This Week’s Menu: Two at the Table Menu Week of July 12 2015

We had a fantastic time in Nashville over the weekend. We enjoyed lots of great food – especially barbecue! – and lots of fun music. We also made time to visit both the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum as well as the Frist Center for the Visual Arts. We didn’t get home too late on Sunday (about 8:30), but it was late enough that after we were welcomed home by our cats George and Henry and unpacked, all we felt like for dinner was some cheese and French bread. We didn’t place our usual Fresh Direct order (we were too busy exploring Nashville!), so this week’s menu is pretty simple. 

That said, we did a try a new recipe last night: Martha Stewart’s One-Pot Pasta,  a recipe we were alerted to by an e-mail from Food 52. The idea behind the recipe, as the name implies, is that you can make an entire pasta dinner (with sauce) in one pot in about 10 minutes once the water in the pot starts to boil. We were a bit skeptical (Tony’s Very Italian Mother would definitely not go for this recipe!), but gave this one a go because we got home very late. Check back later in the week and we’ll let you know exactly what we did and how it turned out.

Kim has a Junior League event Tuesday night, so Tony will be on his own. He’s not quite sure what he will do for dinner, but with the Major League Baseball All Star Game scheduled to be played, hot dogs and beer – plus the bread and butter pickles Tony made last weekend – will probably feature prominently in his plans.

On Wednesday night we will, at long last, come hell or high water, make the Grilled Cheese Sandwiches with Truffle Oil. We’ve been pushing them to the next week for a few weeks now, not because we didn’t want to make the, but simply because we never seemed to get home with enough energy to cook on the nights when we originally plan to make the sandwiches. That kind of excuse making ends Wednesday night.

We’re seeing the Foo Fighters at Citi Field Thursday night, so we’ll have dinner there. We are really hoping that the Shake Shack stand will be open, because a Shack Burger and a beer sound like the perfect dinner at the ball park, even if it is enemy territory (Citi Field is home to the New York Mets) and there isn’t a ball game going on. 

We have another Queens adventure planned for Friday night. For those of you that don’t know that borough of New York City, it is truly a cultural, linguistic, and culinary melting pot. If there’s a kind of food you’re craving, from Greek to Peruvian to Pakistani, you can probably find it somewhere in Queens. We’re trying to find a good Filipino restaurant, mostly because we’ve never had Filipino food before. We’re looking at Papa’s Kitchen in the Woodside neighborhood, but are still doing some research.

We plan to go to Le District, the new French market place on the West Side waterfront Saturday afternoon (our original plans to go there on the Fourth of July fell through), so we’re hoping to get some inspiration for dinner there.  We’re thinking that a Rachel Khoo recipe might be called for, so we may just bring our cookbooks along and see what looks good in the market and what dishes we can make using it!