Meaty Monday: Ground Lamb with Asparagus and Peas

Tactical errors occur frequently in the kitchen here at Al Dente HQ. I have this tendency to plan a week’s worth of meals without necessarily reading the instructions.

For instance, I observe Meatless Monday and had planned to make a roasted tomato and crispy chickpea sauce. When I got home from work and read the recipe, I noticed that step one of the recipe is to roast the tomatoes for three hours. So. Yeah. That wasn’t going to work.

Meatless Monday takes a seat for Meaty Monday and what was supposed to be for dinner later in the week.

Al Dente Frozen: Mixed berry frozen Greek yogurt

Let’s talk about Christmas for a second. The haul was nice. I restocked the closet at L.L. Bean, added some new Under Armour to the arsenal and got a new iPhone dock/alarm clock. The big news, though, was the addition of two items to the kitchen: a panini press and an ice cream maker.

Cuisinart’s ice cream maker is pretty nifty and simple to use. Freeze the bowl. Mix the cream/sugar blend. Assemble and start the mixer. Add the cream. Mix for 15 to 20 minutes. Add any other stuff. Freeze. I’m simplifying of course, but my first outing — coffee toffee pretzel ice cream — was basically that. I mixed a double shot of espresso from Starbucks with some instant espresso powder, then whisked together in a vanilla ice cream base (heavy cream, sugar, 1% milk). About five minutes before I was done mixing, I tossed in the toffee and pretzels. Done.

The inlaws like frozen yogurt, so I thought something made with Greek yogurt would work for dessert when they came over for dinner last weekend. I had mixed berries in the freezer, so all I needed was a container of plain yogurt to make this happen. I used frozen because, well, it’s January. Berries are not in season. Plus, you will macerate the berries anyhow, so fresh really doesn’t matter here. Being frozen helps keep them from falling apart on the stove.

Monday dinner: Quinoa burrito bowls (and the debut of Meatless Monday)

UPDATE: Al Dente’s Binghamton Canandaigua bureau chief Brian Moritz reports that his Wegmans carries store-brand freshly made pico de gallo. Very disappointing.

Meatless Monday has become a national movement backed by the geniuses at Johns Hopkins University in an effort to reduce our overall consumption of saturated fat and cholesterol. It has its roots during those skirmishes in the early to mid 1900s, where Presidents Wilson, Roosevelt and Truman asked Americans to go meatless one day a week to make sure we could feed our soldiers abroad. Or something like that.

(Tangent: We can get into the politics of this, but I don’t believe that food should be political. It should be safe. It should be accessible. It should be served to politicians. It shouldn’t be a political statement. There are too many people who lack access to quality fresh food. A 12-week per year farmer’s market in a Northeast city is a nice gesture, but is a fingertip bandage on a fissure. If people are hot to make a political statement about food, they should try fixing that.)

For our purposes, Meatless Monday is not going to be a grand statement. It’s my challenge to reach out and try new things that are healthy, and approach the stove without a chicken thigh, pork tenderloin or other piece of animal flesh in hand.

We’ll see how long this lasts.

Thursday dinner: Roast chicken breasts with garbanzo beans

Not all paprika is created equal.

For most of my life, I thought paprika was the orange stuff that some people would put on macaroni salad. It really wasn’t until the last few years, when I really got into exploring and trying new stuff in the kitchen, that I learned the difference. It’s really a product of my upbringing. We never ate the stuff. Frankly, if it wasn’t parsley, basil or oregano, it rarely made it into one of my mother’s recipes. That said, it’s the fourth-most consumed spice in the world.

This particular recipe calls for smoked paprika. Most Spanish paprikas are smoked, though they can range in flavor from sweet to hot depending on the pepper used. Spanish paprikas are typical milder, a direct correlation to the pepper grown. The peppers used in Hungarian paprika are bolder and sun-dried. This process maintains the pepper’s natural flavors, which can range from bittersweet to hot. The most widely found variety, found in the plastic McCormick bottles with “Paprika” splashed across the front, is good mainly for garnish and color. It possess little to no flavor.

Tuesday dinner: Yogurt-marinated chicken with quinoa and vegetables

Real Simple has apparently ascended to the status as “official magazine of 30-something women.” Find a woman between 30 and 39 who doesn’t subscribe, buy or worship to the monthly magazine. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

See what I mean?

It’s actually a pretty nifty magazine with a robust archive of recipes on its website. Tonight’s dinner came from the February 2011 issue.