If there was a recipe for a perfect cooking weekend, this was it: Gray, cold, damp. Yeah baby!
I started off with a run to the Charlotte Regional Farmers Market for lettuce, mushrooms, green peppers, heirloom apples (mostly those winesaps with skins so dark, they look like burnished wood), a big chunk of Donnie Cline's Hubbard squash, parsley and cilantro, proscuitto and ground pork from Grateful Growers, whole-hog sausage from T&K and a loaf of French bread.
Saturday, I made oniony meatballs from pork and ground beef that got cooked in a from-scratch spaghetti sauce that night. I started a huge bowl of chicken pieces marinating for Chicken Marbella. I made a batch of bacony crackling cornbread to set aside for dressing Sunday night.
I tried a recipe for butternut squash and proscuitto roasted in a sauce of maple syrup, smoked paprika and chili powder. To up the green-vegetable ante, I tossed in a couple of cups of green peas -- remember that old favorite of green peas in a ring of mashed sweet potatoes? Same notion. It came out a little too sweet for spaghetti and had more syrupy juice than I expected, but was great with Sunday night's dinner.
That was Chicken Marbella, cornbread/sausage/apple dressing from "Silver Palate," and the leftover sweet-squash and peas.
I ran out of time for a batch of sofrito, but that's an easy weekday evening project. I didn't make dessert, but with the sweet squash, we didn't need it.
So how about you? What did you cook on a perfect food weekend?
Chili with ground beef and Italian sausage, beer bread warm and crusty fresh from the oven and coconut cream pie (not Rebel Room good but still tasty).
ReplyDeleteEnough chili left over for chili mac so one less meal to worry about this week.
My kitchen was fragrant this weekend, too. The chilly weather prompted me to pull out the soup pots, and I stirred up some Chicken Chili with White Beans, as well as Tomato Basil Soup, which was vegetarian until I dropped in some mini-meatballs (beef, because I didn't have ground turkey). Oh -- although it didn't add any aroma to the kitchen, I also grilled a large pork loin with coarse mustard, half of which we ate with Thyme-Scented Lemon Rice and the other half of which will be incorporated into Pork Fried Rice later this week. Just the thought of it makes me hungry all over again...
ReplyDeleteI didn't cook but I spent all weekend baking. The gambit ran from chocolate chip pecan (and regular) pies to lemon bars to mississippi mudd cake to an elegant triple chocolate cheescake.
ReplyDelete