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Went to Chicago had awesome food and wine. I can't remember what I made Tuesday for dinner. I made Tuna steaks on Wednesday. I served it with 4 sauces. Sirrcha and mayo, soy, an herb mustard pesto I made a while ago and a hoison-wasabi sauce (with soy). I also made quinoa like sushi rice, with vinegar. It was really good. I will use that application again for more grains.
Thursday I made etouffe with shrimp and chicken. I browned the chicken thighs and removed then I sauteed and lightly carmelized celery, carrot, onion and red bell pepper. I added flour and got it a little golden brown and then added beer, Old Speckled Hen. I reduced that a bit and added crushed tomatoes then put the chicken back in. I put in two bay leaves and simmered it for an hour and a half. I took out the chicken and let the sauce reduce. At the very end I put the chicken back in to warm up and added the shrimp at a low temperature to cook. I served it with sushi rice. Yum. I think I will make etouffee ravioli with what's left.
Saturday was not as big of a hit. I marinated flank steak in garlic, Italian herb seasoning (I made), oo and red wine. I wrapped it around grilled egglant, sauteed mushrooms, pepperocini, parsley and a little parmesan. I browned it and braised it. Like a Matambre, an Argentinian recipe. It was good, but I should have simply grilled the steak and used the reduced marinade as a sauce. But that would have been too easy. I served it with quinoa mixed with eggplant, mushrooms, red wine vinegar and goat cheese. I red in a cookbook this weekend that vinegar should be used like salt or pepper and adjusted at the end of dish just like salt or pepper.
Tuesday I remember aspargus roasted in duck fat. What was the meat???
Sunday was a pizza. I finally got a crispy crust, at least for a ww crust.
i think it was lamb chops Tuesday night. Simple prep and grilled. Yum. No starch.
OK, Sunday was pizza with eggplant and mushroom from Saturday, pepperocini and this awesome Virginia ham I got from FD. I put shredded mozz and jack cheese on it and topped it with garlic powder and my italian seasoning blend. Yum. It was probably one of the best I have made, in recent memory.
This week I have chicken thighs marinating in the freezer with store bought sauces: curry, mexican and asian. I still have ravioli and smoked salmon in the freezer, too. Maybe a meatless dish this week. . . doubtful.

Yesterday was a snow day, so I made chilli. I have made it throughout the years varying the way my mom made it: onions (cut in half then wide slices), canned stewed tomatoes, ground beef and kidney beans. Yesterday I made it perfectly. I sauteed onions, portabella mushrooms and red bell pepper with salt. I added 90% lean ground beef and a lot of chili powder and cumin and more salt. When the meat was cooked through I added about a half a box of beef broth, reduced to nearly a syrup. I then added San Marzano tomatoes crushed by hand and more chili powder and cumin. I let that cook all together for about an hour then added black beans, adjusted seasoning and cooked about 1/2 hour more. I adjusted the salt at the end. It turned out great.

Last night's dinner was lamb chops, got them a perfect medium rare, marinated in lemon zest, lemon juice, garlic, evoo, thyme and black pepper. The marinade is Ellie Krieger from FN, but I substituted thyme and black pepper for oregano. I liked it. I used S&P on lamb before grilling. I made a mustard mint sauce on the side from Rachel Ray: mint, stone ground mustard, ww vin, honey and evoo. I was able to balance the salt and sweet, but it turned out very vinegary. It was OK on the lamb and veg, better as a salad dressing. I won't make it again.
I also made roasted sweet potato, turnip, cippolini onion and cauliflower. I just added S&P and evoo. Roasted the veg for 45 minutes at 400degrees. I stirred them a couple times. They turned out good, I could have subtracted about 5 minutes in the oven. They weren't mushy, but on the verge. I didn't account for carryover. I was pleased with the taste. My favorite was sweet potato. Steve liked the turnip the best.

Saturday night's family meal was breaded veal scallopini, unremarkable, zucchini strands with thyme-butter, good (I will make again) and some rough cut round pasta from Sardinia I picked up at Essex Market. Laurent had made a truffle sauce with mushroom stock which, to me, saved the dinner since I had a little trouble with the veal. Cooking the breaded veal was like crepes. The first couple ones are disaster then thet progressively get better until you have one perfect one. I was unispired by the veal. I thought of making a roll-up, but it didn't seem worth it. It was not one of my better meat nights.

I also made a dessert, dulce de leche bread pudding. I made it A - Zed, as Laurent put it. I baked some sweet bread with orange zest in my bread maker (BTW I did make the seeded bread with whole wheat and bread flour, I had to make it twice. The first time it was a crumbly bunch of rock. The second time was better, a real loaf, but pretty dense. I think I am having problems with yeast amout and salt). It wasn't very sweet, but had a nice orange zest thing going. I used the recipe from Delish.com. I decreased it by a third, used the dulce de leche brought to me by Laurent's brother and sister-in-law from France, used half cream and half skim and no chocolate. I thought it was pretty good, it had a nice caramel flavor and crispy bits. A vanilla topping would have been nice. I would have melted choclate or vanilla icecream in the fridge for a topping if I had any. Maybe I could have added some salt, too.

