Dinner's in the mail

The bad timing of our first Hello Fresh delivery was not their fault. Who would have known almost a month ago when I scheduled it that there would be seven people in the house, instead of the two that I ordered meals for, and that five of them would be throwing up?

There are currently a number of companies offering delivery of ingredients and instructions for meals. They offer a variety of options for number and type of meal.  I thought that this might be helpful in my quest to learn to cook for two. After looking at several and comparing menus, cost, delivery options, and reviews, I decided to try Hello Fresh.

Each week I have a choice of six possible entrees. I have opted for Thursday delivery, since my husband is out of town during the week. I need to decide what I want in the next week's box, or pause delivery, by Saturday night.

I spite of the bad timing, I was excited to see what was in my box.

The box was nicely organized, with the ingredients for each meal in a separate smaller box, and the meat alone in the bottom of the box. Everything looked very attractive.

I'll report back after we get to try the food. Everything looked very nice, and the produce was in good shape. Although my report may not come until I get my next box. I don't think that the tummies here are ready for these recipes, so we'll just use up the ingredients elsewhere, for the most part. (It's all pretty normal stuff, which makes that easier.)

By the way, if you use the link above, and decide to try Hello Fresh, you will get $40 off your first box, and I will get $20 off of my next one. Everyone wins!

Plannin' some meals

You would think that with two sons in college and working and with one son who is, for all practical purposes, finished homeschooling and is also working , I would be feeling like life is getting less complicated.

Ummmmm. No.

It will help when we have another car. We've been down one since that unfortunate event in the Menard's parking lot. (Can I just take a moment to say, "Sven, I miss you!") Jonathan, Andrew, and I share a car. Or rather, Jonathan and I share a car, and I chauffeur Andrew.

And then there's my job. Which I love. A lot. If I didn't, I would quit, because last year it cost us more in taxes than I made, so it's really more like a hobby. But, I will just think that I am really caught up--or even ahead--and then things happen. Like musicians.* Or Sundays unobserved in recent memory. And this always happens during holidays when I have extra stuff to do in the rest of my life.

And then there's my business that I am trying to resurrect. (I seem to lack the energy and ability to roll with the changes** that I used to have.)

So I am doing something that is going to shock those who know me well. I am going to simplify my life by planning our during-the-week meals. Starting after the holidays, Monday will be roast chicken and vegetables. Tuesday will be something with ground beef. Wednesday will be pasta or some take on mac & cheese. Thursday will be soup. Friday will be left-overs/fend-for-yourself night (since I'm usually the only one here.) On the weekends I will continue to cook what sounds good to the hubby.

I think that this plan will simplify my grocery shopping for the next couple of months. It will cut down on food waste. It will save money. The leftovers will be used. But it still leaves me room to make a dinner that will please my palate any given night.

* I LOVE MUSICIANS. I love it when they play their lovely music. But they tend to complicate my job. Not mentioning any particular names here.

**REO Speedwagon, where are you when I need you?

This could work on a Tuesday. Sweet potato shepherd's pie.

Cooking

I'm a pretty decent cook. I enjoy cooking and I like to try new things. I keep a well-stocked pantry and have gotten pretty good at just pulling things together into a meal, based on my mood and what sounds good.

My daughter is a newlywed who found herself in the position of needing to fix dinner a few nights ago without planning and using only the ingredients on hand. She didn't think she should need a recipe. She should just be able to pull it out of her head. She couldn't. So she had, in her own words, a minor meltdown.

She had two things working against her. Well, maybe three:
She is a perfectionist.
She has an unrealistic view of how most people cook.
Her husband is an excellent, intuitive cook.

As a result, to comfort her, I find it necessary to blog about what dinners were like in the early years of our marriage. I was not a complete novice. I cooked dinner many weeknights my last couple of years in high school, but my mom did the planning. I only had to cook. And she had taught me many of the basics.

When I got married I cooked the same things that I had eaten as a kid. I had a rotation of about seven meals. I think all but one involved a white sauce or Campbell's soup. We had tuna noodle casserole nearly weekly. Creamed tuna or creamed dried beef on toast was a frequent meal. Some version of hambuger browned and cooked with soup and noodles--and maybe cheese--was a frequent dish. Salmon cakes and spinach. Hamburger gravy. Spaghetti made with Ragu.

That was pretty much it. Add a canned or frozen veggie and some canned fruit. I had recipes that I made sometimes. My grandma's beef stew. A couple of chicken casseroles. Once in a while I might make a roast with potatoes and carrots for a Sunday dinner. But I never veered far from the foods that I grew up with. And my husband started our marriage as a 19-year-old college student. He would eat anything.

