Thursday Dinner: Deviled Frittata

Simply thinking about deviled eggs makes me gag. The smell. The texture. The feeling of your tooth piercing the outside of a hard-boiled egg. The horrendous breath it gives you. The catastrophically bad gas members of my family would get after eating them. All of these factors individually give me the shivers. Combine them all and I start pre-vomit salivating.

Yet, this looked like a good option for dinner. And when I asked The Wife if she wanted eggplant or eggs, she answered the latter. So, the eggplant remains in the crisper for another day.

Thursday Dinner: Slow Cooker Pork Shoulder Pasta

There are two ways to use your slow cooker. Ninety-eight percent of America uses it as a time-saving device. They are too busy to cook, so they careless toss things into it — chicken breasts, Good Seasons Italian dressing or Hidden Valley Ranch packets, jars of Ragu, chipmunks, shredded cheese, and/or sour cream — in an effort to prepare something called “dinner.” Us remainders, the civilized 2 percent, use it because braising a piece of meat in an unattended oven while at work is unsafe.

I’ve seen people take perfectly good pieces of beef and pork and render them an overcooked gray. I’ve seen recipes on Pinterest that brag about some cheesy chicken concoction that kids love to eat. Everything that comes out is a thoughtless mess of otherwise good food that has been forced to sit in one place together for too long. Dinner from a crockpot is what happens when you put food through jury duty.

Panini Sun…Thursday: Chicken saltimbocca panini

In response to The Wife’s request for something lighter, I opted to cancel tonight chicken orzotto with asparagus in lieu of a panini. Yes, we did them on Sunday, but they are quick, versatile, and when you have the right ingredients, they can open up the doors to try new stuff.

In my fridge, I had a chunk of gruyere cheese, a bag of baby spinach, some prosciutto and leftover rotisserie chicken from the night before. Add in a loaf of Italian bread, and we had the formula for dinner.

I call it chicken saltimbocca because it has all the ingredients of a personal favorite dish. Traditionally, chicken is pounded to paper thin, wrapped in prosciutto, topped with a salty cheese and pan roasted in a wine sauce with some sort of green. It’s really a saltlover’s dream, but this time it’s on a sandwich. The gruyere doesn’t get a chance to melt and get stringy and gooey, which is good. The sandwich holds its form and stays away from being too messy.

Wednesday dinner: Google’s braised chicken and kale

I’m a Mac guy.

I’m currently writing on a MacBook Pro. I have an iPhone and iPad. I’ve converted probably a half-dozen friends and more students than I can count to the Cult of Mac. That said, Google is one of those stories that intrigues me greatly, from their products to their corporate culture.

Catching my eye recently was an article in the March 2013 edition of Bon Appetit that focused on Google’s commitment to providing their staff healthy dining options. The underpinning was the idea that they demand a great deal from their employees and healthy foods in the cafeteria reduces absenteeism and maintains productivity. From the article:

Though the cafeterias feature their share of decadent offerings (like crispy pork carnitas and butterscotch-pecan-cookie pie), they’re also strategically designed to “make it really easy for people to make healthy choices,” says Scott Giambastiani, Google’s head chef. Borrowing from the field of behavioral economics, Google’s tactics specifically encourage healthy eating.

Thursday dinner: Chicken and poblano white chili

My mother worked at our elementary school as a teacher’s aide. Typically, her hours were 9 a.m. to 2 or 2:30 p.m., with most of that time spent checking books in and out in the library. She would get home and spend the rest of the afternoon preparing dinner. On occasion my father, a construction sales rep with a home-based office, would make dinner, but the evening meal was typically my mother’s domain. And, 5 p.m. was dinnertime.

Around Al Dente HQ, dinnertime is still 5 p.m. This is mostly a product of The Kid’s impatience with waiting to eat (Side note: My kid’s dinner rotation is yogurt and pancakes. She refuses to branch out.). Now, I know we’re a rarity. I have multiple friends with families who sit down for dinner anytime between 6 and 8 p.m. The Wife and I are blessed with jobs that start early and get us home around 4 p.m.

My mother would often make dinners that we time consuming. Sauces that had to reduce. Things that needed roasting. She would make soup from homemade broth that would take hours to cook down. In two-income households like mine, there is simply no time for that. In some cases, like chili, cooking in advance and saving it for later in the week is the only way to get that slow-cooked meal on a weeknight without freezing things.

Thursday dinner: Hearty White Bean and Spinach Soup with Rosemary and Garlic

The genius J. Kenji Lopez-Alt went vegan this month. If you are not a regular reader of Serious Eats and his Food Lab columns, you’re missing out. He breaks down the science of cooking in an unpretentious manner, showing all the curiosity of the kid on your street who would take apart machines to see how they worked. One of his finest works is a complete deconstruction of an In-N-Out Burger Double-Double Animal-Style.

Regular readers of this blog know that soup is a staple of our diet here at Al Dente HQ and bean soups make more appearances than others, hence this appearance on the blog. The recipe was pretty basic. He used a homemade vegetable stock and I opted for store-bought, otherwise I followed his plan to the letter. It was tough to resist the urge to render a couple of ounces of pancetta for flavor and fat, as I wanted to hold as close to the original as possible.

Grocery list: March 3, 2013

We have a houseful this weekend. My sister-in-law, who lives in the Utica area, came in town on Thursday for…I’m not sure why. Dentist appointment on Friday, maybe? I wasn’t paying attention, to be honest. Later that evening, my sister rolled in for a long weekend. It’s funny having all of these people in my house. When we bought it, we thought it was a good-sized place. Add The Kid into the mix, and suddenly we’re crowded. My sister is sleeping on an air mattress in the dining room. She’s okay with this because the bed butts up against the liquor rack.

Friday night’s dinner was a trip to our new regular haunt: Stella’s Diner. It works out quite nicely for dinner. We eat early enough (5-ish) that we can beat the crowd and The Kid devours their pancakes like we don’t feed her (the truth, of course, is that she has made picky eating an artform).

Last night, we were one sister lighter (my in-law) so Dinosaur Barbque takeout was the call. Stellar, as usual. I had the brisket and was slightly let down after my recent trip to Dallas. It’s an unfair comparison, really, to compare the two. It was good, but you know, not quite Texas. Though it was takeout, we still managed to eat too much, which is not an impossible feat for the Dino.

Today’s shopping trip is what my sister would call “Family Fun Time.” The four of us stormed Wegmans, which was packed, and still managed to spend $70 on this list. I wonder just how we manage to do it sometimes.

Thursday dinner: Lemon-thyme chicken thighs

For the first time in a couple of weeks, I got home before The Wife and The Kid. There’s something about the quiet of any room, but the widespread silence in my home was refreshing after a day spent on the phone. Typically, I throw the television on in the kitchen while I cook, but tonight I soaked in the quiet while prepping my ingredients.

About 10 minutes in, the women arrived. The quiet ended and I flipped on AMC in time to catch the last 30 minutes of The Fugitive. I’ve seen that movie about 800 times and the only part that doesn’t stand up is when someone uses a cellular phone. They are all early 1990s style Motorola bricks. Otherwise, it holds up.

Anyhow, tonight’s dinner actually went together quite easily. From prep to table, it took about 40 minutes, which is more than you can ask for from a chicken dish with this many ingredients. As a side, I went with a boxed risotto from Trader Joe’s. Any sort of rice or grain (quinoa or farro) would go nicely here.