Two at the Table

So, our plans for last week worked out great…until Wednesday morning, when Tony woke up with a horrible head cold that tormented him for the rest of the week. Without much of an appetite, and with impaired taste buds, he didn’t feel like doing much cooking or eating, so we stuck to ordering in simple comfort food. We did have a lovely anniversary dinner at Chef George Mendes’ Aldea in Manhattan’s Flatiron neighborhood, where we enjoyed a variety of Iberian-inspired dishes, like croquetas de bacalhau (cod fish croquettes); mussel soup, with wild mussels, fennel, chorizo, and a coconut-curry broth; arroz de pato
(duck confit with chorizo, black olives, citrus purée, and duck cracklings); and cinnamon rice pudding.

The one dish we did make last week was really very good, so what we lost in quantity we feel we more than made up for in quality: Roasted Chicken with Lemon, Thyme, and Shallots from the The Yellow Table Cookbook. (Please note that the first link will take you to a recipe that is very similar to the one we made, but that uses a whole chicken instead of a cut up chicken.) We enjoyed this on Monday night and again as leftovers Saturday night and it’s a dish we know we’ll be coming back to. Here’s how Tony did it:

The first step in this recipe is to marinate the chicken. I placed the cut up chicken in a 2-gallon resealable plastic bag and added the lemon juice, olive oil, shallots, garlic and thyme. (We also had some rosemary in the fridge, so I added a couple of small sprigs of that as well.) I sealed the bag and then shook and kneaded it to mix the chicken and marinade together, then let it sit on the counter for 30 minutes. While the chicken marinated, I preheated the oven to 450 degrees and also sliced up a lemon, which is used a little later in the recipe.

I laid the chicken pieces in a foil-lined roasting pan and drizzled the marinade, along with the garlic, shallots, thyme, and rosemary, on top. I sprinkled on plenty of salt and pepper and laid the lemon slices on t0p. I put the chicken into the oven until the internal temperature read 165 degrees on a meat thermometer, which took about 40 minutes. I then broiled the chicken for a minute or two to crisp up the skin a bit; I probably could have left it under the broiler another minute or two, but it smelled so good it was hard to wait any longer.

The recipe also calls for making a sauce inside the roasting pan by placing the pan over high heat and adding some white wine and later butter to the pan juices. I wanted to minimize clean up, which is why I lined the pan with foil, so I just poured the pan juices into a sauté pan and worked in that.

The chicken was cooked perfectly – the skin was crisp but the meat was juicy and tender. The sauce came out great and helped keep the chicken moist. We (fortunately!) had some French bread in the freezer, so we didn’t miss out on any of the sauce. The sweetness of the shallots helped balance out the tartness of the lemon juice in the sauce and the herbs gave everything a We paired this up with a wine we 2012 Grauer Burgunder, a German white wine we had never had before and  that our friends at Wines by the Flask suggested. Their recommendation, as always, was spot on – the wine was crisp and dry with more than enough acid to balance out the fat in the sauce. It was a wonderful dinner – both Monday night when we first made it and Saturday night when we had it as leftovers – and a great way to start and end the week.

Two at the Table_Menu_Week of January 18 2015

We have lots of new recipes to try out this week, including from our two newest cookbooks, Gina Homolka’s “The Skinnytaste Cookbook” and Anna Watson Carl’s “The Yellow Table”. Here’s what we have planned:

On Sunday afternoon, we met up with our friends Lynee and Mary Ellen to watch the Packers-Seahawks playoff game. We knew we were going to indulge in a lot of tasty bar food – beer, nachos, wings, fries – so we figured that would be our dinner.

On Monday night, we’re making our first dish from “The Yellow Table”: Roasted Chicken with Lemon, Thyme, and Shallots. This one sounded perfect, for a number of reasons. The weather, predictably for January in New York, is cold and grey, which calls for comfort food, as far as we’re concerned. The dish does not take a lot of time to make, but it is always easier to make a chicken dish when you have a little time to spare, which we do today, because we both have the day off from work. Most important of all, we love all the flavors, especially the combination of chicken and thyme. (Please note that the link above will take you to The Yellow Table website; you’ll have to buy the book to get this specific recipe!)

On Tuesday night, Kim has plans with her work colleagues, so Tony is going to make something he knows Kim wouldn’t be partial to: Bay Scallops Provencal, from a recipe he found in The New York Times. Bay scallops were highly rated on Fresh Direct this week, plus, last week was very meat-centric, so a little seafood sounded like a good idea.

Wednesday night will see us making a new recipe from “The Skinnytaste Cookbook“, namely, Crustless Swiss Chard Pie. We both love chard and haven’t had it for a while, so this recipe sounded perfect. Plus, it will make some leftovers, which will give us options for interesting lunches. (As with the Roasted Chicken with Lemon, Thyme, and Shallots recipe, the link above will take you to the Skinnytaste web site.)

