This Week’s Menu: Two at the Table Menu Week of February 14, 2016

This will be our first full week of Lent so far. It will also be a relatively quiet week –Tony will be on his own on Wednesday and we have plans for dinner and the opera on Saturday–so we’ll get to do lot of cooking. We’re making a couple of old favorites that we included when we played our Lent card game as well as a couple of simple new recipes to try as well.

First up is Ina Garten’s Pissaladiere. We planned to make this last week on Friday, but neither one of us had the energy to do it, so we ordered sushi. It’s not a very complicated dish (especially since we bought pre-made pizza dough!) but is does take a little time, so a Sunday before a holiday Monday is probably a good time to give it a try.

(As a side note, we’re spending some of Sunday cooking, mostly to make lunches for the week. If you follow our blog, you know we typically don’t take a “week in a day” approach. In fact, we tend to cut recipes in half so we won’t have too may leftovers to deal with. In the interests of avoiding temptation, though, we thought it would be a good idea to make a couple of larger-scale, vegetarian dishes and bring them for lunch during the week. Kim just wrapped up making Southwest Potato Corn Chowder from a recipe her friend Janice found and recommended on the Hi Sugarplum! blog. The one modification will be to use vegetable stock versus chicken stock. Tony will soon be starting on a batch of Spinach and Mushroom Enchiladas with Tomatillo Salsa from the Homesick Texan blog.)

We’ll try a new recipe on Monday night and one we’ve been meaning to make for a while: Real Simple’s Linguine with Broiled Garlic and Clams. The only challenge with this dish is the need to use fresh clams, so we’ll head out to the market Monday morning and buy them. We’ll have this with a 2014 Cimixa from Italy that our friend Michael suggested for us.

On Tuesday, we’ll make an old favorite: Elie Krieger’s Fish Tacos with Chipotle Cream. This is a simple, delicious dish that’s perfect for a weeknight. One of the best things about the dish is that the leftover chipotle cream lasts a while and goes well on lots of different things. We’ll pair the tacos with our own added garnish of avocado with a nice hoppy IPA.

We’ll make a slightly modified version of Food & Wine’s Baked Eggs with Spinach, Asparagus, and (NOT) Prosciutto; the modification of course is that we’re leaving out the prosciutto. We’ve made several baked egg dishes over the years, but this one is different. Not only does it contain asparagus, but the eggs are baked  on a thick piece of crusty bread. We’ll have this with a side salad and a 2011 La Damnee Des Prieur Sancerre.

We’ll make a very simple dinner on Friday: Ina Garten’s Pasta with Pecorino and Pepper (Pasta Cacio e Pepe). This is about as simple a pasta dish as you can make, as the sauce only contains grated Pecorino cheese, heavy cream, and butter. We’ll pair this up with a 2014 Abruzzo Pecorino.