Chicken thighs again.
I know. I could have reached out of the box and gone for something with a little more flair, but I try to build in one meal each week that does not take a lot of effort to assemble in case I get home later than normal. Today’s 2 p.m. conference call ran a little more than 90 minutes, which pushed back the rest of my afternoon. I left about a half-hour later than normal.
Thus, chicken thighs.
Continue reading Wednesday Dinner: Honey-Chili Chicken Thighs with Cilantro Cream
Lime is not what one would expect to find on a list of soup ingredients. Soups usually evoke carrots, celery, and bay leaf from your flavor memory, not cilantro, chili peppers and lime.
This soup bears a striking resemblance to sopa de lima, or Yucatan lime soup. Budget Bytes, the website where I found this, took some short cuts away from authentic, but not enough to affect the integrity of the traditional sopa too greatly. Continue reading Wednesday Dinner: Sopa De Lima
I add the slash in the title, because this could easily stand alone as its own dish. On Saturday, I needed something to go on the side of a steak. Potatoes? Meh. Rice? We were having it the next day at The In-Laws. So, shrimp it was.
If this were June or July or if I lived in San Diego, this would have been cooked over the open flame of a grill (and I would likely go for a pound or two of shrimp). Since it’s January in Syracuse, I went stovetop. Either way, the work is really done in advance here. The acid from the lime works its way into the meat of the shrimp, while the cilantro offers its telltale fragrance and flavor. The two ingredients are made for each other and they pair quite nicely with shrimp.
Continue reading Saturday Dinner/Al Dente On The Side: Lime-Cilantro Shrimp
Here’s my problem, and it is truly an issue faced only by white people living in the suburbs: There’s only one place in Syracuse that I can find fresh chorizo. While I really like Nichols Supermarket in the village of Liverpool, it’s a little out of the way and they don’t always have it in stock. It’s also not a product that they custom make by the order. Now, the way I should deal with this is to buy about 5 lbs. worth, break it into half-pound portions and freeze it for later use. But, planning ahead…yeah. You know how that goes.
Everything else in town, from Nojaim Bros. on the Near Westside to Wegmans, carries a cured sausage. You can heat it and eat it, but the flavors don’t quite assimilate with everything like fresh. It’s like buying prepared cookie dough and adding extra chocolate chips. It will work, but you can tell the difference.
But, we’re located in the Northeast and not the Southwest. The availability of chorizo is a take-what-you-can-get situation. In the future, I’ll have to take what I can get from Nichols. Continue reading Tuesday Dinner: Breakfast Tacos with Chorizo
If I were to guess, I think The Wife would like it if I used the grill a few more times before the chill of autumn settles in. We have a detached garage that sits towards the end of our property. It seems like the din of fall makes the walk to and from the garage more like an arduous expedition rather than the same 40-step walk (from door to door) that I’ve done since assembling the grill in the spring.
(I would ask The Wife about all of this, but that would require us having a conversation about something other than The Kid or work. This is a seeming impossibility these days. And besides, we’re married. I don’t have to talk to her anymore.)
What I do know is that there are flavors that The Wife likes and those she loves. Cilantro falls into the later category. If she approved of such things, you would see her walking around with a wad of the pungent little leaves tucked into her lower lip like a hunk of Skoal.
This post was originally published on September 4, 2012 and is in the spirit of Pickling Without Canning.
We ate a lot of pickles in my house growing up.
A lot of them.
We were a Claussen household. For some reason, my mother refused to buy pickles that weren’t refrigerated. Vlassic was never seen. I’d like to think that it was because my mother was nuts (true) and thought the non-refrigerated variety would spoil quicker, but it was probably because the Claussens are better. My sister and I would eat them by the jarful as kids (I think we’ve covered the excessive eating my household on this blog.).
Continue reading Pickling Without Canning: Garlic cilantro dill pickles
The Wife loves tomatillos. Usually when I buy them, the end result is a batch of salsa verde. I’ll fire roast them over the gas burner on the stove to char them up a little and puree them for salsa.
Tomatillos are nifty little fruit. They have a husk and a sticky skin, which goes away with a quick rinse. Their flavor is earthy with a slight sweetness. They just beg to be matched with cilantro and onions.
Continue reading Tuesday dinner: Tomatillo Chicken Quesadilla
When we last checked in, the plants had been purchased and were waiting patiently on the back steps to be planted.
The Wife, God love her, married plants to dirt on Sunday…just in time for a healthy frost that covered Central New York. This was the same cold front that dropped 30+ inches of snow on Whiteface Mountain over the weekend. We moved them in before heading out for a Sunday evening excursion to Syracuse’s Strathmore neighborhood for dinner and loud conversation, and the overnight in the garage kept them alive.
On Day 17 (May 28), everything was alive and growing. The basil was pressed into service with Tuesday dinner.
Tuesday marked day one of The Kid’s planting project. Last year, The Kid harvested green beans. The Wife let her have a flower this year, which she planted and took great pains to water (along with my herbs and tomatoes).
Al Dente: A Blog About Eating 