On Thursday night, we’re going to have more of the delicious Short Rib Ragu we made last week, this time served over polenta. We’re going to modify one of our favorite polenta recipes a bit, Ina Garten’s Creamy Parmesan Polenta, by leaving out the Parmesan cheese and creme fraiche. The ragu is so rich on its own that we thought that adding cheese to it, even indirectly in the polenta, would be overkill.

Friday night is our fifth anniversary, so we’ll be heading out for a special dinner. We took our honeymoon to Spain and Portugal, so we thought the Iberian inspired menu at Aldea would be a perfect way to remember out wonderful trip.

We have ballet tickets Saturday night, so we thought we’d make a simple dinner at home. We haven’t made any of Rachel Khoo’s recipes recently, so we decided to try her Tomatoes Stuffed with Crab. Since the recipe uses cooked crab meat and only involves roasting the tomatoes for about 15 minutes, we figured it would be easy to make before the performance.

With a long weekend ahead, Tony wanted to do something spectacular and he found a great recipe to try: Food 52’s Short Rib Ragu. The plan was to serve it over the fresh pappardelle, which we made by cutting up the sheets of fresh pasta we had left over from the Lasagna with Meat Sauce. Here’s how Tony made this fantastic dinner:

I’ll start by saying the is one of the most ambitious dishes I’ve ever tried. It’s not especially labor intensive, in the sense there aren’t tons of difficult steps, but it takes a long time to make: I started at about 7:30pm and didn’t get the ragu into the fridge – the ragu should sit in the fridge overnight – unit 1:30 am. In retrospect, it would have made more sense to make this on Saturday and have it on Sunday or make it on Sunday and have it on Monday, but I was determined to have this dish for dinner before the opera Saturday night and I was willing to put in the time to make that happen.

The star of the show is, of course, the short ribs. I had never worked with them before, but I’ve had them in restaurants several times. I’ve always seen them served as cubes, so I was a little surprised to see that they occur “naturally” (at least at our local Whole Foods!) as planks. It was a simple matter  to have the butcher cut each one in half, which left me with about 14 cubes of roughly the same size. This not only made them easier to work with but had the added benefit of creating more surfaces to brown and exposing the marrow in the ribs, which added to the flavor of the dish.

The first step in the recipe is to brown the ribs on all sides over medium heat for about 2 to 3 minutes per side. I wanted to avoid making a huge mess, so I worked over slightly lower heat. I browned the ribs, which I seasoned liberally with salt and pepper, about 3 to 4 minute per side in our trusty Dutch oven with our handy-dandy splatter screen to help contain the mess. I managed to do everything in two batches, but with each piece of meat having six sides, the whole process took a little over an hour.

Normally, I like do all my prep work in advance of cooking. This isn’t always the most efficient way to do things, but it usually works out. Tonight, however, I knew it was going to be important to get the ribs started as early as possible, so I chopped all my veggies and herbs (carrot, celery, onion, garlic, rosemary) and measured out the other ingredients (tomato paste, red wine, anchovy paste, red wine, tomatoes, Dijon mustard, Worcestershire sauce, thyme, and oregano) while the ribs were browning.

The one exception to all this was prepping the dried porcini mushrooms. Since those had to soak, I did that step before anything else, adding them to two cups of boiling water. The mushrooms were a little expensive (the little 1 ounce packet of mushrooms I used was only about $6.00, but pound for pound, they were about 10x more expensive than the short ribs!), but they really made the dish. I have never smelled anything as delicious as the mushrooms the minute I poured the boiling water over them.  The aroma was huge – earthy and nutty and a little funky; it literally (and I literally mean literally, not figuratively) made me take a step back and say “Whoa!” out loud. Their flavor really comes through in the ragu, so do not skip them!

With the ribs browned and the other ingredient ready to go, I was ready to start cooking. After taking the ribs out of the Dutch oven and draining off all but one tablespoon of the fat, I sautéed the carrot, celery, onion for about 10 minutes until they were soft. I then  added the garlic and cooked that for about 1 minute more.

Just a note about draining the fat from the Dutch oven – this has the potential to be a phenomenally dangerous, trip-to-the-emergency-room inducing step. Be sure to turn off the flame before you move the pot, use potholders, of course, and work in the sink. It may be a little clumsy, but tip the pan away from yourself when you pour so that any spills or spatters are directed away from you. Make sure you pour the fat into something that you are certain won’t melt or shatter from the heat of the fat; I used the can from the tomatoes, because I didn’t think any of the glass or ceramic containers we had would be strong enough. It should go without saying that you don’t want to pour the fat down the sink (it will splatter, because your sink will probably be wet, and it could clog or damage your pipes) or in the trash (it will melt and potentially set fire to anything it touches.) The can will be too hot to touch at first, so let it sit in the sink until it’s cool enough to handle and then put it in the fridge until it’s solidified. It should be pretty easy to deal with then.