Super Bowl Sunday I did some "football food".I have been wanting to do barbeque ribs for awhile, but I am not a huge fan of them so an opportunity would have to be right in my face to make them. They were on sale at FreshDirect. I used Neely's recipe and marinated them in a dry rub of paprika, sugar and onion powder for almost 24 hours and added Kim's spice rub and some extra salt to the ribs and baked them 3&1/2 hours at 275dgrees in the oven. The ends were a bit like jerky. The flavor was too sweet for me and only the fat was tasty to me. I researched how to cook them in the oven and the couple recipes I had were all low and slow with no instruction as to whether to wrap in foil or cover so I just left them exposed. Maybe next time I will cover with foil. I think that's what I may make for Easter in Boston. I have made nearly every dish for a crowd I can think of.

I also made a pretty healthy black bean salad with tomato, avocado, purple onion, lemon, chili and cumin powder and green Tabasco. I would have rather used lime, cilantro and jalapeno instead of lemon and powdered spices, but its too damn cold right now to run out and get those things. It was still good and it is a nice add to lettuce salad and smoked salmon. I love avocado!

Steve and I love Angelina's Pizza Bar. We have had good pizza and a good brunch. We sampled some new menu items. The smoked salmon pasta with a cream sauce was unremarkable, but it would appeal to the masses. The homemade pasta was a nice suprise, a little mushy, not quite done. Steve's spicy mussels with squid in pasta was a little tasteless and a little too hot. The mezza-luna (half pizza, half calzone, literally) was interesting. The good stuff was inside the calzone and the pizza part was just sauce and cheese, still tasty. The should fold the pizza part over the calzone.

Last night I made dinner in a crock pot. It has been a long time I have broken that out to actually cook in it and not just keep things warm. I browned one pound of boneless leg of lamb, placed it in the crock. Then I carmelized a carrot, couple celery stalks and two shallots (out of onions). I deglazed with some of the Bermuda sherry stuff and poured that over the lamb. I put the carmelized veg into cheese cloth with thyme, parsley, bay leaf, third of a head of garlic, black peppercorns, I think that's it. I put in two quarts of turkey stock, one of them was cut with some tomato puree, in the crock, poured a bag of dried garbanzo beans and five merguez sausages. I placed the cheesecloth bundle in and left for the day.
For dinner I threw out the cheesecloth bundle, strained the sauce and poured some caraway seeds over the lamb and beans. I reduced the sauce and boiled two strips of bacon in it to give it more meat flavor because it was very beany. I strained the sauce when it got full flavored (1/4 cup) and then whisked in dijon mustard. The dijon and the bacon took care of the beany flavor. I think next time I would soak the beans overnight, discard the water, then add to the pot.
The "Crockpot Cassoulet" turned out pretty good. Steve loved it. I need to find more meat for the leftovers.

I did not cook yesterday. Instead I went out to dinner at an Italian restaurant not too far from here. Been wanting to try it. No reservations, cash only. It was fabulous, wishing I had gone there sooner. I had a grilled calamari salad over couscous with pinenuts and raisins, not my favorite preparation of couscous, but it worked for this dish. No additional seasoning needed, that is a big deal. Steve had grilled octupus salad over chick peas and potatoes, he enjoyed it, I found it to not really go together, the chickpeas were hard, the potatoes soft, the octupus was good, his needed more seasoning.
The entrees were fantastic. I had a veal chop with polenta, roasted root vegetables, and broccoli rabe. The polenta was the best I have ever had. It was creamy and flavorful, quite suprising. The veal chop was done well, too. The root veg were great, no cliched sugar addition. The sweet potatoes were even inspiring and I am not much for sweet potatoes. I will be making these at home, salty. Broccoli rabe was good, not bitter. I will also be making the polenta (glad I got some last week). I think I will add mascarpone cheese.
Steve's dish was the better of the two. He had chicken rolitini stuffed with zucchini and provolone. The chicken was browned all over. It was suprisingly fantastic. I usually view chicken on menus as obligatory for the unadventurous palate. I will only order it if it is a novel production (I am a chicken-snob). I will be pounding out some chicken breasts before the month is out.

Whole wheat pizza dough. . .I know it would turn out better if I added some AP flour. Its just so much healthier and more filling 100% WW. I don't know that I will ever get a crispy WW crust. I have been thinking that I could make WW bread with some AP so it doesn't weigh a ton and added seeds: caraway, sesame, fennel, wheat germ, etc. It would add more fiber. It would be like those new multi grain tortilla chips that have less corn flour. I guess I could do the same with pizza dough.

I have been thinking about this. Whole Foods sells their own pizza dough. They can make a killing on that: flour, water, yeast, sugar and oil. Cheap, cheap, cheap to make! They also sell their own bread crumbs, a half quart = $4!!! I must research this more.

Anyhow, pizza was good: cheese, canadian bacon, pepperocini, artichoke hearts. Two pieces and that's all I need. I am getting used to eating less, hopefully it will show in my gut some day.

Four n'Friends had an interesting talk on Sunday. Many start up business questions answered. Now we just need to figure out what we are providing. We are going to do catering and food products, but we need to start somewhere, with something simple and the rest will come. I am still for Farinata and Hummus. I really think we need to focus on health, as well as, cultural diversity. We have to start somewhere and these two items, to me, are easy, different, appeal to a large demographic (with a boost from the health conscious and health compromised) amd taste good.

I am dragging my feet a little on the catering only because we have no logo to put on business cards and a website. Our service will be more marketable if it is more memorable, the name is great, but some people need a visual, too. Maybe four horizontal lines in red, blue, white and black or yellow. Maybe a fruit or veg w/ four seeds inside, a baguette four marks on top, a sun with four rings, four different symbols. Not sure.

I passed my Food Safety Course today. So, at least that is taken care of.