What's For Dinner? Week 4

{Week of August 20-26}

A picture of my weekly vegetable share is always the start of each dinner post because that is how I determine my menu plan each week! I spread it out to survey the contents and take the picture, but then it all gets wrapped into plastic grocery bags and stored in our two refrigerators depending on what's getting used first. (We have a second, old refrigerator out in our garage that serves as our overflow at times.)

So here is the vegetable share we picked up from our CSA farmers on August 16th:

Contents: Leeks, kale, parsley, 4 carrots, 4 beets, 1 red onion, 1 zucchini, purple broccoli, red & orange cherry tomatoes, 3 sweet banana peppers, 4 ears corn on the cob.

My first thought when surveying this bag was that Will was going to be so excited for the red beets! He doesn't eat them plain, but he loved those red beet pancakes and we've talked about doing red beet cupcakes if we got any more of them. The second thing I was psyched about were those cherry tomatoes and I used them immediately as I wrote about in last week's dinner post. And the carrots went into muffins and pancakes and salads.

Before we left for Traverse City, I prepped a dish that I could easily put into the oven when we came home in the early evening on Monday so I wouldn't have to cook that night. I made it on Friday night and we ate it on Monday. Our CSA newsletter always has recipe suggestions for that week's vegetable share and so I tried their suggestion of Chicken-Stuffed Peppers using those sweet banana peppers.
They were okay. A little bland - could use something to kick up the flavor - but seemed to taste better the next day as leftovers in my lunch.

Chicken-Stuffed Peppers

3 sweet banana peppers

1 egg

1/2 cup salsa
1 1/2 cups shredded cooked chicken breast
1/3 heaping cup soft bread crumbs

1/4 cup cooked long grain rice (I totally forgot to even put this in!)
1 cup meatless spaghetti sauce, divided
-Cut tops off peppers and cut lengthwise removing seeds and veins. In a large bowl, combine the egg salsa, chicken, bread crumbs and rice. Spoon into peppers.
Coat a 13x9 baking dish with cooking spray. Spread 1/2 cup spaghetti sauce in the pan. Place peppers over sauce. Spoon remaining sauce over top of stuffed peppers. Cover and bake at 350 for 30-60 minutes just until peppers are tender. (I think I only did 30 minutes.)

The same night that I prepped the stuffed peppers, I also roasted three of the beets and pureed them for our cupcakes the next week. Then Monday after the kids went to bed, I made the cupcakes and waited till nap time the next day to frost them for dessert on Tuesday. The batter was the same fuchsia color that the pancake batter was. But after baking, they actually looked just like a typical brown muffin with just a hint of red.

The frosting, however, also contains pureed beets and so there was still a fuchsia colored top on the muffin! I love using beets to naturally achieve this color, rather than food coloring.

Tuesday, I took the day off to spend with the kids and do a few odds and ends at home since I was gone all weekend. We went to the library and the park in the morning and then, while they napped, I prepped Gwyneth Paltrow's Grilled Chicken with Peach BBQ Sauce and Weelicious's Grilled Corn and Red Pepper Salad for dinner. I used my open-face panini grill to prep the vegetables for the salad.

When they woke from their nap, the kids got to come along with me to pick up the next vegetable bag! This is the first time either of them have come for a pick up since I usually just swing by after work. They got to see Diane and another farm helper and I told the kids that these are the farmers that are growing our food! I love being able to tell them that and have them realize that our food comes from an actual family farm and that there are actual people that grow it. It gives a lot more meaning and appreciation for the food we eat. The pick up location is all the way out at UT's campus in one of the parking lots so it was quite a drive on a day that I'm not already working out that way.

When we came home from the pick up, I grilled the chicken and we were ready to eat dinner!

And after dinner, it was cupcake time!

The kids ate them outside without shirts on for fear of staining. And then it was straight into the tub! {Side note: Sophie always looks like a little rag-a-muffin by evening time with her hair all disheveled and her clothes and body just screaming for a bath. I don't know how she gets so much dirtier than Will ever did, but she definitely requires her daily bath, along with several mini-clean-ups in between!}

Scrumptious!

Red beet lipstick??