Once the veggies and garlic were cooked, I used a rubber spatula to clear out 3-inch circle at the bottom of the pot and cooked the tomato and anchovy pastes. I’m not sure I got them quite caramelized like the recipe says you should, but after 2 or 3 minutes, they smelled pretty good, so I figured I was good to go. I added the wine and reduced it by about half, which took another 10 minutes. I then added the tomatoes, mustard, Worcestershire sauce, and herbs, along with the mushrooms and their soaking liquid. The recipe says to not use the last 1/4 inch of the liquid to keep out sediment, but the liquid looked pretty clear to me (plus, I wasn’t going to lose any of that flavor!) so I used it all. I just about covered the ribs with chicken stock, which I though would give everything more flavor than water. I accidentally skipped the next step of bringing the liquid to a boil, which in retrospect didn’t hurt the dish at all, and put the pot into the oven for 3 hours.

After 3 hours, the ribs were perfect: so falling-apart tender that I had a little trouble getting a few of them out of the pot. With the ribs on plate off to the side, I used an immersion blender to puree the liquid. (If you don’t have an immersion blender, you could ladle the liquid into a blender and puree it that way, but if you don’t have either, I don’t think having a chunkier ragu would be the end of the world.) You want to be careful here; if you’re using a large pot like I was, the liquid in it may not be deep enough to make sure the head of the blender is fully immersed, as its name makes clear it should be. This will turn your immersion blender into a super-high-speed catapult and you run the risk of splattering the liquid all over your kitchen. I tipped the pot a bit so the liquid would pool and saved myself a lot of cleaning up.

The ribs were still pretty hot at this point, so I put them in the fridge for about 15 or 20 minutes to speed things up. When the ribs were cool enough to handle, I pulled out the bones, which was very easy at this point, and shredded the meat, throwing away any large pieces of fat as I worked. I added the meat to the pureed liquid and mixed it all together. I let the ragu come to room temperature and while the recipe says to “skim any large pools of fat from the surface” as it cools, there was surprisingly little fat to skim away. The final step was to put the Dutch oven in the fridge overnight – and to go to bed!

Getting dinner ready the next day was very easy. I took the Dutch oven out of the fridge and skimmed away the additional fat, which was minimal. I don’t want to give the impression that this is fat-free dish; when the pot initially came out of the oven, I was a little shocked at how much oil there was on the surface. The next time, I might skim some fat off at this step, but despite not doing that this time, I wouldn’t say the dish was greasy or oily at all. I put six servings of ragu in the freezer and put the remaining two in a saucepan so they could warm up over very low heat. I used a pizza wheel to slice the sheets of fresh pasta into strips about 1 inch wide. I also made the gremolata, which is a mixture of  garlic, lemon zest, parsley, salt, and olive oil. I boiled the pasta for about 2 1/2 minutes, drained it, and plated it into two shallow bowls. I divided the short rib ragu over both servings of pasta and sprinkled about 2 teaspoons of gremolata over each dish.

As I said at the start of this post, this was a pretty ambitious undertaking, but it was stunningly good. We truly savored every bite. The ragu was rich and thick and meaty with tremendous flavor. The gremolata was a perfect counterpoint, as the brightness of the lemon zest and grassiness of the parsley really helped balance out the dish. We paired this up with our last bottle of 2007 Torciano Baldassarre for an amazing pre-opera dinner. We’re planning to serve some of the leftover ragu over polenta on Thursday, so check back in later this week to see how that turned out!

Thursday, we had a mix of one leftover, Garlic-Rosemary Rubbed Pork Loin, and a new side, Roasted Asparagus with Crunchy Parmesan Topping. Here’s how Tony got dinner on the table:

Since the pork loin was basically cooked (more on that later), all I needed to do was warm it up. I figured I would start with the asparagus, because the recipe says it can be served at room temperature, so I knew I could let is sit while I warmed up the pork loin. I cut off the hard ends of the asparagus, placed the spears in two layers a shallow glass dish, drizzled them with olive oil, and sprinkled on some salt and pepper. The asparagus went into a 450 degree oven for 10 minutes, after which I spooned the parmesan-bread crumb mixture on top. The recipe doesn’t say how much parmesan cheese and bread crumbs to use to make the topping, so I mixed together two tablespoons of each, which worked out perfectly. I then put the asparagus under the broiler for about 2 minutes and put the dish aside while I worked on the pork.

