What I'm Eating

I mentioned in my last post that I've actually become something of a cook over the past year or so. I still don't cook dinner every single night, but I feel like cooking dinner every night would be overkill anyway. There are just two of us here, we don't need elaborate meals every night of the week. Still, we seem to be getting into a pretty good meal routine around here. I've been cooking from a recipe about twice a week, sometimes more. Usually the recipes make four portions, so I eat one portion for dinner and save the next one for lunch or dinner the next day. Penn, being the manly man he is, usually eats both of his servings the first night (P.S.-I occasionally try to imagine how we're going to afford to feed a family, particularly if we end up having boys with Penn's appetite...I think I'm literally going to be eaten out of house and home one of these days!).

We also usually go out for a restaurant meal one night a week, typically looking for specials online to offset some of the cost of eating out. I love trying different restaurants, but my restaurant habit is an easy way to blow through money really quickly, especially around here where there are so many appealing options. One of the things Penn has started doing is buying restaurant gift certificates online. A lot of websites let you pay $10 for a $25 gift certificate. Paying $10 for $25 worth of food isn't bad at all! And sometimes he gets even better deals than that. Recently he was able to buy several gift certificates for a dollar! Tonight, for example, we went out to a sushi restaurant using a $25 gift certificate that Penn got online for only a dollar. Awesome! The restaurants offering gift certificates aren't always the best, but they're always decent, and we've managed to find a gem or two that way. I'm also thrilled every time a local magazine or paper publishes a "Best Cheap Eats" guide. Whenever those come out I read them carefully and make a list of cheap and highly-rated restaurants in our neighborhood (yes, I make an actual list; it's a Word Document called "Restaurants to Try"). Also, I pay attention to local events like Restaurant Week, where restaurants that are normally way out of my budget offer inexpensive specials. Last week was a Restaurant Week, actually (there are 2-3 a year) and I got a $10 lunch at a normally much-more-expensive tapas restaurant. Over the summer our town would do "Cheap Date Night" on Mondays, with all the restaurants on the town square offering cheap meals. One night Penn and I went to an Italian restaurant and got two Caesar salads, two bowls of pasta, a shared dessert, and a bottle of wine for $25. Can't beat that!

So, yeah. About twice a week I cook, once a week we go on a restaurant date, and usually once a week we meet up with friends to do pub trivia and snack at the bar instead of having a real dinner. That leaves 2-3 nights a week where Penn and I fend for ourselves. But even on those nights I've become a bit more ambitious. I'll do quesadillas or pasta or simple soups or salads. Basically, I do things that are ready in 10 minutes or less that I know Penn wouldn't be particularly interested in. Like the other night I made a single serving Moroccan vegetable stew that I read about in my Fitness magazine. That's something that Penn just isn't going to eat (vegetarian AND from a "healthy" magazine? Heaven forbid!). I do feel like it's sort of my job to broaden his culinary horizons and I love nothing more than to make something, watch him scarf it down happily, and then say to him, "Surprise! That dish was from one of my healthy living magazines!" With that said, I'm not going to torture the poor guy. He's not picky at all (thank God!) and he'll eat anything I make with a smile on his face, but I know what he likes and there are certain things (things like whole wheat pasta, for instance) that I'm not going to subject him to because I know he wouldn't really enjoy it.

Anyway, because I'm thinking about meal planning tonight for some reason, and because I know that I'm not the only one looking for easy things to make for dinner, I'm going to share a couple of recipes that have worked well for me lately:

These feta and banana pepper turkey burgers from Allrecipes.com. First of all, allrecipes.com is a pretty awesome website. Penn's sister told me about it a few months back, and my favorite thing about it is that you can enter ingredients and the website gives you recipes with the ingredients you want (you can also get it to avoid ingredients you don't want). I'm sure there are other websites that have the same feature, but I just think it's amazing. If something in my fridge is about to spoil or, say, I bought a random product for a recipe and don't know what to do with the rest of it, I type that ingredient into the recipe generator and it gives me options. That's how I found this recipe, actually. There was a great sale on ground turkey and Penn bought several pounds of it and then I couldn't figure out what to do with it. Anyway, these burgers are a great option for ground turkey. I thought the flavor would be too bland because of the lack of spices and I thought the patties wouldn't stick together, but no. It worked perfectly and made for a really juicy, flavorful burger. Penn seems to like everything I cook (he at least pretends to!) but he has asked when I'm going to make these again a couple of times, something he doesn't always do with other recipes.

Also, this tomato soup was super easy and will be really good to make throughout the winter. I LOVE the combination of lemon juice and tomato juice, so I thought this was delicious.

Speaking of soup, I may have already mentioned this here before but I loved this one: Greek wedding soup. It turns out I'm the sort of cook who always likes experimenting with new things rather than trying to perfect any one specialty dish (surprising, huh?!). As a result, I rarely re-make a dish, even if it was really delicious. This is one I think I'll go back to this winter, though, just because it was so tasty and Penn and I both love Greek flavors.

Just today I made these turkey thyme patties (to get rid of the last of that ground turkey!) and they were yummy. My only complaint was that this recipe dirtied up a lot of dishes: two skillets, a saucepan, a cutting board, a potato peeler, potato masher, a spatula...Ideally, I'm more of a one pan or skillet sort of cook, but I think this recipe was worth the sink full of dirty dishes. Also, I still get quite proud of myself when I can handle 2-3 items working on the stove at one time. I once thought that would be beyond me but, as you can see, I've branched out quite a bit from my old pasta-and-appetizers only abilities.

I feel like I should inform you that not EVERY recipe I cook comes from Rachael Ray or Allrecipes, it's just that these are the recipes I can link to on the internet. It wouldn't be fair for me to tell you about delicious meals from cookbooks I can't link to, now would it?

Oh, and I also feel like it's only fair to inform you that sometimes Penn also cooks for me. He makes a very good steak, and the only cheesy scrambled eggs I've ever actually enjoyed. It's just that it turns out that now that I have a spacious kitchen and someone to cook for, I really like cooking, and Penn prefers to do the eating and do the dishes, so why mess with a nice, natural breakdown of tasks?