Sundays in the Kitchen

The glory of the Sunday fridge is undisputed.

If you’re friends with me on Facebook, you know that each Sunday I post a list of my Sunday achievements in the kitchen. Sunday mornings are my time to get up early, walk the dog on the beach while making my mental list of to-dos for the morning. By 8am, I’m at the grocery to pick up any last needed items for the week, and by 9am, I’m in the kitchen. My weekly goal is to have all breakfasts, lunches, snacks and 2 dinners for the week prepped by 1pm in the afternoon…sometimes I’m a little quicker, sometimes a little slower. The important thing is that nothing intrudes on this block of time.

A morning in the kitchen sets me up for a successful week at work, where all I have to do is grab breakfast, lunch and snacks from the fridge and toss it in my lunchbag on my way out the door. Having a couple of dinners prepped ahead, and Sunday dinner leftovers for another night make it easy to get dinner on the table quickly, even after a long day in the office.

When I’m done with cooking and prepping Sunday afternoons, there is nothing more glorious than opening the fridge and seeing that wall of storage containers and know that I’m ready for whatever the week ahead brings. Friends often ask how I plan and get all the cooking done each weekend, so here’s how the magic happens (of course, there really is no magic, just some Type A organizational mojo and a teensy bit of help from my younger years spent in professional kitchens as a prep cook).

Lunches, breakfasts and snacks live on the top shelf – red lentil soup, pesto quinoa salad, sliced jicama and bags of veggies for snacks

Breakfasts: 

• Baked oatmeal with with sour cherries (you can add any favorite fruit to this recipe – about 2 c of fresh fruit)
• Granola bars for mid-morning snack

Dinners: 

• Sunday: Mushroom Chorizo tacos w onions and bell peppers and jicama taco shells (similar to what I wrote for the Mushroom Council (client) – full recipe coming soon)
• Monday: Leftover red lentil soup w roasted red peppers and Italian sausage from last Sunday
• Tuesday: Grilled hamburgers, fresh sweet corn & cucumber salad
• Wednesday: Leftover mushroom chorizo tacos & kohlrabi slaw
• Thursday: Grilled Italian sausage & cabbage salad
• Friday: Fresh sweet corn pesto pasta with bacon and basil (make this NOW)

Lunches: 

• Green monster summer veggie quinoa salad with basil pesto vinaigrette
• Leftover red lentil soup with roasted red peppers and Italian Sausage

Snacks:

• Baggies of blanched fresh green beans and peeled and sliced carrots (I hate those slimy bags of baby carrots, and they’re 2-3x more expensive than whole carrots)
• Nectarines and apples from the farmer’s market
• Granola Bars

Second shelf: cabbage for salads, salsa for snacks, and fixins for chorizo mushroom tacos.

The Plan of attack:

Friday night: 

• Take inventory of pantry and fridge
• Menu planning, cruise blogs/Pinterest for inspiration
• Start the farmer’s market & grocery list

Saturday:

• Hit up the farmer’s market for local, fresh goodies
• Make a batch of quinoa (1 1/2 cups + 3 cups water + salt) & stash in the fridge
• Make granola bars (1 batch lasts us 2+ weeks) & stash in the fridge in a large storage container with parchment paper between layers
• Night: Prep the baked oatmeal by putting the oats in the almond milk/egg mixture to soak overnight in the fridge

Sunday: 

• 7am: Preheat the oven and bake the oatmeal. Walk the dog, bring the phone along to add to the grocery list on my list app.
• 8am: Let the oatmeal cool, and raid Whole Foods or Rogers Park Fruit Market for any items needed for the week
• 9am: Cooking begins…the trick here is to multi-task as much as possible for maximum efficiency – have something working in the oven or on the stovetop while you’re chopping. Turn on some upbeat tunes and be diligent in setting timers so nothing burns as you multitask.
  • Note: while you get down in the kitchen, this is a perfect time for your spouse/partner/SO to do some cleaning around the house
• 12pm: Done cooking, and time to relax – perhaps with my favorite margarita.

