So...whats for dinner?

Was there a football game? I was throwing popcorn at season 6 of Downton Abbey. I hadn't noticed....

Susan, your ryes are gorgeous!

Auntienance, ditto with your English muffin loaf. I I can see where that would make an excellent bread for French toast. I assume there's lots of nooks to sop up the egg mixture. Yum!

Carole, your salad sounds amazing!

Tonight is leftover chicken Parmesan, and I'll make saffron risotto. I plan on making arancini with the left over risotto tomorrow

I love rye bread - love it, love it, love it! Can you tell I love it?  Those are so pretty!  I want one!  I have only ever had an English muffin, but not the bread - does it taste the same and have the same density?  I regularly baked bread in college because it was cheaper, but I should get back into it again.  You ladies are bread baking champs - the photos are awesome!

luvmygoats: (whispers) I won't tell anyone about the TV dinners. Don't worry.

MinusTwo: mustard with the roast beef on pumpernickel?

My rye breakfast includes one thin slice of rye bread, toasted, and one wedge of La Vache Qui Rie original cheese with 16 ounces of water. I tried "real" cheese, several varieties, but my stomach simply can not handle an intensely flavored cheese while I am swallowing chemo at the same time. My preference would be a nice Gruyere, or even a blander Emmentaler. The goal is to keep this stuff in my stomach, so my stomach gets to make these decisions.

I wanted a supper with variety and didn't have the energy to create a gazillion components, so we had take out from one of our local schwarma spots. We split a kofta plate which had three koftas, a few grilled vegetables, rice and a huge cucumber salad, a small lentil soup, a side of tabouleh [not for you Lacey, all parsley], hummus, garlic sauce, and it came with pita, tahini sauce and a hot sauce. There is enough left for one more serving. Amazing really. Based on the number of packets of utensils they gave is. the schwarma folks thought this was a meal for one! The meal satisfied my need for a variety of textures and flavors. Since I was able to do 10 hrs of billable work today, I don't feel badly about spending $20 on dinner!

Oh... I cut into the freshly made rye bread so I could wrap and freeze, and the crumb is just about perfect! I will start using one of the small boules tomorrow. Flavor is the final test.

*susan*

Bedo - Not your kind of dinner. Salisbury steak/mashed potatoes. Heavy meat - almost cowboy stuff. A better step up from Swansons. I used to take a Marie Callenders every night when I was doing hospital nursing.

Eggplant parm in oven. Smells good. Eggplant parm and a hockey game. Great together. DH has decided he will not eat eggplant. Shame I like it. He unpacked the groceries yesterday so he knows I bought a cauliflower head. Hmm - wonder what he thought of that.

Minus - I have not seen the Orange Julius refridge jello. DH asked why we had so many jello packages around, I told him they were left over from all that tooth stuff that seems to have resolved itself. Funny I was just looking at a can of mandarin oranges and thought "jello".

Susan - so glad you found a wonderful dinner. I love La Vache Qui Rit cheese. Can you tell I googled it haha? The best stuff smeared on crackers.

I skipped lunch today at work so I left a few minutes early....105 minutes from work to home...sigh....no wrecks or other unusual circumstances...just a long way on crowded roads.

Sharon has her Jenny Craig food (she's lost 7 or 8 pounds so far) and DD had eaten already, so I "nuked" a couple of potatoes. A tiny bit of real butter and some of the Artisan brand Alder smoked salt, a cup of coffee and I'm good. So, Luv, don't worry about the TV dinner. :-)

yummy stuff everyone! The breads looked so good.

I just had my leftover pork tenderloin. I kept it in the pan sauce of red current jelly and balsamic and heated it up for a couple min. Baked a potato. That was supper. I Froze the rest for a stirfry in the future. Even reheated it was tender.

I hope everyone is ok on the East Coast. Got clobbered over there! We haven't had a lot yet. Just what we had couple of weeks ago. . Dodged a big one this time. There was a pic of the airport in NY. You could only see the tail of the planes over the snow. That's a lot of snow. Yuck.

