This Week’s Menu: Two at the Table Menu Week of July 31 2016

We have several fun events planned with friends this week, but will still make time to try three new recipes, two of which will let us use some farm-fresh vegetables (and eggs) that we have because our friend Krista was generous enough to give her farm share to us.

Before we launch into the week’s menu, we should tell you a bit about what we made for lunch and dinner on Saturday. We still had a piece of swordfish in the freezer because we didn’t use it to make the Food & Wine’s Ligurian Seafood Stew as we had planned to do two weeks ago. (We didn’t make the stew at all, but are determined to make it before the summer is over!) Instead, Tony used the swordfish to make Food & Wine’s Grilled Swordfish with Herbs and Charred Lemon Salsa for lunch on Saturday. The salsa was really delicious; the charred lemons (which we cooked on our trusty grill pan) gave the dish a real jolt of flavor. The recipe says the dish takes 50 minutes to make, but even accounting for the fact that we were only grilling one swordfish steak (versus the four in the recipe), it took much less time than that. We also had The Yellow Table’s Israeli Couscous Salad on the side, which was perfect accompaniment.

We kept with the seafood theme for dinner, but went to a totally different part of the world for our inspiration: Thailand. Our farm share vegetables included some beautiful summer squash and we had a can of coconut milk in the pantry, so we decided to use those ingredients to make Saveur’s Sautéed Squash and Shrimp with Coconut Milk and Chiles. Tony found this dish to be very easy to make; there were no complicated steps, plus he was able to get a lot of prep work done (like julienning the squash, which Tony did without losing any fingers) while the broth that is the base of this dish simmers. This was another winner, and was just like lunch: easy to make and super-flavorful. We will make this again but probably with some tweaks, like maybe adding some lemongrass and lime zest to the broth and some other veggies – like bean sprouts – to the squash and shrimp. Kim started us off with a delicious salad made with the lettuce and some of the tomatoes we got in our shared farm share, which she dressed with a lemon/sunflower oil dressing and topped with pickled onions and toasted peanuts.

As for this week, we’re planning to visit the Met Brewer (the new extension of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) Sunday afternoon with our friends Tom and Sharon and we’ll have an early dinner with them afterward, so we have no plans to make dinner on Sunday. However, Kim is currently making a tomato and mushroom frittata that will use the one of our farm share tomatoes. When she is done, Tony will use the beef and lamb left over from when we made Saveur’s Beef and Lamb Koftas a few weeks ago to make meatballs and add those, along with some pork we also had in the freezer, into a pot of leftover sauce (our freezer was pretty full!) so we can have some easy lunch and dinner options for the week.

We’ll start to say goodbye to the last of our vegetables (a beautiful bunch of kale) on Monday night when we make Epicurious’ Italian Kale Caesar Salad. We have a little cooked chicken in the fridge that we will add to the salad to make it  a little heartier. In addition to clearing out our freezer, we’re also clearing out our wine rack, so we’ll have the salad with a bottle of rose that we’ve had for a little while.

On Tuesday night, inspired by the great success we had making Real Simple’s Chile-Rubber Pork Tostadas, we’ll have The Kitchn’s Corn, Tomato and Black Bean Tostadas with Creamy Cilantro Dressing using the last tomato from the farm share. In keeping with this week’s theme of cooking with things we already have in the house, this recipe will let us use up some corn we have in the freezer and black beans we have in the pantry.

Kim will be at the New York Junior League Wednesday night for a meeting, so Tony will probably have the pasta and sauce he’s making on Sunday. On Thursday night, we’ll have dinner with Ben, one of Tony’s oldest friends who is in town for work. We haven’t picked out a place yet, but there are no shortage of options in New York City!

On Friday night,we’ll be making The Kitchn’s Herbed Gnocchi with Mushrooms. While we have experimented with making out own gnocchi in the form of The Girl in the Little Red Kitchen’s Acorn Squash Gnocchi and plan to make them again, we thought it would be much easier to buy fresh pasta and use that instead. We’ll reach into the wine rack for another bottle to go with this dish.

On Saturday night, we’ll be attending our friends Jimmy and Elaine’s annual summer  cookout, which we look forward to all year long. We gave a shout out to their Seventeen at the Table extravaganza a couple of summers ago and know that this year’s version will be no less spectacular!