This morning’s session went something like this: 

• Preheat oven to broil.
  • Meanwhile: scoop baked oatmeal into storage containers for the week ahead & stash in fridge.
• Roast red bell peppers for quinoa salad, turning peppers every five minutes.
  • Meanwhile: boil water and blanch green beans, drain beans and chill in an ice water bath
• Shuck 3 ears of fresh sweet corn & slice kernels off cob. Heat a large, non-stick pan over medium heat, add 1 T olive oil and saute for 5 minutes
  • Meanwhile: Dump cooked quinoa in a large mixing bowl. Dice leftover grilled steak from Friday’s dinner for deployment in quinoa salad. Peel & chop roasted bell peppers & chop a handful of beans for quinoa salad. Add chopped veggies & steak to quinoa bowl. Set aside rest of green beans for snack baggies.
  • Add sauteed corn to the bowl of quinoa, meat and veggies. Gently stir to combine.
• Make pesto vinaigrette in the food processor: 2 handfuls of fresh basil, stems removed, 3 T marcona almonds, 1 garlic clove, juice of 1/2 lemon, zest of 1 lemon & 1/4 cup olive oil. Process until smooth, add salt & pepper to taste.
• Scrape the pesto vinaigrette onto the quinoa salad mixture. Use a spatula to gently stir until all quinoa is lightly dressed in pesto dressing. Crumble a handful of feta into the salad and stir a final time. Scoop into storage containers and stash in the fridge.
• Peel & slice 1lb of carrots and portion into snack baggies along with the rest of the green beans, and place all baggies of veggies into an open storage container in the fridge for easy grabbing.
• Make watermelon lemonade sorbet base: slice and cube watermelon and dump into the blender. De-seed and juice 3 lemons. Make lemon simple syrup with sugar and lemon juice – add finished syrup to the watermelon, and puree. Stash the sorbet base in the fridge to chill before churning around dinner time.
• Wash 1.5 lbs of mushrooms in a salad spinner filled with cold water. Swish the mushrooms around a bit to shake all the dirt loose, then pick up the basket to drain. Dump the filthy water, and spin gently.  (Now, I know washing mushrooms is taboo, but people – these things grow in manure, and that’s just not good eats, as Alton Brown would say. So if you’re planning to use mushrooms the same day you wash them, there’s truly no harm in it so far as I’ve experienced.)
• De-stem the mushrooms (save the stems for stock in a bag in the freezer, since you’ve already washed them) and dice into 1/2” cubes. Store in a large storage container for use in mushroom chorizo tacos for dinner.
• Dice 1/2 white onion and 1 large red bell pepper for the mushroom tacos. Store in a separate storage container in the fridge.
• Make Salsa: dump 1/4 of an onion, a handful of cilantro, pinch of salt & garlic powder in a mini-prep processor with 1 can of fire roasted diced tomatoes and 1 T chipotle puree. Whizz & jar. Done.

And that, my friends, is roughly what happens in my kitchen every Sunday morning.  What are your prep-ahead secrets? How do you tackle menu planning for the week?  Share your tips for weekday culinary success in the comments below! 

One Year Later…

I give myself Saturdays to do nothing, or more precisely, I don’t do anything that I don’t want to do. Mostly, this means I wake up without the screaming of an alarm at 5am, walk the dog, and do the weekly menu planning until Whole Foods opens at 8am, and then do the grocery shopping before it gets crowded. On this very Saturday one year ago, Miracle joined our family. Our hearts were still aching after losing Turbo, but sadist that I am, I had to dive right back in so that I would not come home to an empty house. Unlocking the door to a dog who is always happy to see you is a magical thing that says more than anything – “welcome home.”

Those first few months with Miracle were not pretty. She loved us immediately, but was desperately sad while we were away and restless at night. Mark and I struggled in a fog of exhaustion for months. We had a taste of what life is like for parents of newborns, who catch sleep when they can, or not at all, because Miracle needed a lot of soothing. But a year is a good stretch of time – enough for a hound to gain confidence that we’ll always come home to her, and for us to get to know this clownish beast we share our home with.

Also, on the second hound, we’ve turned into complete softies. Miracle helped herself to snoozing on the furniture not long after she came home. The moment you make a few moves in preparation to leave the house and – BOOM – Miracle is on the sofa, in your seat and glaring at you…daring you to kick her off, as if to say, “If you think you’re leaving me – fine, but I’ll be right here in your spot on the couch, all day long.” I can’t argue with that. We’re gone 12+ hours per day during the week, and if she wants to chill on the furniture, I am not going to stop her. Softies.

The hound can also be persuaded to join us for a run. In the early days, running was one way we could manage her separation anxiety. Now, we use her more as an excuse to stop for a few seconds and dither around before continuing on our way. It works for all of us.

One year later, we’re so glad that Miracle joined our family. She’s a lovey little hound, always scheming for a belly rub or snuggle on the couch. Her bursts of play, endless squeaking of toys and high speed laps around the house keep us laughing. Welcome to the family, dear hound.