Much love.

auntienance, I'm so sorry about your dad. That must've been very scary for him and for you. Thank God he didn't hurt himself. My dad is 87, and I stay with him during the winter in Ohio. It is very difficult to watch a parent get older and vulnerable.

I made arancini this morning with the left over risotto, and gave the majority to my cousin and his family. My dad woke up with a cold, so I'm going to make matzoh ball soup with chicken, noodles and veggies. He doesn't have an appetite, so hopefully I can get him to drink a couple of Ensures

Nance, I'm glad your dad didn't injure himself with the fall. How far away is he? In driving time.

DH is going to a woodworkers' guild meeting tonight so he will eat his warmed over leftovers from Sunday dinner for his night meal. Rice and gravy and roast pork. I'll make him a salad if he wants one. I will probably eat the small container of leftover chicken salad from last night and maybe some warmed up turnip greens.

The chicken salad was kind of a waldorf salad with chicken. Diced roasted chicken, apple, celery and walnuts, raisins and small cubes of cheddar. Dressing was small amt. of mayo and sour cream. Foundation for the salad was romaine and avocado slices. White balsamic sprinkled on mine, brown balsamic on dh's.

I cooked a huge pot of turnip greens on Friday. A big bundle of the greens lured me right in. $2.50 and very fresh. I had a bowl for lunch today with hot pepper vinegar and they are good. Greens call for corn bread but I shall ignore the call.

Bedo, is your vacuuming robot a rumba? I talked to a woman recently who got a rumba for Christmas and she loves it. I'm thinking about getting one for a birthday present for myself in March. Or asking for it. Same thing. I think my floors would be much cleaner than they are now. I love the idea of the little disk returning to its charging station!

ChiSandy, I was liking you until you mentioned having a housekeeper. Now that liking is turning to jealousy! Bob sounds like a keeper.

Susan, I'm relieved that so far you have an interest in eating. I've never particularly liked rye bread but have only eaten it on sandwiches in restaurants. Like reuben sandwiches. Your home-made rye is probably very good. I doubt I had eaten rye bread at all until I ate a reuben sandwich and that was probably in my 30's. Background figures into our tastes. When I was a child, my mother made white flour yeast bread and biscuits and cornbread. Bought white bread, the kind you can squish into a ball, was a treat and much preferred over the home-made bread. Now it's the home-made bread that's a treat.

Carole, I am the only person in the house who likes Rye Bread. Making Rye Bread feels a bit selfish, to be honest, since no one else will ever eat it. I take over the kitchen; flour is everywhere; the brotforms sit out drying and taking up valuable counter space. I grew up in NYCity eating food from Jewish delis. My mother, the quintessential WASP was amazed by the food in NY after a lifetime of living in Boston [18 yrs, haha!] with bland Yankee food. My first solid food was liverwurst for goodness sakes. When we moved back to Boston I was devastated to not find pastrami on rye with mustard and all my other favorite foods. It might be a "what you grew up eating" thing? I have not been adding caraway seeds since I am considering these breads to be a breakfast bread. [My mother did not allow any of the squishy white breads in our house. We had to go to a friend's house to enjoy the making of white bread balls.]

My Costco does not have frozen cherries, but Shaw's does? I don't recall seeing them there. I do buy frozen wild blueberries there. I will look more carefully next time I have to head there. It is a store that I rarely enter.

The chicken was a bit undercooked tonight. Quite disappointing. He threw it back on the grill, but I didn't get quite enough to eat. I got too hungry before dinner and was overwhelmed by nausea. Clearly, I need to have some strategies in place for another high quality snack if this happens again. The green salad turned into a tomato, red onion, goat cheese salad dressed with Greek red wine vinegar and olive oil, placed on top of a bed of lettuce. We purchased a boneless chicken breast at the store today and put it in the kids' fridge. Guess what they are eating for dinner? Score one for the parental units!

