So Many Dishes

It feels very odd to go over a week without posting a recipe. I’m not on strike, I’m still busy in the kitchen. However, when we put together our last weekly menu, to make some favorites that I’ve written about already. I asked myself several times during the week, “why don’t I make this more often?” Of course, the answer is that I love trying new recipes.

I went back to an old standard, salmon with mustard and herb sauce , for Friday night. I love pouring some of the sauce over whatever vegetable I’m serving, in this case green beans. We also had picked up a delicious Florida avocado, so I sliced half of it to go with the fish, as well. (The next morning, the smashed the other half for avocado toast). It was a nice, relaxing dinner.

I didn’t take pictures of two other dishes I cooked. The chicken egg roll bowl that I made from my list of recipes to try was such a success that we repeated it. And I hadn’t made baked chicken Parmesan in over a year. That’s one I really need to do more often.

When we were planning for Saturday, Ken suggested a pasta salad. I was in the mood for a tortellini salad, but none of the recipes I’ve made before was exciting me. I decided to combine tortellini with the traditional Greek salad, horiatiki. Sometimes called Greek country salad, it’s a mix of tomatoes, onion, cucumber, bell pepper, olives and feta, and dressed with a simple olive oil-lemon juice (or red wine vinegar) dressing.i mixed one-quarter cup of olive oil with the juice of one large lemon, 2 teaspoons of Penzey’s Greek seasoning, and a pinch of granulated garlic to supplement the garlic in the Greek seasoning. I just cut veggies until it looked right, cooked a 19-ounce bag of frozen tortellini, and mixed everything together. Sometimes, improvisation is the best.

Ken still is in charge of Tuesday dinner, and he cooked one of my favorites last evening, his Maine meatball stew. I have no idea what about it associates the dish with Maine, but it doesn’t matter. It’s comfort food, it’s delicious.

The dish is essentially meatballs and frozen mixed vegetables cooked in a tomato sauce. I think there’s wine in there somewhere. We serve it in bowls because it’s kind of soupy, and last night we had Italian bread to sop up the sauce.

So we are definitely not starving. Tonight will be leftover stew, but tomorrow I’ll be trying a new recipe. There’s another new recipe on our current menu, too, plus a tagine that I haven’t made since I started the blog. My writing respite is about to end!

Happy eating, everyone!