This Week’s Menu: Two at the Table Menu Week of January 3, 2016

Welcome to the first menu of 2016! We have a bunch of new recipes planned this week, including two (one for beef and one for salmon) that we never made as planned the week before Christmas, and we’ll also make use of the leftovers from our Fifth Annual New Year’s Day Indoor Barbecue.

Sunday night, we’ll have one of the recipes we planned to have a few weeks ago: The New York Times’ Orange Beef, which we will pair with basmati rice. We’ve been making more Asian-inspired food lately, so we’re looking forward to this dish.

Tony will be on his own Monday night, but on Tuesday might we’ll have dinner together and we’ll make the other dish we didn’t get to make a few weeks ago. This one is from a blog we just found, Sommer Collier’s A Spicy Perspective’s, and it’s for Garlic Lime Oven Baked Salmon. As we mentioned in the original write up, this recipe caught our eyes in part  because it will let us try a new technique: grating jalapeños on a microplane. We’ll have the salmon with a grapefruit avocado salad, using one of the Texas ruby red grapefruits that Kim’s parents sent us for Christmas.

On Wednesday night we’ll have leftovers from our indoor barbecue: pulled pork sandwiches with homemade barbecue sauce, cornbread casserole, and black-eyed peas. Just like last year, we found our barbecue recipes on the Homesick Texan blog: Pulled Pork with Coffee-Chipotle Rub and Chipotle Barbecue Sauce.

We’ll continue with the Asian theme on Thursday, when we make the Yellow Table’s Quick Stir-Fry with (Basmati) Rice. (The recipe calls for black rice, which we have, but given how long it takes to cook, and the fact that the recipe suggests using leftover rice, we decided to make extra basmati rice on Sunday and use that instead.) This is a vegetarian recipe, as is the dish we’ll make on Friday night.

Friday’s dinner will be Polenta Portabellos, which we picked out from a new cookbook (The Forest Feast), a vegetarian cookbook that our friends Rachel and John were kind enough to give to us. We read through it pretty closely and found lots of great recipes, so many that we’re — somewhat — realistically contemplating going totally vegetarian for Lent this year! 

We’ll have dinner out Saturday night (after a trip to the Big Apple Circus!) and wrap up the first week of 2016 for Two at the Table!