a more consistent, albeit not as often posting schedule.

Posting every day started to feel like “work” to me. I don’t want this blog to feel like work. In fact, one of the reasons why I started this blog was to have an outlet and something to look forward to when I wasn’t working.

That said, April will be a transition month for me and the blog. I’ll be cooking a bit less often and the blog will only get two to three posts per week. It will mainly be the recipes I made earlier or the week prior. An occasional herbal update will be included as well.

This Week’s Cooking Plans

Published on by RJLeave a comment

Disclaimer: This post was started early Thursday afternoon and completed Thursday evening. I kept the “stream of consciousness” style so that you can see how my brain actually works when it comes to deciding what to make each week. Sometimes dealing with over 1000 recipes and a dozen cookbooks gets to be overwhelming.

Well, here we are. Friday….again.

Personally, this week was a little tough for me. The weather didn’t help much either. The lack of sun really starts to get to me after two days.

So, I’m looking forward to spending some time in the kitchen this afternoon preparing a tasty meal. I also decided to give Ina’s dessert recipes a little break. No desserts from her books this week, if any dessert is made at all.

That said, I still want to try to do two or three recipes this week.

I am thinking of branching out of my comfort zone and attempting some elegant and very gourmet.

After reviewing Barefoot in Paris yesterday, I realized that I haven’t made any of those recipes yet. So I’m thinking of doing Chicken with Forty Cloves of Garlic.

But then, when I looked over the recipe I realized that this chicken dish will feed a small army. We would have too many leftovers. So, it was back to paging through books to find a recipe that would work.

Which proved to be a bit of a challenge. We had fish already this week, chicken, lasagne, and pot pies. We also had a leftovers night which just repeated those dishes again. I am also hesitant to do anything with beef and lamb. The beef because I’m not a huge fan of it and the lamb because, well….the fear of the unknown. I’ve never had lamb.

After paging through Barefoot in Paris, I realized that it wasn’t going to happen this week. Nothing seemed easy and interested me. So, I picked a few books at random and thumbed through those. Soon enough, I found a recipe in How Easy is That?

Weeknight Bolognese for the win!

Bolognese is a meat sauce that is fairly common in Northern Italy. It’s an easy sauce to make and since it has meat (beef) in it, it helps fill you up.

(Disclaimer: I’m not opposed to beef in its ground form. Hamburgers, meatloafs, meatballs, etc are all OK in my book!)

I decided to use De Cecco pasta since it was on sale this week and use the called for pasta shape. I can’t wait to see how it turns out!

Since I’ve settled on this pasta dish, there will be no side dish or salad from Ina’s books to go with it. And as I’ve mentioned earlier, I won’t be making a dessert this weekend…from Ina that is.

I stumbled upon an amazing cake recipe that I just had to try! That review and write-up will be posted as well, however under a different category entitled “Other Recipes.”

Ina’s pasta sauce recipe will drop on Saturday and the cake recipe will be released on Sunday.

Enjoy the weekend!