I’ll have a new recipe or two for you in the next couple of weeks…I hope!  In the meantime, here are a few old favorites that have been gracing our table in the last couple of months:

• Fennel, Apple and Orange Salad – Fennel, granny smith apples and oranges are a few fresh ingredients that can be relied upon to brighten up any meal in the dead of winter. I could eat this salad daily and not get tired of it.
• Tomato Sauce with Butter – A simple, classic sauce that makes enough for several meals, freezes well, and is a savior for getting a quick mid-week meal on the table.
• DIY Kind Bars (grain-free granola bars) – These little tasty treats have been a near constant companion, since discovering that I am sensitive even to gluten-free oats. A little bit sweet and a good source of protein, these bars are getting me through weeks when I need to travel for work.
• Indian Spiced Red Lentil Soup – This pot of soup is dead simple, and takes few ingredients, but it makes for a hearty bowl of soup that warms the belly on the coldest of winter days.

Thank you to everyone who has commented, written, posted and tweeted me, asking when I’d get the next blog post up. I’ve missed our conversation here – and I hope to be back more often in 2012!

Red Lentil and Ham Soup

This is a hard time of year for food. The weather outside is sunny and cool, the tulips are blooming all over Chicago and the anticipation of summer is in the air. And here I am making more winter soups. Ho hum. We try to eat seasonally as much as possible in The Whole Kitchen, and living in a northern climate means that local spring crops don’t really hit their stride until late May-early June. Which leaves us with a couple of months of extended winter eating. So here we are – another lentil soup…but it’s a good one, I promise!

I can’t get enough of red lentils. Heidi Swanson turned me on to them with two different red lentil soups, and now I seem to be reaching for the jar of red lentils in the pantry all the time. They are the perfect lentil when you want to add some texture to your soup without it screaming “lentils!” Red lentils (masoor dal) fall apart after cooking for about a half hour and have a light, fluttery presence in the broth. If you’re making a traditional Indian dal – it’s hard to beat the quick cooking time of red lentils.

This particular pot of soup was intended to be minestrone with wild rice. I had a beautiful ham hock from the whole ham we received in our meat farm share last month, a pot of freshly made chicken stock and I had green beans, sweet corn and all kinds of wintery veggies to be tossed into the pot. But minestrone was not to be. It just wasn’t appealing to me Sunday morning when I was chop chop chopping away. The weather outside wasn’t helping, with cold rain pounding down – I wanted something warm my belly. Out came that trusty jar of red lentils. In the end, I’m not sure what you’d call this soup – “Red Lentil Wants to be Minestrone,” maybe. It’s got gobs of veggies, and I took a page from my Indian spiced red lentil soup with the black mustard and cumin – the two flavors went perfectly with the smoky ham with a spike of heat from the red pepper flakes. Served with a scoop of wild rice, this is a perfect soup for a rainy Spring day.

Red Lentil Vegetable Soup with Ham
Serves 6

1 large onion, diced
2 stalks celery, diced
1 red bell pepper, cored and diced
2 large carrots, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 T ghee (or butter)
1 T coconut oil
1 T black mustard seeds, whole
1 tsp cumin, whole
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp rosemary
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
3 bay leaves
4 cups chicken stock
2 cups water
1 1/2 cups red lentils
1 10oz ham hock
salt & pepper to taste
1 T champagne vinegar
garnish with cilantro
cooked wild rice (optional)

1. Heat a large soup pot over medium heat. Add ghee and coconut oil to the pot along with mustard seeds and whole cumin. Cook until the black mustard seeds just begin to pop, then add the onion, red bell pepper, carrot and celery to the pot with 1/4 tsp salt. Stir to coat the veggies with the oil, and saute for about 10 minutes, until the veggies begin to soften, stirring every couple of minutes. After the 10 minutes, add the garlic and cook for 1 more minute. Add the cumin, rosemary, red pepper flakes, bay leaves, chicken stock, water, red lentils, ham hock. Cover and bring the soup to a boil.
2. When the soup comes to a boil, reduce the heat to low and simmer for an hour, uncovered, stirring occasionally. As the soup simmers, the red lentils will fall apart. After an hour, remove the bay leaves and ham hock and blend for a just a few seconds with an immersion blender. You don’t want the soup to be completely smooth – just puree it a little to smooth the lentils in the broth just a touch. Let the ham hock cool for a few minutes until you can handle it, then shred the meat off the bone, and add it back to the pot. Season the soup to taste with salt & pepper, and add 1 T of champagne vinegar, stir, and then serve. Garnish each bowl with cilantro. Serve with a scoop of wild rice if you like.

406 cal per bowl, 110 cal from fat, 13g fat, 30mg cholesterol, 800mg sodium, 450mg potassium, 51g carbs, 9g fiber, 8g sugars, 22g protein