This Week’s Menu: Two at the Table Menu Week of Dec 31 2017

Happy (almost) New Year! We had a great holiday, which included a trip to Austin and several wonderful home-cooked dinners there, some made by us and some made for us. We are as excited as ever about sharing fun new recipes and are looking forward all the cooking and blogging we’ll do in 2018!

One of our goal for 2018 is to expand the focus of our blog. We’ll keep developing and posting menus as we always have, but will try to include more posts about how things turned out (spoiler: usually very well!). We also want to give our readers more insight into what we do when we’re not cooking: enjoying traveling, both around our home city and beyond, and visiting restaurants, museums, and fun shops wherever we go.  

Before we do any cooking or blogging in 2018, we ended 2017 in style, at a New Year’s Eve party hosted by our Upper East Side friends. It was a buffet dinner and Kim made two appetizers. The first was Rachel Khoo’s Sundried Tomato and Ricotta Tapenade, from her “Sweet and Savory Pates” cookbook. The second was Ina Garten’s Green Herb Dip. Kim will also bring a sliced baguette to enjoy with the tapenade and crudités to enjoy with the dip. We’re looking forward to ringing in the new year with good friends — and good food!

We’ve had a very fun and very busy week, with our flight back on Wednesday morning from a great visit to Austin, a special dinner on Friday evening of CDKitchen’s Spanish Mussels with Chorizo and Cava, a holiday party on Saturday night hosted by our Upper West Side friends, plus the New Year’s Eve party on Sunday. We decided to postpone our annual New Year’s Day Indoor BBQ for a while, so that we could have a chance to recover from all the fun. Instead, we’ll make a quiet dinner featuring ribeye steaks that Kim’s parents gave us for Christmas. We’ll prepare them using Ellie Krieger’s Cowboy Steak with Coffee and Chili Rub recipe. The coffee and chili mix is one of our favorite rubs, but we’ve only ever used it on flank steaks, so we’re excited to try it on a different, thicker cut. While we’re not doing our Indoor BBQ we are keeping the most important part of our New Year’s tradition alive: eating black-eyed peas for good luck in the coming year. Kim picked out a new recipe for us, The Homesick Texan’s Pickled Black-Eyed Peas, and we can’t wait to give it a try.

We enjoyed Ina Garten’s Salmon with Lentils with Kim’s parents over the holidays and this inspired us to find a new lentil recipe. We’ll have our friend Lynee over for dinner on Tuesday, when we’ll try The Minimalist Baker’s Saucy Moroccan Spiced Lentils, which we’ll serve next to some roasted salmon. We typically don’t make dishes with Moroccan flavors, so we’re happy to be expanding our palettes.  

Kim will be at a New York Junior League meeting Wednesday evening, so Tony will be on his own. We’ll both be out to dinner with friends on Thursday night, but we have a great dinner lined up for Friday night: The Half Baked Harvest’s Easy Coq Au Riesling. This dish is based on the traditional coq au vin, which is made with red wine, but, as the name makes clear, it uses Riesling instead. Tony found this recipe several months ago and stored it away for future use — Kim’s favorite wine, after all, is Riesling — but Kim found it recently on her own as well and suggested we make it. We’ll have the chicken with the New York Times Brussels Sprout Salad with Apples and Walnuts.

We’ll close out the week on Saturday by making Primavera Risotto, which we’ll make from ingredients Tony’s sister gave us for Christmas. The recipe calls for white wine, so we’ll pay a visit to our friend Michael at Columbus Wine & Spirits for a pairing suggestion.