Today was a busy day for cooking and food prep. The kids are here this weekend (10 and 17), and will be here all week, so I wanted to shop, prep, cook and offer food that they would both like, and that would meet the Sweetie and my needs in terms of being healthy and moderate fat. My main course choices for the weekend were slow-cooked pork shoulder with pasilla peppers (I’ve made this a few times now), that we could turn into a taco bar situation for family dinner, and marinated chicken thighs and breasts that we can grill up.
At the Berkeley Bowl, where I like to shop, I picked up some interesting discount produce to cook with: 6 Japanese eggplants I roasted with oil to turn into homemade baba ganoush; fall apples I baked with butter and cinnamon to make baked apples for breakfast and snacks, a bagful of french and other assorted radishes, and two big bags of small white potatoes, which I will boil and the turn into hash browns and/or mash. I also bought brown sugar, butter, and enough milk to make a pudding. After that I went to the local farmer’s market, where I bought about 12 pounds of beautiful ripe yellow freestone peaches and got 4 french baguettes (the little dragon is a fiend for baguette with good butter).
Later in the day, the cooking began-and then kept going, and going).
I made fresh peach jam and it is just gorgeous; fresh and vibrant and sweet; I jarred the jam and will can it tomorrow morning.
Also made homemade butterscotch pudding with more sugar that I’d use in the future and the BEST texture.
And a pulled pork with pasilla peppers slow-cooked dish that turned into taco meat pretty happily.
Some of the things I would like to make that I will probably not get to this weekend:
- Fig jam, from my neighbors’ trees
- Blackberry clafoutis
I used a variation on a recipe from Ree Drummond to make the pudding and we all agreed it was delicious, but that next time we’d like something less sugary and with more butterscotch/caramel flavor. Going to see if there are any recipes that introduce caramel as a flavoring through melting the sugar more first or what.
We had the taco bar for dinner–pulled pork, refried beans, flour tortillas, chopped avocados, red onions, garden tomatoes, salad, rice and everyone dug in. These Mexican/chili-flavored recipes are so easy to eat, so American and so popular–making chicken or pork with a pepper/green chili inflection seems like it is always a hit.
Today was a busy day for cooking and food prep. The kids are here this weekend (10 and 17), and will be here all week, so I wanted to shop, prep, cook and offer food that they would both like, and that would meet the Sweetie and my needs in terms of being healthy and moderate fat. My main course choices for the weekend were slow-cooked pork shoulder with pasilla peppers (I’ve made this a few times now), that we could turn into a taco bar situation for family dinner, and marinated chicken thighs and breasts that we can grill up.
At the Berkeley Bowl, where I like to shop, I picked up some interesting discount produce to cook with: 6 Japanese eggplants I roasted with oil to turn into homemade baba ganoush; fall apples I baked with butter and cinnamon to make baked apples for breakfast and snacks, a bagful of french and other assorted radishes, and two big bags of small white potatoes, which I will boil and the turn into hash browns and/or mash. I also bought brown sugar, butter, and enough milk to make a pudding. After that I went to the local farmer’s market, where I bought about 12 pounds of beautiful ripe yellow freestone peaches and got 4 french baguettes (the little dragon is a fiend for baguette with good butter).
Later in the day, the cooking began-and then kept going, and going).
I made fresh peach jam and it is just gorgeous; fresh and vibrant and sweet; I jarred the jam and will can it tomorrow morning.
Also made homemade butterscotch pudding with more sugar that I’d use in the future and the BEST texture.
And a pulled pork with pasilla peppers slow-cooked dish that turned into taco meat pretty happily.
Some of the things I would like to make that I will probably not get to this weekend:
- Fig jam, from my neighbors’ trees
- Blackberry clafoutis
I used a variation on a recipe from Ree Drummond to make the pudding and we all agreed it was delicious, but that next time we’d like something less sugary and with more butterscotch/caramel flavor. Going to see if there are any recipes that introduce caramel as a flavoring through melting the sugar more first or what.
We had the taco bar for dinner–pulled pork, refried beans, flour tortillas, chopped avocados, red onions, garden tomatoes, salad, rice and everyone dug in. These Mexican/chili-flavored recipes are so easy to eat, so American and so popular–making chicken or pork with a pepper/green chili inflection seems like it is always a hit.