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Weekly Check In

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It's that time again - let's see how we did with our meal plan last week.

Meal 1 - Christmas lima beans with caramelized onions and bacon, spinach salad
I had been curious about heirloom beans and was poking around on the interwebs when I found the Rancho Gordo site. They have an almost rabid following and I decided to give one of their samplers a try. These are expensive beans, so I was hoping they would knock my socks off. Either beans are beans or I have a terribly unsophisticated palette, because I truly didn't notice much of a difference between these and other dried beans (now these beans and canned beans, no contest. The Rancho Gordo beans kick canned beans in the .... well, can). It is important to me to support small farms and it's VERY important to keep heirloom varieties around (we don't want another potato famine now, do we?), so I'll probably keep heirloom beans in the pantry along side the conventional dried beans. I would like to find a producer on the east coast though - know of one?

OK, enough of the heirloom bean talk. The actual dish we made was based on a recipe from thekitchn, which in turn was based on a recipe from the Rancho Gordo cookbook. And it was good. Really, how can you go wrong with bacon and caramelized onions? And the spinach salad was a traditional spinach salad with bacon, hard boiled egg and red wine vinaigrette. Delicious!

Meal 2 - Kale, potato and sausage soup, shredded carrots with tahini dressing
This soup was based on the Portuguese soup, caldo verde. It was ok, a little bland. I'm going to try it again with a few tweaks and if I like it, I'll share the recipe. The tahini dressing on the carrots is from Karen Solomon's book Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It. Honestly, this isn't my favorite cookbook and I don't make much from it, but this dressing recipe was worth the cost of the book alone. The dressing tastes just like Annie's green goddess dressing.

Meal 3 - Italian turkey sausage and onions over polenta, spicy coleslaw
We made this with the leftover sausage from the soup. A classic and very tasty. The spicy coleslaw was based on a recipe from the Alice Waters book Chez Panisse Vegetables.


Meal 4 - Red lentil bake, cabbage and corn salsa salad
The one meal that we didn't make. You'll see this on this week's menu.

Speaking of this week's menu, check back shortly to see what we'll be eating this week!


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