What I Made for Dinner :: Bibimbap

What I Made for Dinner :: Chicken Florentine Style

We eat a lot of chicken around here so I'm always looking for new chicken recipes to try. This one's a keeper :: Giada De Laurentiis's Chicken Florentine Style. It's not as labor- or time-intensive as the Chicken Florentine recipe I've made since college, and the sauce is good.

Although we eat a lot of chicken, I'm not usually a fan of chicken breast. It often cooks up too bland and dry for my tastes. But this recipe kept the chicken fairly moist and the sauce was flavorful. It might help to pound the breast a bit to even out the thickness, or cut the breasts in half horizontally if they're thick.

Bonus that you cook veggies with it, and the sauce helps the spinach be more palatable for those who aren't fans. The recipe calls for frozen spinach but I had fresh on hand, which worked just fine (I used two bags of the TJ's baby spinach).

What Ian Made for Dinner :: Bucatini with Butter-Roasted Tomato Sauce

Now that my son is in high school, it's really hitting me hard that I need to prepare him better for real life and surviving on his own. Chief among these tasks is cooking, cleaning, and laundry. Slowly, but surely, he needs to practice these skills so he doesn't end up as a ramen-eating, still-in-the-same-clothes-as-a-week-ago, I-live-in-my-own-filth college student. I'll settle for I-only-eat-ramen-sometimes-and-I-changed-my-clothes-yesterday college student!

Anyway, I came across this recipe for pasta (we didn't have Bucatini) with butter-roasted tomato sauce and it looked easy (and good ... mmm, butter!). The kids were still on winter break so I told Ian he was making dinner and helped him get through the steps. It was pretty easy to assemble and required very little knife work. (I did help him with draining the pasta; poor kid has no arm strength and I was afraid he was going to spill boiling water on himself.)

[smashing garlic cloves = no need to use the knife for cutting]

Final verdict? I'll definitely have him make it again. The sauce was a bit more tangy than I imagined it would be, but I think more time in the oven (with a smidge of sugar) will tone it down. 

What I Made for Dinner :: Pork Kakuni (豚の角煮) and Bok Choy over Rice Noodles in Soup

What I Made for Dinner :: Ara-jiru (あら汁)

I was browsing the fish section at the Korean market and noticed that the salmon heads were reasonably priced. I was in the mood for a new kind of soup and quickly googled ara-jiru (あら汁), basically a miso-based fish scrap soup.

It's really quite hearty with carrots, potatoes, daikon radish, nappa cabbage, and scallions. As an added bonus for my daughter, I added abura-age (fried tofu 油揚げ). You can use any kind of fish scraps to flavor the broth.

[leftovers with rice makes a delicious & filling meal]

Sadly, no one else seemed to like it, and I was stuck eating a 6-quart pot full of soup! The problem with ara-jiru for people who aren't used to eating fish is that it can be bony, which means extra caution -- and work! -- when you eat it. Also, although salmon is a fairly universally loved fish, it can be quite fatty and fishy when cooked this way. Maybe it was all just too much for my kiddos?

What I Made for Dinner ... and Lunch ... and Breakfast :: Nabe (鍋)

Now that it's getting colder here in the Mid-Atlantic, Japanese hot pot (nabé: 鍋) will be making its periodic appearance on our dining table. It definitely warms you up, you can use a wide variety of ingredients, and you can really stretch it out over several meals.

For dinner I made our standard version: sliced pork, meatballs (pork, but I've also made it with ground chicken), lots of nappa cabbage, tofu (regular and fried), mushrooms (enoki and shimeji), and shirataki noodles.

For lunch the next day, the husband and I enjoyed the leftovers with udon noodles cooked directly in the broth.


And, for its last iteration, I used the leftover broth to make ojiya (おじや), a rice gruel. Add cooked rice directly into the gently boiling broth and let it simmer until most of the broth is absorbed by the rice. (You can use leftover rice or freshly cooked rice.) Add an egg (just break the egg directly on to the rice and mix it up with a spoon) and thinly sliced green onions.

I'm obsessed with yuzu kosho paste (柚子胡椒) right now so I used it as a condiment for all three dishes. It adds such a nice citrusy saltiness with a slight kick to it.

What I Baked for Dessert :: Apple Pie & Apple Tart

My husband and son are huge fans of apple pie. Our autumn season used to includ pie-baking, but I've fallen out of the habit in the last five years or so. Pie is one of my favorite foods as well, but I'm intimidated by making my own crust and ashamed that I use store-bought (although that doesn't stop me from using it or scarfing it all down!).

I had an abundance of apples this month because I kept buying them (plus, we went apple picking) and not eating them. A sure fire way to use the apples and guarantee they'll be consumed is to bake them in a pie, so I made two tonight: Martha Stewart's Classic Greenmarket Apple Pie (this is a pretty close Martha Stewart recipe, and this is the exact recipe on someone's blog) and a Rustic Apple Tart.

I must be a little rusty with my pie-baking skills because I didn't fill it with enough apples, in my opinion. I used a combination of Fuji, Gala, Stayman, and Honeycrisp (I think ... I kinda lost track of the different varieties I bought) for the pie, and Gala and Honeycrisp for the tart.

They weren't my best pies but they were certainly tasty! I still have some apples left so I'm sure I'll be doing more baking in the very near future, much to my husband's delight.