Ditalini’s meat sauce<\/a> gets better the longer it sits in the fridge or the freezer.<\/p>\nFriday our friend Rudy arrives for the weekend.\u00a0 He’s taking us out to dinner, so I’m off the hook.\u00a0 This weekend?\u00a0 Don’t ask me to think that far ahead!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I retired a few days ago, so Ditalini has put me in charge of the kitchen.\u00a0 We fend for ourselves at breakfast and lunch but I’ve been cooking dinner at night.\u00a0 Readers of this blog, if there are any, will have noted my preference for one-dish meals, so this week’s menu should come as no surprise: Monday, chicken noodle soup Tuesday, pad thai with chicken and shrimp Wednesday, 15-bean soup with ham Thursday, leftover sauce with pasta Friday, roast Rudy Monday’s chicken noodle soup was easy and good.\u00a0 Ditalina made her little chicken dinner a couple of weeks ago.\u00a0 Since she had to boil a chicken, she made stock and saved it.\u00a0 I used two cups of Ditalini’s stock, two cans of store-bought chicken stock, chopped onion, celery, and garlic, two cut-up chicken breasts, and a pinch of salt.\u00a0 It all went into the pot together.\u00a0 I brought the soup to a boil, then put it on simmer, covered, for a couple of hours.\u00a0 For the noodles, I used campanelle, tossing in about half a pound for the last 30 minutes of simmering.\u00a0 Mmm, comfort food! Tuesday.\u00a0 I wish I knew how to make pad thai from scratch.\u00a0 There’s a Thai cookbook somewhere in the house, so I’ll put that on my to-do list.\u00a0 For Tuesday’s meal I used a package, which provided the rice noodles and sauce.\u00a0 I supplemented that with chopped scallions, half a thinly-sliced serrano pepper, a handful of snow peas, chopped cooked chicken from Ditalini’s freezer stash, a dozen peeled shrimp, one scrambled egg, some bean sprouts, and dry roasted peanuts.\u00a0 I stir-fried the veggies, chicken, and shrimp in a wok, added the cooked noodles and sauce and stir-fried a little more, then added the scrambled egg (cut into squares) and bean sprouts.\u00a0 We sprinkled peanuts on top and served it with lime wedges, and it was pretty damned good, even if it did come out of a package.\u00a0 If I do this again, though, I won’t used cooked chicken, because it breaks up quickly when you stir fry it. As a side dish, I sliced a little red onion, one whole cucumber, and the other half of that serrano pepper.\u00a0 I put it in a bowl and let it soak all day in the fridge in an equal-parts mixture of sugar, vinegar, and water. Wednesday.\u00a0 After dinner last night I put the dried beans in a pot and let them soak while we slept.\u00a0 This morning I chopped up an onion and three cloves of garlic, drained and rinsed the beans, and put everything back in the pot with two cans of vegetable stock and a little water (enough to cover the beans).\u00a0 I added a smoked ham hock, five or six whole black peppercorns, and a bay leaf.\u00a0 I threw away the packet of chili seasoning that came with the beans.\u00a0 I brought the beans to a rolling boil, reduced the heat to low, and covered the pot.\u00a0 I’ll let the beans cook a few hours, then add the slice of ham Ditalini has in the fridge, cut into small squares.\u00a0 That’ll be tonight’s dinner, and there’ll be leftovers. Thursday\u00a0\u2014 tomorrow \u2014 it’s leftover sauce with whatever pasta is handy.\u00a0 Ditalini’s meat sauce gets better the longer it sits in the fridge or the freezer. Friday our friend Rudy arrives for the weekend.\u00a0 He’s taking us out to dinner, so I’m off the hook.\u00a0 This weekend?\u00a0 Don’t ask me to think that far ahead!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[251],"class_list":["post-98","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cookblogging","tag-cookblogging"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pixFB-1A","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/cookblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/cookblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/cookblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/cookblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/cookblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=98"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/cookblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":451,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/cookblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98\/revisions\/451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/cookblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=98"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/cookblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=98"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/cookblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=98"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}