The menu for the week beginning May 16th – including National Pick Strawberry Day - is:
- Sunday - Ham salad sandwiches made with green onion mayonnaise and home made whole wheat bread.
- Monday - Moroccan chicken skewers with herb sauce accompanied by glazed carrots
- Tuesday - Garlicky shrimp pasta accompanied by roasted broccoli
- Wednesday -Grilled apple glazed port chops accompanied by mashed potato casserole and mixed vegetables.
- Family Thursday – Sausage and bell pepper pizza accompanied by a fresh tossed salad
- Finger Food Friday – Cheese cakes
Comments
Last weeks freezer cleaning was a success. The only “left over” is the ham which I’ll make into ham salad with a home made may0. This week we’re opening up the grilling season!
The Moroccan chicken skewers sound awesome (I really like Spice & Easy on Food Network). With a clean up grill I can’t wait to try some kabob type items and the spicing sounds wonderful. Hope it tastes and smells as good as it sounds.
I guess I’m just stuck on a shrimp theme for another week. The combination of shrimp with garlic and pasta is hard to resist.
In line with the grilling aspirations for this week, the apple glazed pork chops easily made the menu. They were a hit last time I made them and I expect it’ll be no different this time. The mashed potato casserole is new – never heard of it before I saw it air on Cooks Country TV. Sounds yummy!
This weeks pizza will have a pizza sauce inspired from a Joe Pastry recipe I found when looking at his pizza section. The ingredients will be the same, but I’ll cook it in a slightly different order.
While visiting my Mom recently I purloined one of her cook books entitled Cooking with Love and Paprika. Published in 1966 it has an interesting collection of recipes. One that looked tasty is called Cheese Cakes, not cheese cake as in cream cheese but as in cheddar cheese. Sounded interesting so I’ll give it a whirl.
Outcomes
I’ve thumbed through a number of ham salad recipes over the last couple of years and none wowed me. This time I decided to strike out on my own using the Flavor Bible. Aside from celery which adds some texture, I saw that green onions, garlic, mustard and brown sugar all paired well with ham. So why not in a ham salad and in fact why not in the mayo. Get Saucy had a recipe for green onion mayo that was almost what I wanted. A bit more lemon juice and white wine vinegar with the garlic and green onions got the mayo going. I added chili powder instead of straight cumin and some salt to bring out the flavor. Pretty good! Some course ground mustard with the may to bind the finely processed ham and celery and a a generous pinch of brown sugar made the sandwich wonderful.
After eating it I realized that home made bread would have made it even better. So before all the ham salad is gone I’ll whip up a loaf of whole wheat bread.
The bread wasn’t bad for my first time around. It’s a little more dense that I would like so I’ll tinker a bit with the recipe by adding less whole wheat and more bread flour. Perhaps I’ll also try adding the salt after kneading and chilling the dough.
Monday’s chicken skewers were pretty good – let’s say there was not much left. My wife even liked the dipping sauce. I ended up skipping the carrots and just making some rice. If I had thought about it some more I could have added mushrooms and perhaps onions and bell peppers and just had shish kabobs. D’oh!
It’s refreshing when your daughter tells you “that was the best thing I ever ate” – which is what she said about the garlicky shrimp and pasta. Served with the roasted broccoli, it was pretty good. Guess I’ll be making that again.
I was hoping Wednesday’s “meat and potatos” night would turn out great and for the most part it did. My first stab at the mashed potato casarole turned out a little on the dry side, but then again I only made 1/2 a recipe. I could have backed down on the cooking time. The pork was also a bit overdone since my instant read thermometer decided to give up the ghost right in the middle of cooking. Oh well, the chutney like apple sauce on top of the chops made up for their dryness. My son even like it!
There were certainly better reviews for the pizza sauce on Thursday. I ended up with enough sauce to make perhaps 2-3 pizzas. For pizza toppings I tried half-pepperoni, half-peppers/onions/sausage. The sausage actually started off life a sweet Italian sausage patties. Bulk sausage was not to be found at the store but the patties did a suitable job after being crumbled up and browned in the skillet. Once I use up the 2 remaining patties we’ll try some hot/spicy sausage.
So, cheese cakes. Interesting little pastries. More in a separate post but they puffed more that I thought and despite a little over-cooking they tasted pretty good and were super delicate – wafer thin inner layers. I substituted Spanish paprika instead of sweet Hungarian so the flavor was on the spicy side. I’ll give the sweeter paprika a try next time. Tasted kind of like a Cheeze-It, only much better.
