What’s for dinner?

The first three months of our marriage we tried out a lot of recipes. Since then, while we’ve managed a bit of a variety most of the week, we fell into a bit of a rut. Time to break the rut. Especially since we have some real good cook books. Also, we accidentally ended up with too much chicken and ground beef in our freezer after our last trip to Sam’s Club because we forgot to check if we were actually running low on those.

So we pulled out the cook books. Two of my current favorites are from America’s Test Kitchen – The Best 30 Minute Recipe and Slow Cooker Revolution. We’ve tried several recipes in both and write our notes and reviews next to them as well as when we made them. It’s a fun little food journal.

Two weeks ago Brett decided he wanted soup. So we put it on the calendar. Then it snowed that day so it was perfect soup weather. Flipping through our cook books I decided we were going to try Caldo Verde, a Portuguese soup, from the 30 Minute Recipe book. I’m not quite coordinated to get most of those recipes to 30 minutes yet, but that one was 20 minutes from prep to simmer and then for the last ten minutes of simmering I was able to clean up all my choppings and prep stuff. And then we ate a delicious soup. Definitely making that one again (this week in fact, need to finish off our sausage and kale).

And then we needed to cook some chicken last week. So I looked up a chicken recipe in the slow cooker book and we made a ginger chicken dish that we’ll definitely be making again. And since the recipe asked for 6 chicken breasts we used the chicken on our Hawaiian Haystacks two days later and our salads the day after that. We also decided we need more ginger in our diet. That’s a wonderfully smelling/tasting aromatic.

With our recent culinary successes, I sat down with our March calendar and our trusty cookbooks to plan some more adventures this month. This month we’ll be mixing up our standard calendar with:

• Tater Tot Casserole – My own design. Ground beef with mixed veggies and cream of potato soup (because I don’t like cream of mushroom). Topped with tater tots and baked. Top with grated cheese at the end.
• Caldo Verde – Brett liked this so much when we made it two weeks ago that I only got one bowl of it because I had to leave for mutual right after dinner. This time we’re cooking it on a day when I’m not leaving after dinner.
• Hawaiian Meatballs – My brother’s recipe actually, and a favorite of mine. We just haven’t had it since we were first dating when I was trying to impress Brett with my limited culinary skills (cooking for more than just me has made cooking much more worth it, and me a better cook).
• Chicken Pot Pie – On Pi Day. I don’t exactly have a recipe for this one yet, so if you have a good one… The only ones I’ve ever made were heating up frozen ones, and Brett says those are too soggy.
• Meatloaf – My last experience with meatloaf was an utter disaster (one of the truly inedible foods I’ve ever made), and in 1996. But I have full confidence that the America’s Test Kitchen slow cooker recipe will work.
• Chicken and broccoli sauce over ziti pasta – Another Slow Cooker Revolution recipe.
• Slow cooker spicy sloppy joes – We’ve actually never had sloppy joes together, about time to fix that. This will be a new recipe.
• Easter Lamb – We’ll probably use the recipe we used last year because that was just good stuff. Lamb roast cooked in the slow cooker with garlic and rosemary.

We’re both really looking forward to dinner this month. Next month we’ve already got potato soup in homemade bread bowls (we’ve tried several potato soup recipes but we’re still looking for one we both like, and I’ve never made bread bowls before) and spicy pesto meatballs on the calendar. The 30 Minute book also has several variations of stir fry. We tried and really liked one of them, might be time to try another (good use of chicken).