O hai. Apparently I have this blog? It’s been awhile, hasn’t it? I will try to remedy that soon, but for now, here is a post about our dinner tonight, written mostly to provide people that asked with links to the recipes.

First off, there is the pesto chicken. I pretty much followed this recipe for Baked Pesto Chicken from Kalyn’s Kitchen. I didn’t cut my chicken into strips, but gave the boneless breasts some gashes to let more pesto in. FYI, I’ve also made this with bone-in breasts. I pulled the skin off and again slashed them to let the juices in more and reduce cooking time a bit. I also didn’t brown the cheese. And I used a jarred pesto. Maybe someday I’ll make my own basil pesto when I finally grow some basil. I HAVE made garlic scape pesto before, so I’m not completely pesto-less in experience.

The roasted cauliflower was inspired by this recipe from Everybody Likes Sandwiches, but I used a slightly different seasoning. The original recipe called for cumin and sumac, but I happened to have some za’atar, which contains sumac, so I just used that. I roasted at a lower temperature as the chicken called for it, but bumped it up after taking the chicken out and gave them a chance to brown up a bit more as the chicken rested for a bit.

The couscous is just 1 cup of couscous to 1.5 cups of chicken broth. You bring it to a boil and then turn off the heat and let it go and then fluff it. I poured some of the pesto “sauce” over it as well so as not to let tasty juices go to waste. And there you have it!

Here’s a little round-up of some food we’ve had lately. I mentioned before that I’m using Paprika to help plan meals. It’s been great for keeping different recipes in mind to try. All of these are iPhone photos because that’s what I usually have handy. Someday I’ll attempt to return to more “styled” food photos with my “real” camera.

One night we had beef and snow peas, with sauteed bok choy. I ended up using skirt steak instead of flank because it was cheaper at the store and it was fine. I realized at the last moment that I didn’t have any “regular” soy sauce for the beef marinade and used black soy sauce instead. I think it made the beef a little too heavy (with the molasses flavor of the black soy sauce), but it was certainly edible. I REALLY need to find a good recipe to recreate beef bulgogi at home, as that is what we are usually craving. I could eat bok choy all day and I don’t know why I don’t buy it more. NOTE TO SELF. I was originally planning on doing baby bok choy, but Hannaford’s only had the large kind, so I just chopped it into smaller pieces. These are the sort of things that happen when you are used to being a Wegmans shopper. You just ASSUME that you will find baby bok choy.

I made this recipe on the recommendation of Shari and realized at the same time that I never actually ATE at Moosewood the whole time we lived in Ithaca. My vegan/vegetarian restaurant choice was more often the now-defunct ABC Cafe. Anyway, this, West Indian Red Beans & Coconut Rice, was good, although next time I will use dried beans to start. For some reason the “can” flavor of the beans was more noticeable to me although Joe did not seem to mind. I might also throw in some garam masala or something too to change things up. The coconut rice was great, as coconut rice usually is. I’ll definitely make this again, though, and Cecilia even ate a few spoonfuls of it (being a long-time fan of coconut rice for dessert), so that’s always a win.

I made this Butter Chicken recipe in the crockpot and it was pretty darn good, although I used the boneless, skinless breasts I had in the freezer. Next time I’ll do otherwise to get the extra flavor and fat in. Chicken in the crockpot is always kind of a gamble for me as it seems if you don’t shred it and mix it back into the sauce, it can be kind of watery-tasting and bland. But the sauce this created was flavorful and “good enough” for hitting the Indian spot without having to monitor it cooking. Have I mentioned that there are no Indian restaurants in town? I’m mostly familiar with the Syracuse/Ithaca/Troy options, but I actually haven’t eaten at any of the ones in Utica, though, so I’ll have to explore. Instead of rice, I paired this with Jamie Oliver’s Bombay Potatoes. I left the tomatoes out though as we already had that going on in the chicken and threw frozen peas in instead. The potato leftovers also ended up making two servings of what I dubbed “Samosa Frittata”. Indian-spiced potatoes, peas, eggs, and a handful of mozzarella (fusion cuisine!) and I was a happy camper. Behold potatoey goodness: