Day Sixty-five--Pot Roast and Mashed Potatoes

Hello all. Whew. It's been hot around here lately. Too hot. I moved out of Florida to escape the heat. Last summer was perfect for me. High 70's to low 80's with a day or maybe two days of the mercury seeing 90. Those one or two days were perfect to drag out the kiddie pool and go nuts. It would then go back to it's normal 70s and 80s. It appears we are having our 90's this week. I did see in the forecast 70's again next week. Whew.

Now, on to dinner. It was a good one. I finally did something I've never done before. I cooked a pot roast. That's right, I've never done it before. I've never really been a beef person. I'm not sure why, but I never order steak out. Never have. The extent of my beef consumption has been burgers. The first time we ordered our grass fed beef from Chris and Amanda I asked for mostly ground beef because I use them to make chilies, tacos, burgers. They humored me and also threw in a couple of steaks. I think this was done for Tim's sake. They also knew that once we had them, we would be hooked. Well, we have a freezer full of roasts and big hunks of meat. I'm wasn't sure what to do with them. Then, I got my new cookbook that I'm absolutely in love with. The Pioneer Woman Cooks. I've been making recipes off of her most fantastic blog and had to have the cookbook. One thing to note is that these recipes are not low in calorie. I have to remind myself that her family runs a cattle ranch. They burn a lot more calories than my family does so I will not be using this cookbook on a daily basis, unless I start using my treadmill for four hours a day and I don't see that happening any time soon.

Anywhooo...on to dinner:

Pot roast with mashed potatoes

This was a nice middle of the week meal. It was very filling. It made a ton. We had lots of leftovers. They boys inhaled the mashed potatoes. They were very good. They weren't too big on the beef but did enjoy the carrots. I myself obsess about carrots that have been roasting with beef for a long period of time. Everyone knows that I get a huge claim to them. The recipe was very easy to follow. I think the thing that I liked the most was that I made it all earlier in the afternoon. The roast baked in the oven at a low temp for 3 hours and then I just reheated the potatoes. Once Connor came home from karate, dinner was ready and the kitchen was clean. Those are my kind of nights. We even went out and worked in the yard after dinner. That rarely happens.

I think that is all for now. Until later...peace out. =)

Day Forty-eight--Pork Chops

I think we should call tonight's dinner a cowboy dinner. It was a damn fine cowboy dinner. It was another one of these "almost didn't happen" nights again though. The plan was that Tim was going to work on the loaded potatoes mashed potatoes and I would do the green beans and the pork chops. I was going to start it all off with making home made chocolate syrup so it could cool off before dessert. My plans were shot when I was in the process of writing the recipe of the syrup down and my laptop just flipped off and had no power. I know the battery was full, and at first I thought maybe we had a power surge, but it was unplugged. Instead of putting Tim on the potato duty he was put to "fix my laptop" duty. Needless to say I'm glad it's still under warranty and it's being shipped out this weekend to get fixed.

Back to dinner:

Fried pork chops with mashed potatoes and garlic Parmesan green beans

Ok, so here is how it went down. I made the chocolate syrup first. Aidan actually was a huge help and did the stirring for me while I threw a few red potatoes in a bowl and chucked them in the microwave. While Aidan was stirring, I also chopped up some garlic and fried a few pieces of bacon. Aidan got bored and I had to finish up the chocolate syrup. No problem, it was almost done. When it was done, I pulled it to the side and let it cool. I checked on the potatoes. I hardly ever use my microwave. I've never cooked anything in it. For the most part it's used to heat up leftovers. I had no idea how long it would take the potatoes to cook. Come to find out it was just over 15 minutes. While the potatoes were still cooking, I cleaned up the green beans and snipped the ends off of them and got them to boiling. Then it was time for the pork chops. These babies were beautiful. Again, they were from a local farm and were good for you pork chops. I dredged them in a mixture of flour and seasoned salt, and black pepper and then put them in some hot canola oil to fry up. At this time, Tim came and said he didn't know what was wrong with my laptop. I know it's bad because Tim can fix anything. He took over the frying of the pork chops and I tended to the green beans. I drained the beans and cooked up some garlic and grated Parmesan cheese and then threw the beans back into the pot and stirred them together. While I was doing this, both Connor and Aidan came in and offered to help. I let them make the potatoes. I had already cut up everything and all they had to do mash and mix. They threw in the butter, chopped bacon, sliced green onions, sour cream and some of those french fried onions, you know, like the ones you put on top of a green bean casserole. Amazingly, everyone was done at the same time. I plated up and we all sat down and enjoyed. I invited Mr. Jack Daniels to meal with me with some coke. Thanks Deb for the coke. We don't ever have soda anymore but Aidan was begging Debbie for some soda this afternoon and she sent some over.

The dinner was a huge success. All four of us loved every bit of it. Aidan even ate the green beans. He was funny too about the onions in the potatoes. He said, "the onions add a nice texture to the potatoes." Pretty funny coming from a boy who generally hates anything crunchy in his food. He's growing up. I have to say that I think my favorite part was the mashed potatoes. They tasted exactly like loaded potato skins that you would get from a restaurant as an appetizer. Dinner was ended with a small bowl of vanilla ice cream from our favorite dairy with some pretty tasty chocolate syrup. Yee-haw! This meal is a keeper!

Until tomorrow, happy cooking!

Day Ten--Roasted Chicken and Potatoes

This will be a short post tonight. Partly because I'm tired and partly because this meal was only meh. Tonight's dinner was poorly planned out. I didn't realize how long it would take to finish and we ended up eating dinner at 8 o'clock. Now, we've been eating later lately but this is too late.

Here's what we had:

Roasted Chicken with potatoes. Sorry the picture is kind of boring but my creativity was tapped out today. I should have taken a picture of the chicken before Tim cut it up, but I didn't do it fast enough.

The chicken. I spent the big bucks on this chicken. It was organic. It was delicious. It had great taste. I put olive oil on the outside and then salted and peppered it. Inside the bird I stuffed a lemon, garlic cloves and thyme. The lemon and garlic were already warm and juicy because I boiled them with the potatoes.

Lemon and garlic boiling with the potatoes.

I've never boiled potatoes with a lemon and garlic before. After the lemon boiled, I stabbed (fun) it several times and then put it inside the bird. It smelled really good and it really put some lemon flavor into the chicken. I guess my issue with this meal were the actual potatoes. First of all the recipe called for way too many. Second of all, even after being cut up and boiled and then roasted for 45 minutes with the chicken they weren't really cooked all the way through. I have a lot of them left over that will be turned into hash browns over the weekend.

On a good note, Aidan loved tonight's dinner. He ate it all up and said he loved it. Connor didn't eat any of the chicken (too bland for him) but had a couple of potatoes. I think next time I attempt roasted chicken and potatoes I'll just do it the way I usually do.

Day Six--Crispy Asparagus Potato Tart

I realized that when I made the menu for this week that out of six nights, four of them are things I've never made before. This might have been poor planning. We could all be really grumpy by the end of the week from not eating any tasty food.

Tonight I made Jamie Oliver's Crispy Asparagus and Potato Tart. Can you tell I adore Jamie? I love how he uses real food. Yes, some of it might be fatty but you use such a tiny bit of that to get such a crazy intense flavor. This recipe called for Lancashire cheese. I asked the cheese lady at Wegmans and she said that they used to carry it but no one ever bought it. I had done some research on it when I was making my menus last week and learned it was a harder cheese. I picked up some Gruyere cheese instead. The lovely lady at Wegmans said it would be a suitable substitute. I've never had Gruyere cheese and while it is very expensive, it is very delicious. I used half of the small brick that I got for this dinner. Tim has already claimed the other half to munch on with apples through next week. So presenting:

This recipe said it makes 4 servings. Uh, more like 6 or 7. That's great for us though because it means lunches tomorrow. That's always a plus. It was fairly easy to make. The worst part was working with the phyllo dough. I love how it bakes up but it is a royal pain in the arse to work with. It always tears on me when I'm working with it. I suffered through layering it trying not to get too upset with it. It was going to be covered with potatoes so that helped. I would say all in all it took about 25 minutes to prepare. While my potatoes were boiling, I was able to blanch my asparagus and shred my cheeses, and get my layers of phyllo in the pan. Once the potatoes were done it took 5 minutes to get them mashed and everything pulled together. It baked for 20 minutes and I took advantage of this time to clean up the kitchen.

I did go food shopping today and I did keep my receipt so I'm hoping that I can try to start getting cost per meal going here soon. So, all in all, this dinner was great. All four of us liked it and Aidan said that this needs to go into our weekly rotation. He even liked the asparagus. That is huge for him. I don't think it will go into the weekly rotation though due to the cost of the cheese. Connor and I also had a little bit of coleslaw with ours that was left over from a couple of days ago. It was still tasty.

Well, that's all I have for you now. Until tomorrow. Happy cooking.

**edited to add cost: Last night I was able to figure out the cost for this meal. It was hard to figure it out. I figured what each egg cost, what each ounce of milk cost, and then I came to the cheese. Obviously that was the most expensive part of this dish. Tim said I should count the whole cost of the cheese even though I only used half of it because I wouldn't have bought it if not for this recipe. That is what I did so the total meal was $24.29 split up between 6 servings which comes to $4.05 per serving.

Day Five--Pork Chops with Apples and Sage

Wow. I am full. I just finished the most delicious dinner. We are still in Olean and Laurie was kind enough to give me her kitchen to use. Dinner was later than we usually have and it and almost didn't happen.

We ate a late lunch and then 6 o'clock rolled around and we weren't really hungry. I waited until 6:30 before I even looked at the recipes and then freaked out because I was going to need to roast the potatoes for an hour. Oops. I ended up just boiling them and then making garlic mashed potatoes. The rest of the meal came together really fast. Tim came in and helped me for the last part.

So what did we have?

Pork Chops with Apple and Sage, garlic mashed potatoes and red swiss chard.

This dinner came together really quickly. I let the potatoes boil for about 30 minutes and then got to work on the rest. I browned the pork chops in some olive oil. Then I put the chops in a baking dish and sauteed the apples in a tiny bit of butter until they turned golden. I put them on top of the chops with a couple of leaves of sage. On top of that a tiny dab of Stilton cheese. I popped in the oven for a few to let the sage meld with the apples and melt the cheese a bit. While the chops were in the oven Tim and I worked on the potatoes and chard. I sauteed the swiss chard in a little bit of olive oil and garlic with salt and pepper. The potatoes were just the boiled red potatoes mixed with chopped up garlic, butter, a splash of milk with some salt and pepper. All that with some Merlot and it is all good. Eating real food isn't that bad. =)

Everyone loved the dinner. Aidan ate the pork and the potatoes and he had some of the chard. He actually said, "I kind of like this green stuff." We're making progress! I do have the receipts from this weekends eats and when we get home, I'll come back and edit with the cost of the meal.

We leave tomorrow morning to go home. I need to make my shopping list up tonight so that when we get home I can go food shopping. Monday night is going to prove interesting. I am going to the Peace and Justice Award dinner where there will be food served. I think I'm still going to go ahead and make the boys dinner. One nice thing with all of our meals so far is that we've had leftovers. This makes for yummy lunches the next day.

I think that is all I have for now. I'm going to go finish my Merlot and start packing up all of our stuff to go home. Until tomorrow. Happy cooking!

**edited to add cost of meal: Total cost was $30.77. Served 6 so cost per person was $5.13.