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March 2020

weekly meal plan

Weekly Meal Plan, Week 14 2020 – Shelter in Place Edition

March 31, 2020

As you can imagine, my formal Weekly Meal Plan has gone out the window with everything happening right now. Meal Plans are for the time-starved with access to any ingredient they need. In the age of Covid-19, I am time-rich, but I can’t predict what my local grocery store will have in stock on my weekly trips, so sketching out anything resembling a plan feels impossible right now.

Nevertheless, I still rely on this little blog of mine to generate excitement and enthusiasm for my culinary adventures. I also use it as a guide, a shorthand for what I have in my cupboards. My hope is that my weekly meal plans can inspire you in your kitchen. Maybe you’ll see me cooking something and decide to give it a try for yourself. Lord knows we can all use a little inspiration when it comes to cooking, especially these days where we’re home for most every meal.

So, I decided to make a rough little list of what I plan to cook for the week based on what’s available in my kitchen. I can’t promise I’ll cook it on any certain day, but you can at least see my inspiration and cross-reference what’s on my Baking and Cooking Dream List to see what I’m tackling next.

That said, here’s this week’s plan:

  • Banana Bread – I’m still on my quest to find my perfect banana bread recipe and I have some ripe bananas withering on my counter. Thinking of trying the Smitten Kitchen one she posted today. Do you have a recipe that you swear by?
  • Chicken and Rice Casserole + Roasted French Green Beans. I never buy chicken quarters because I don’t really like meat that much and I really don’t like it off the bone, but they were on crazy sale the other day and I panic-bought them. I’m thinking a cozy casserole is just the ticket.
  • Vegetarian Chili + Grandma’s Mexican Cornbread. I actually made this for dinner last night and it was SO good. That cornbread is damn delicious and the leftovers just get better with time.
  • Whole Roasted Chicken + Jeannie’s Famous Kale Salad + Roasted Asparagus. I need to share that Kale Salad recipe with you all. It’s amazing and I know we could all probably use some more greens in our lives these days. I’m nervous to try my first roast chicken. I’m thinking I’ll go with the Ina recipe because she is just the queen, but I’m open. Do you have any suggestions?
  • Shrimp with Feta. I’m intrigued to try this one even though I’m not much of a shrimp person. I’ll let you know how it goes….
  • Pasta Alfredo. Keith Jr. loves pasta alfredo, so this one will be a surprise for him. I’ve never made it homemade. Have you?
  • Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies. Look, we all need comfort right now. That’s all I’m sayin’.
  • For brunch this weekend: Super Duper Easy Egg Bake.

Our list this week is a wee bit indulgent, but hey, these are unprecedented times. I am also planning to buy a juicer, so there will be lighter days ahead. It’s all balance, right?

What are you cooking while you’re sheltering in place? I’d love to hear!

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home

Our Home Project List

March 30, 2020

Friends,

There is nothing I love more than a good home project. Keith can tell you. My favorite line when we buy any furniture second-hand is ‘we can paint it!’

Given the current shelter-in-place restrictions here in Oakland, we have a LOT of time on our hands. Instead of twiddling our thumbs or watching an ungodly amount of television (let’s be real, we’re still doing that!), I want to tackle some projects that we’ve had on our list for ages. Are you doing the same? I’m sure everyone else in the country has a similar list, so I’m suspecting it will be hard to get our hands on supplies, but I do want to tackle anything we can. We’ve been slowly weeding the front yard a little bit here and there and it feels good to look at something and think ‘I did that!’ when so much in this life feels out of control right now.

Here’s our project list:

  • Decorate the mirror I bought at the White Elephant sale in January. See photo above! I have a start… I pulled that oak box out of my closet (it used to be my shoe rack) and added a couple of plants. I’m at a loss for what to put in the actual box as we live on a busy street and our living room gets real dusty, real fast. I also want to put some dried roses above the mirror that are currently in our shed. Will that look creepy?
  • Paint our front door. You can see it in the photo above. Shout out to our dog Jax for totally scratching the heck out of our front door! In all fairness, it had really cheap paint on it when we moved in that flaked off super easily. I am thinking I want to paint it a pretty dark green in chalkboard paint so that I can leave inspirational self-help messages on the door for myself and my family. I’m a real treat to live with!
  • Clean out the fridge. It needs some elbow grease and an organizational system of some sort.
  • Strip the painted concrete outside and add the outdoor lights I bought at Costco last year. We are going to BBQ so hard once this covid craziness is over.
  • Paint Back and Front Porches. I’m tired just typing that.
  • Weed front yard and finally add flowers to the flower bed. I’m totally paralyzed as to which flowers to put in there, but I’ve weeded about half of it so far. A little bit every day.
  • Buy and propagate more plants for our house and backyard. If we have to be stuck indoors, let’s make it feel like we live in a jungle!
  • Paint bedroom a pretty light blue and then string LED fairy lights and put glow in the dark stars on the ceiling. Enchanting!