After Craig saw the kids eating cupcakes, he asked why I never make him any special desserts anymore. That is such a crock! Because whenever I do make desserts, they sit on the counter and he forgets about them and only eats them if I serve it to him. In any case, it had been a little while since Will and I made some chocolate chip cookies and Craig said he was in the mood for some brownies... so I made some brownies in addition to our cupcakes. The cupcakes are really just for the kids anyway and I froze most of them 'cause I know they won't get eaten quickly enough. Now I'm just pulling them out of the freezer as needed.

Here's the brownie recipe I used (sorry, no pic). They're very rich. I think the three sticks of butter between the brownie and the frosting could have something to do with that. ;)

Mix 1 cup soft butter, 2 cups sugar, 1/3 cup cocoa. Stir in 4 eggs. Add 1 1/2 cups flour, 2 tsp vanilla, 1/4 tsp salt and 1 1/2 cups chopped nuts (optional - Craig doesn't like them). Stir; pour into greased 1" deep baking sheet (not a 13x9). Bake at 350 for 20 minutes, or until done. Cover with 1# mini marshmallows and bake for 3 minutes (I omitted this step and just frosted them, but they're very good with the marshmallows too). Add frosting: 1 2/3 cup powdered sugar, 1/2 cup butter, 1/3 cup cocoa, 1/3 cup canned evaporated milk.

Pure decadence.

One of the things we received in our vegetable bag on the 23rd were a pound of green and yellow beans. So even though most of the things don't get used till the following week, occasionally there will be items that I do use immediately. Craig wanted to order pizza on Wednesday since Vito's has been doing $6 larges on Tuesdays and Wednesdays throughout the month of August. So I made up a quick green bean and tomato salad (Smitten Kitchen) to go along side and it was PHENOMENAL!

Oh! And I want to show you one of my exciting new kitchen tools! It's a food scale!!! I love it and it's so sleek and slim. Did I mention awhile back that I purchased a food mill from Williams Sonoma to make some tomato sauce with all our garden tomatoes? Well I ended up finding a tomato sauce recipe that doesn't require a food mill and I decided to exchange the mill for a food scale since I've wished on several occasions that I owned one.

Just a simple on/off/zeroing button and a smooth surface that easily wipes clean.

For the green bean salad, I needed 1# of green beans and 1# of cherry tomatoes. This scale is going to come in handy for so many recipes that call for weight measurements, i.e. that tomato sauce I just linked above.

I snapped and rinsed the beans...

...and I just used chopped, regular tomatoes instead of cherry tomatoes since that's what I had on hand. This dressing is so simple and so delicious!! I could eat this for a meal - easy. I also ate less pizza because of it. :)

When I was making those stuffed peppers (above), I cooked some chicken breast to shred for the filling and ended up with a whole chicken breast left over. I also had every other ingredient on hand to make my favorite Chinese Chicken Salad, so I did that one evening and packed it for lunches the rest of the week. I freakin' love this stuff!

Oh, and here's one more kitchen accessory I just got a new set of. I bought my original set (looks just like these) from Sur La Table because that's where Giada de Laurentiis's Food Network set list said I could find them. ;) (You can find the set list for all the shows on their website.) I LOVE them. They look so vintage and I love when they clink together. But once, when Will was baking with me, he dropped my measuring spoons and the tablespoon broke. I was so sad and he felt so bad. But Craig ended up finding them for me on Amazon and they were cheaper than my original set! So now I have one complete set and one without a tablespoon. :)

More kale in my bag last week! Needed another new idea to use it...

Enter Bon Appetit's recipe for Cheese Tortellini Soup with Cannellini, Kielbasa and Kale.

Again, this is more of a wintry soup, but we didn't mind. I served it with crusty bread rubbed with garlic, cheese slices and fruit.

Kid's plate this night:

Friday night, we grilled steaks and had several veggie side dishes. Craig had been asking for sliced tomatoes with mozzarella, basil, balsamic vinegar & oil. I just kept it simple with shredded mozz instead of fresh sliced 'cause I had it on hand, along with all the other ingredients. No recipe for that... just layer and drizzle. I also made Weelicious Twice Baked Potatoes with our CSA potatoes and broccoli and we ate leftover corn salad.

Mmm. :)

And that concluded our week!