*susan*

Nance and hsant, I do hope that your fathers feel better. Always scary to get the middle of the night calls.

I never really embraced rye bread growing up. I think it was my dislike of caraway seeds, which I think ruin Irish soda bread, too. My father was a New Yorker and loved rye bread...as does DH who loves all things NY deli. You may recall that he sent Katz's salamis to all of our relatives a few Christmases ago.

Carole, I've pretty much avoided artificial sweeteners in the past few years, switching to stevia, which I am hoping is not so unhealthful as those chemicals are reported to be. I wish I could tolerate drinking coffee unsweetened, but I find the bitter taste intolerable. I am also finding that I am developing more of a sweet tooth as I get older....not a good thing! Oh...I must check out turnip greens.

Today I had lunch with one of my favorite former co-workers. We both had BLTs and I made it weird by having it on raisin bread ( purely because the server offered that as one of the bread options, and I thought why not experiment?!). Well, it was okay, but I will probably not mix my sweet with savory in that way again. I do adore raisin bread....and apparently so does one of the cooks at the restaurant who saw this odd creation and decided he wanted one too. LOL

Tonight DH was in Cambridge so I didn't cook....and even worse, I ate three large squares of peanut crunch. Never had a bite of anything dinner-like. See, Minus, you often do much better than I at self dinner prep

Susan, I think I recently saw a recipe for tabbouleh that used something different than parsley. I was excited since my next door neighbor is a great middle eastern cook and I always miss being able to dig into the colorful tabbouleh she makes. I must search out that recipe.

Tomorrow nite I am on my own for dinner again, so will try to actually have dinner!

Thursday we are heading out to Stockbridge again for a few days for DH's board meetings so we will eat very well and enjoy the beauty of the home we stay in with the amazing art collection it holds, and its pastoral surroundings. Even in the bleak winter it is beautiful.

Thank you friends for the dad wishes. It's nice to have a group of folks who understand.

Sandy, don't be embarrassed, if I could justify it to myself, I'd have a housekeeper in a minute! It would have been especially helpful when I was working. I thought when I retired, my house would become spotless. Ha! I have come to realize that I am an unenthusiastic housekeeper, no matter what. The only spotless things are the kitchen work surfaces. (I'm afraid the floor usually has flour on it lol) Fortunately, DBIL and DSIL are coming Friday for the weekend so (as usual) I am motivated to clean. It's a good thing that they visit regularly.

Because someone mentioned chicken parm, that's what we're having for dinner. I'll make some fresh angel hair as a side and a salad.

I use sweet leaf organic stevia packets in place of sugar. Stevia is not an artificial sweetener. It'sderived from the Stevia plant.

Tonight is leftover matzoh ball chicken noodle soup and I will also make mashed potatoes for my dad. It's about all he can tolerate with his cold.

For myself, I picked up some gorgeous scallops. Three of them are the orange females. Rarely do I see even one orange scallop, and to find three...well, couldn't pass that up. I will sear them in a combo of olive oil and butter, and steam some asparagus as my side.

lacey - your post prompted me to look up Stevia farming - very interesting!  Grown in sunny wet climates - sounds like Florida!  I should start a Stevia farm for the ladies of the So What's for Dinner thread!  You need less of it due to its inherent sweetness and it uses far less water and land than farming for sugar (beet and cane) does!

Tonight I am browning some chicken/spinach sausages and red peppers, adding Mia's tomato and basil sauce and serving over angel hair, with an iceberg wedge with blue cheese and crumbled bacon, and a lot of black pepper.  Having some pretty intense back pain so going the easy route - even the bacon is cooked and crumbled from the broken freezer debacle - just have to take it out of the new freezer and gently nuke it.  Just ironed a shirt for DH for tomorrow and then had to lay down for a minute!  Not having fun....