Monday

Tonight we had a quick and easy Chinese-ish dinner: spicy Szechuan noodles (dan dan mian) from CI's international cookbook and a small salad. The salad dressing was an easy five-ingredient Epicurious find: a couple teaspoons minced shallots, 2 Tbsp rice vinegar, 1 Tbsp vegetable oil, 2 tsp. minced ginger, and 1/4 tsp. toasted sesame oil. It was delicious even on very American green leaf lettuce, with orange sections, sliced almonds, and black sesame seeds. I'll definitely make this again with spinach, as the original recipe suggested.

The noodles I had made before at least once. You can use either fresh Chinese noodles or just dried pasta (linguine), which any couponer always has on hand. A little briefly marinated ground pork is browned over high heat in a skillet, then a fair amount of ginger and garlic are briefly sauteed with it. You then add a sauce made of several ingredients, mainly peanut butter and chicken broth along with soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, red pepper flakes, and oyster sauce, and let it thicken for about 3 minutes. Off heat you drizzle a little sesame oil into the mix, and that's it. To break up the beige motif, and also for their nice flavor, you garnish with scallions. I crumbled part of a small Chinese dried pepper on top, because this dish really isn't very spicy at all. But it has a nice complex flavor and is about as easy as a stir-fry can get.

snowed in

M has been home all day all week because of the freak snowstorm, so I've been doing lots of cooking for us. It's been fun. Tuesday for lunch I made New England clam chowder, with some necessary modifications (didn't think to buy celery before the storm hit) and the last of the delicious frozen CI Anytime Dinner Rolls with a side salad (my boring old standby: red leaf lettuce, baby carrots, and sunflower seeds in a slightly variable vinaigrette). For dinner I made the Szechuan pork, red pepper, and scallion stir fry that I first tried in November and loved. This time it was markedly bland; not sure what happened. My garlic wasn't fresh so I didn't put quite as much in as called for, since peeling and getting the green sprouts out of the middle before pressing is not what I call fun. M still said he'd eat it again, even like that. It was healthy and something different at least.

Wednesday for lunch I baked a cheesy chicken bundle from the freezer (something we made at Emily's in November) and with it we had leftover tomato soup. I was busy making more pumpkin muffins and a light chocolate Bundt cake from CI's Best Light Recipe, which was featured in one of the ATK weekly newsletter things. It did not disappoint. Better chocolate flavor than many cakes I've made, and though it seemed a tad dry today, with whipped cream and cherries it's still great. I'll probably freeze half before it dries out too much. It's nice for once being able to leave a cake out at room temperature. And given that it is relatively light, and has no icing, it makes a very nice everyday chocolate cake indeed.

Today I served up the last of the clam chowder for lunch. For dinner it will also be leftovers, from last night's mediocre pasta meal. Mostly so because I used the Garden Delight pasta which needs a very strong and/or rich sauce to cover up the (obviously) vegetal flavor. However, since it is healthy M doesn't mind it too much, and said the same thing last night as he did about the stir fry—not going to win any awards, but perfectly fine as a home cooked dinner. The sauce was the simple meat sauce from CI, which I made exactly per instructions (and which I know I've made before), and I think it usually gets better with age. It's not bad at all as an all-purpose sauce; I'm just spoiled by the tomato cream sauce I've made from them, as well as (especially) the slow-cooked pork sauce with wine, which I need to make the next time pork ribs are even marginally on sale (not altogether rational, I know, but I have to feel like I'm being frugal most of the time...).