I'm not sure when I started to cook differently. I remember a chicken enchilada casserole that a friend made when Patrick was small that may have been a starting point. Being a Weight Watchers member and then leader changed my cooking somewhat, but made me more recipe dependent when I strayed from the baked chicken breast or piece of fish and broccoli.


 I like having a lot of ingredients available and having many choices. I have a generous grocery budget. I'm kind of spoiled. But it has taken me years and lots of experience to be able to cook this way. And sometimes it fails me. I stand and stare at my pantry and the ingredients don't seem to amount to anything. Those are the nights that my family usually gets spaghetti, tacos, or chicken breasts.

My advice to the person who is newly responsible for cooking meals for a household is to have a couple of meals that you always have ingredients for and that you can cook easily, whether with or without a recipe. These should be things that will almost always sound good to the members of the household. (Around here spaghetti is the big fall back, although in recent years lentils have moved up the list.) It will save lots of stress, and avert meltdowns.

Making risotto. With a recipe.

Perspective

Sometimes I have to remind myself to look at things from the proper angle.

I had a cruddy morning. We realized just as I was leaving for work that the circuit that controls the poorly-wired disposal--the circuit that has been off since Saturday evening--also controls our deep freeze. I'm not even going to address the bizarreness of the wiring. Suffice to say it makes no sense.

But I admit that I had a bit of a sobbing meltdown when I looked and saw pounds of thawed meat.

I went ahead and went in and did what I needed to at work, and came home a couple of hours later to sort out what was still usable and what was destined for the garbage. I quickly found myself grateful that I had not had time to order meat from the farm this year. And that I hadn't spent hours picking blueberries in the hot sun, because the few that were in the freezer were ruined. I was grateful for the three bags of frozen sauerkraut; for some reason they stayed frozen and helped keep the meat around them cold.

In the end we lost a lot of food. But we also were able to salvage a lot. Since I needed to go ahead and cook it I have the beginnings of several meals for next week and a big pot of chili for the weekend.

I've been wanting to get my freezer and pantry organized and to simplify things a bit. I've wanted to get some meals or meal starters in the freezer. Done and done.


I'm thankful that this happened after I have my new stove.
I'm thankful that this happened on a cool day, when having the oven on all afternoon just makes the house smell good.
I'm thankful that, although this is an annoyance and an inconvenience, losing this food in no way effects my ability to feed my family well.
I'm thankful that, if the frozen wedding cake was going to thaw, it happened when the newlyweds are coming for the weekend.

Baking

My assistant Bethany and I are baking. Lots of baking. We are making desserts for a benefit concert and dessert buffet and for a dessert auction. We are discovering some new things we like and some new things we don't.

We like piping the frosting onto the cupcakes.

 

We like these pumpkin bars. We may even need to make another pan.

Bethany doesn't like red velvet cupcakes. I can take them or leave them. But we both love the cream cheese frosting. We also love these cupcake cups.

We also love the way these apples look with the dish towel. It's the little things....

O, Christmas food!

Although the true feast--the Christ Mass--was held at Redeemer, we did a fair bit of feasting at home, too. In fact, it seems like cooking and eating have been the main occupation the last few days. We chose to ignore the well-meaning suggestions for lightening up our holiday food that Bethany found.

Instead the day of Christmas Eve started with orange rolls. Before dinner, during the afternoon, we had cheeses, and olives, and smoked oysters, and dates, various crackers and a couple of kinds of snack mix. For dinner we had a gorgeous, delicious, perfectly medium-rare standing rib roast, twice baked potatoes, carmelized brussels sprouts, salad, and herb yeast rolls. We had an Argentinian Bonarda that I bought over a year ago and had been saving for a perfect piece of beef. It was lovely, especially since we had excellent company in my mom and my Wicked! Dessert was cookies.

Today we had what has become our traditional Christmas day meal of chicken tetrazinni. It is a wonderful, rich recipe and perfect because I can make it ahead and just pop it into the oven after church. We had a salad, some roasted garlic bread and a french baguette. We opened an Oyster Bay Pinot Noir, but it was a big disappointment. It was thin, almost no legs, and its citrus notes were mostly reminiscent of slightly sour orange juice. So we finished up the ends of several other bottles.

I baked some more cookies this afternoon, because tomorrow we will celebrate with Colin's parents at their house. For supper tonight we had cold roast beef sandwiches. And of course the house if full of goodies: cookies, candy, toffee, nuts, snack mixes, egg nog....

For a bit more food, this for the mind and soul, check out Pastor Petersen's Christmas Eve sermon.

To-do update

I had a comment on my to-do list asking for an update.

It's been a year and four months since I posted this list. A few are done. A couple have a bit of progress. The red are done. An update:

1. Learn to make a souffle.
2. Visit England.
3. Swim a mile.
4. Make a dress that looks good enough to wear.
5. Learn Spanish. (working on it!)
6. Go to a Broadway show.
7. Sell another article.
8. Make my own tortillas.
9. Make noodles as good as Grandma's.
10. Get my scrapping stuff organized and out of my dining room. Almost done. Soon.
11. Find out who Sarah Serring was. Much progress. Her name was probably Zehrung. (Still working.)
12. Move. Waaaaahhhhhhh.
13. Paint my grandma's kitchen table and chairs.(chairs done)
14. Wash the windows. (Many times)
15. Have six month emergency fund.
16. Ten pounds. Just ten pounds. Halfway there.
17. Clean the master bedroom.
18. And paint it. (Different MBR, still need to paint.)
19. And paint the furniture.
20. And the master bath, while I'm at it.
21. And the kitchen cupboards. Started. A year ago. Different kitchen. Rip it out.
22. And then the dining room.Yep.
23. Reupholster the dining room chairs.
24. Make a perfect risotto.
25. Make money doing what I love.

Cooking style

Tagged for this by Adriane. Seems like a good Mother's Day blog topic. (Okay, I started it on Mother's Day, then got too sleepy to finish.)

1. What's your cooking style?

Home cooking with an experimental twist. I like to play with my recipes, adding and subtracting ingredients. I like to try to recreate meals we've had in restaurants. I learned the basics pretty well from my mom and my grandmothers: how to prepare meat in different ways, good gravy and white sauce, the right techniques for baking, preparing fresh vegetables, homemade salad dressing, etc. I've learned to spice things up, turn that white sauce to a bechamel or make red gravy, and to experiment with the basics I know. I'm a big fan of comfort food, and a lot of what I cook would fall into that category, but I love taking the mac and cheese with Velveeta that I grew up with and changing the flavor with different cheeses and spices. I love making soup, just throwing things into the post and seeing what comes out.

2. What inspires your kitchen?

My mom and my grandmas, the cooking shows I've been addicted to since I started watching Julia Child and the Galloping Gourmet when I was a kid, and the family I have the privilege to feed.

3. What is your favorite kitchen tool or element?

It's a tie:
My stockpot is used almost almost every day for either soup or pasta, but my KitchenAid stand mixer has changed my life. Seriously, baking is so much better with my monster mixer.

4. Best cooking advice or tip you ever received:

Taste while you cook. Taste before salting. Taste taste taste.

5. Biggest challenge in your kitchen:

Time. I just don't have enough time to spend in my kitchen.

6. Biggest indulgence:

Quality ingredients. I spend money on good meat, quality cheeses, good spices, excellent extra-virgin olive oil, farm-fresh eggs. etc. I keep all of the extras in my pantry that I might want: pesto, tapenade, artichoke hearts, olives, roasted red peppers, good vinegar, decent wine. There are very few times that I am willing to sacrifice flavor for price.

7. Dream tool or splurge:

A set of Le Creuset pans. I have one. I love it.

8. What are you cooking this week?

Not much. This is a weird week. The boys are gone for a few days. We have things going on Wednesday and Thursday nights and a garage sale Friday and Saturday. There will not be a lot of cooking. Last week I made portabella mushroom ravioli with a light bechamel sauce, salad and bread for Monday night. On Cinco de Mayo I made beef and chicken tacos. I made clam chowder Wednesday night. On Thursday night I made chicken cacciatore and garlic mashed potatoes. And Friday night I made smoked salmon caesar salads.

9. What cookbook has inspired you the most?

Hmmmmmm. I like to read lots of cookbooks and cooking magazines, but I don't really have any one that has inspired me. I have gotten the most use--by far--out of my Red Plaid Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook.

10. What's the most memorable meal you've cooked in this kitchen?

That's hard. There have been so many good meals with good friends and family in this house. I guess the winner will have to be the whole beef tenderloin that I made for Christmas when Nathan and Katie Fischer joined us in 2007. It is the first and only one I have made and it was perfect! We also had twice baked potatoes, salad, bread, and a really good Pinot Noir.

Consider yourself tagged, if you would like to be.