What about you? Are you on the project train? Feel free to share your plan in the comments. I will totally cheer you on!

damn delicious, Procrastibaking, recipes I've tried and liked, Uncategorized

Damn Delicious: Melt-in-your-mouth Barbacoa and Homemade Flour Tortillas

March 28, 2020

There’s this moment when I’m cooking something new and I pull it out of the oven to check on it, perhaps I do a little taste test on a fork and the food it too hot and I’m doing deep breaths to try not to burn my mouth. In that moment, I just know that I turned a culinary corner. I made something so delicious that I amazed my own self.

Not to oversell it, but that’s the way I felt when I cooked this barbacoa. It was so incredibly good that I almost wanted to cry and I felt this little thrill of awe that I could cook something so nurturing and complex and hearty and just so damn delicious.

We’ve been in a bit of a chicken rut in my house lately, so I wanted to make some beef. After cooking this barbacoa, I am now on a vegetarian and healthy bend because I’m afraid I almost gave myself gout eating meat for several meals in a row, but anyway. We were in a chicken rut and I swear I decided to learn to cook barbacoa just out of thin air. I don’t know where the inspiration came from, but it was suddenly there and palpable.

Whenever I’m cooking something new, I do a stupid amount of research before I commit to a recipe. That’s why I’m so proud of my Damn Delicious posts. Sure, I’m just sharing another person’s recipe most of the time, but I’m not just sharing it, I’m vouching for it. I’m putting my picky, food-loving name behind it. I’m making you a promise that it’s worth the time and effort. It’s so disappointing to invest the time and energy and resources into a recipe for it to just be ho-hum. I don’t have time for that and neither do you!

So, trust me when I say that this recipe for homemade barbacoa is going to knock your socks off. Truly. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever cooked. Yep, I will be so bold to say that. The recipe comes from Give me Some Oven and I’m confident you could follow her slow-cooker method and find awesome results. Me? Of course I had to modify it, so here’s what I did:

  • I went through the extra step of blending all of the ingredients minus the meat and the Bay Leaf in my food processor. If you do this, beware and blend in small batches because it’s a pretty liquidy process. I had a leaksplosion with my food processor. I also added about half a cup of orange juice and a tablespoon of honey because someone in the comments mentioned that it’s more traditional to add that and I happened to have them on hand.
  • I didn’t plan ahead enough to cook in the slow cooker, so I used my oven. I don’t have a dutch oven, so I cooked in my trusty cast iron skillet covered with aluminum foil for about 45 minutes at 425 degrees and then turned it down to 350 for about two hours.
  • I went ahead and seared the meat for about five minutes or so on each side before putting it in the oven because I was going for maximum flakiness and nuance. Once seared, I poured over the sauce and popped it in the oven with the aluminum foil covering. I honestly forgot the Bay Leaf, but if you remember, I’d recommend you add it. It can’t hurt.
  • At first, it isn’t going to seem like the meat is going to get tender. It stays in the two inch chunks for quite some time – at least an hour and a half. Be patient and trust the process. Over time, the meat will just fall apart into the most tender, flaky pieces. After I shredded the meat, I put it back in the oven for a bit so that some pieces could brown further. Gah, so good!

Now, of course you can put that barbacoa on anything. Nachos, burrito bowls, you name it, you can’t go wrong. But, if you happen to have extra time on your hands (Corona virus shelter in place, what!) and want to try your hand at homemade tortillas, I am going to fully support your decision. You will be my tortilla hero.

I love a homemade tortilla more than most things in life, but I had never worked up the nerve to try them for myself, mostly because I was intimidated by lard. I found a recipe that honestly was so easy that called for olive oil instead of lard via The Cafe Sucre Farine. I was intrigued, so I decided to use my limited stock of flour to give them a go.

Holy crap, these tortillas were delicious. They are little pillows of heaven and they couldn’t be any easier to make. The Kitchenaid will do all the work for you aside from a little rolling pin action. Be sure to give them the adequate rest time before you pull out the rolling pin and don’t be afraid to really get in there and roll them out super thin. That’s going to keep it more like a tortilla versus a pita.

All you need is tortilla + barbacoa + maybe a little cilantro and diced onion to have a very memorable meal. Keep it simple my friends.

Please let me know in the comments if you decide to make this! I would love to hear of your culinary triumph and I will live vicariously through your recount. I love cooking so much and love nothing more than when you make a recipe I recommend. Happy cooking, friends!

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