This Week’s Menu: Two at the Table Menu Week of July 17, 2016

We have some fun social plans at the beginning the week, so we won’t be making any dinners until Wednesday. We’ll start the week with a Yankee game Sunday night with our friends Janice and John, so we’ll have dinner at the ballgame. Tony is going out with his friends Monday night and Kim is going it with her friends Tuesday night, so the other party will be on his or her own to put together dinner from leftovers, like the Pissaladiere or Korean-Style Grilled Flank Steak that we made last week. Once Wednesday rolls around, however, we are going to start cooking passionately with four new recipes.

Wednesday night will feature a vegetarian dish:  Saveur’s French Lentil Salad with Blue Cheese. We’ve found that while we’re slowly drifting back to eating meat (but still less than we did before we gave it up for Lent), we still have out eye out for good vegetarian dishes. This one also plays into our new-found fascination with French lentils (and on-going admiration for Rachel Khoo), as shown when we made Rachel Khoo’s Green Bean Bundles with Herb Lentil Salad in May and Shepherdless Pie in February. We’ll pair this up with a  2013 Chateau Maucoli red suggested by Neil at Columbus Wine & Spirits.

On Thursday night, we’ll make Real Simple’s Chile-Rubbed Pork Tostadas. We haven’t made pork tenderloin in quite a while, so we’re looking forward to this dish–and the leftovers. We’ll have this dinner with a local beer, namely a summer ale, either from the Bronx Brewery or the Montauk Brewing Company. We did a quick audit and cleaning of the freezer on Saturday mooning and found that we had some leftover Tomatillo Salsa in the freezer, so we will try to work that into this dish as well, even if we just have it on the side with tortilla chips!

On Friday night, we’re planning to make something a little more extravagant: Jacques Pépin’s Chicken Jardinière (a recipe from the Kitchn). While we haven’t made many (if any) recipes from Jacques Pepin, we’ve made lots from the Kitchn, so we’re confident this one will turn out great. Well have this with a 21012 Costieres de Nimes from Chateau Cornut.

On Saturday, we’ll continue our more recent, non-lentil-based obsession–the one with seafood–and we’ll make Food & Wine’s Ligurian Seafood Stew. Liguria is a crescent-shaped region in the northwest of Italy adjacent to France and with Genoa more or less at its center. We’ll have this dish with a rosé from the other end of Italy, namely, a 2015 Etna Rosato from the Graci vineyard in Sicily, which, as the name of the wine implies, is on the slopes of Mount Etna. (As an aside, a very interesting article on the exciting wines being made in the shadow of the still active volcano that is Mount Etna, which included comments from Mr. Alberto Aiello Graci himself, appeared in the New York Times Food section this past Wednesday.) Tony is planning to make a trip to the local fish market Saturday morning to buy the shrimp, red snapper, mussels, and cockles that go into this dish. Our freezer audit also turned up a lovely piece of swordfish, so we’ll probably use that in addition to the red snapper.