This week’s menu: Two at the Table Menu Week of March 29 2015

Kim’s jury duty ends on Monday, but with our schedules for the week still a bit crazy, we’ll only be making three dinners at home this week. All of them are new recipes for us from favorite cookbooks, both old and new.

We recently learned that Lisa Fain, the Homesick Texan, is opening a restaurant in New York City called El Original. (You can read her announcement on Twitter here or get a bit more detail on the restaurant from Grubstreet.com here or check out the menu at www.eloriginaltxmx.com.) Once we stopped jumping up and down, we decided that we needed to make something from Lisa’s “The Homesick Texan Cookbook” and decided on Green Chile Posole with Black Beans. Posole is a hearty soup that sounded like a perfect dish to get us through these last few cold days of March. We recommended you buy Lisa’s cookbooks, but if you want to read the recipe online, you can find a write up by Martha Stewart here. We’ll have the posole with Shiner Ruby Redbird, a lager brewed with Texas ruby-red grapefruit.

Kim has a Junior League call Monday night and Tony has his fantasy baseball draft, so we’ll have leftover posole for dinner. On Tuesday night, we’re going to try to attend the new member reception at the The Frick Collection, a small art museum located near Central Park that we joined over the winter. We figure it will be simpler to order in or eat out after the reception, so that is the plan. Tony will be on his own Wednesday night, as Kim has a Junior League meeting and we’ll be having dinner with a group on Thursday night to celebrate our friend Lynee’s birthday. We’re going to Lombardi’s on the Lower East Side, which bills itself as America’s first pizzeria. First, second, or last, this is some seriously good thin crust pizza and we can’t wait.

We’ll be making Quinoa Stuffed Peppers from Gina Homolka’s skinnytaste cookbook on Good Friday (the Friday before Easter). This is a simple recipe that looks to be very satisfying and a great vegetarian option for one of our last meatless days. We also recommended you buy Gina’s cookbook, but if you want to see an online recipe, you can find a write up on the Lori Lange’s Recipe Girl blog here. We’ll have this with a 2012 Lang & Reed Cabernet Franc suggested by Wines by the Flask.

We’re planning another day trip to Greenport Long Island this Saturday. In addition to visiting the baby goats at Catapano Dairy Farm (which is honestly the main reason for the trip) and buying lots of tasty goat cheese, we’ll also have lunch in Greenport, hit some vineyards on the way out of town, and visit the Freehold Fish Market too. We’ll stock up on local seafood so that we can make Food & Wine’s Provencal Fish Stew (or Bourride), which was one of the recipes in the cookbook our friend Manon gave us after our dinner with her and the Wines by the Flask crew, Michael and Eric. We’ll serve the stew with some crusty French bread that we’ll get at the Blue Duck Bakery Cafe in Greenport. We’ll pair it with Bedell Cellars Blanc de Blanc, a sparkling white wine that we first had at our friend Jennifer’s wedding reception at the Bedell vineyard. This wine was so new when we first purchased it, the bartender had to go into the storage room to get the labels to stick on the bottles! We had such a great time at the wedding that the trip to Greenport has become a special getaway for us and the wine one that we look forward to having every chance we get.