The leftover pork has a bit of a back story. We made it for my parents, who we had invited over for their anniversary. I planned to use a pork  tenderloin, like when we made Chili-Glazed Pork with Sweet Potato Hash or Fig Balsamic Roasted Pork Tenderloin and Sautéed Brussels Sprouts with Pancetta, because pork tenderloin is so easy to cook: just 10 or 15 minutes under the broiler and it’s done. I couldn’t get a pork tenderloin, so I got a pork loin instead. I knew the pork loin would take much longer to cook, but I figured I would just start cooking earlier; it was a Saturday, so we had time. The pork loin, however, took what seemed like forever; I think I said “I think it probably needs just 10 more minutes” about four times! Fortunately I had cut the pork loin into two pieces, and when the smaller piece was done, I took both pieces out of the oven, sliced and served the cooked one and sliced and froze the under-cooked one. We had dinner at a reasonable time, but I learned a valuable lesson: pork loin and pork tenderloin are both tasty pig parts, but they are very different tasty pig parts.

So, for tonight I put the pork in a 350 degree oven for about 20 minutes to finish cooking. This proved to be a bit longer than needed, so the pork was a little dry, but it was still pretty good.

The asparagus, however, we cooked perfectly: bright green and still crunchy. The parmesan-bread crumb topping was a nice touch, but I think nice time, as the recipe suggests I’ll use more coarsely ground bread crumbs and mate even shaved (versus grated) parmesan. We paired this up with dry Riesling for a nice Thursday night dinner.

In keeping with the general theme of “Simple Dinners for a Crazy Week”, we reached into the freezer last night to pull out some leftover hanger steak and sauce to have Epicurious’ Grilled Skirt Steak with Parsley Oregano Sauce with a simple arugula salad. Here’s how it came together:

As we noted in our original post about Grilled Skirt Steak with Parsley Oregano Sauce, cuts like flank steak, skirt steak, and hanger steak are great because they are so versatile and cook so quickly. Tonight was no exception – I grilled the steak over medium-high heat for about two minutes a side and I was done. The steak was a little more rare than we usually cook it, but it was still perfect.

The parsley oregano sauce was already made and we discovered that it freezes very well. All of the flavors (parsley, oregano, garlic, red pepper, and lime juice) came through very clearly and were a great complement to the seared, juicy steak.

We made an arugula salad with a simple dressing (equal parts olive oil and red wine, with a little dijon mustard to hold everything together) to go with the steak. As a twist on the salad, we added a watermelon radish. They taste more or less like regular radishes (maybe a tiny bit more bitter), but are really beautiful, as you can see in the picture above. We paired the steak and salad with some cold Stone IPAs for a fast, fun dinner.

Two at the Table_Menu_Week of January 11 2015

This week looks to be pretty busy for both of us. We also have lots of leftovers (both cooked food and ingredients) in the freezer. As a result, this week’s menu is going to be a little simpler than usual, but it will still have some fun things on it.

Sunday was Tony’s birthday, so we had dinner out. As we wrote in our New Year’s Indoor Barbecue post, we’re crazy about the Homesick Texan’s Coffee-Chipotle Barbecue Sauce. We still have some sauce left over (miraculously, Tony hasn’t eaten it all yet!), so we thought it would be fun to try it on Monday with our Barbecued Chicken with Short-Cut Collard Greens. Instead of collard greens, though, we’re going to make Spinach Sautéed with Garlic, to use up the spinach we have left over from last week’s Grilled Portobello Spinach Salad from the The Skinnytaste Cookbook, which we had last week on Wednesday night.

On Tuesday night, we’ll both be home on the late side, so we’ll each have to scrounge up dinner on our own from things like Real Simple’s Pan Roasted Steak with Creamed Kale and Lasagna with Meat Sauce.

We saw that we had some leftover hanger steak in the freezer, so on Wednesday we’re going to make Epicurious’ Grilled Skirt Steak with Parsley Oregano Sauce (the recipe works just fine with hanger steak) and a simple arugula salad.

We also saw that we had some left over Garlic-Rosemary Rubbed Pork Loin (a dish of our own invention) in the freezer, so on Thursday we’ll have that with a fun new side, Roasted Asparagus with Crunchy Parmesan Topping, a recipe we spotted in the New York Times a little while ago but haven’t had a chance to try yet.

We’ll have dinner out on Friday, probably at a sushi place we tried for the first time in New Year’s Eve, but on Saturday, we’re pulling out all the stops and making Food 52’s Short Rib Ragu. We’ll serve this over fresh papardelle, which we’ll make by cutting the sheets of fresh pasta we have left over from the lasagna into wide strips.

So, not an overly challenging menu for the weeknights, but a good one with a strong finish, making for another great week at Two at the Table!

We were excited to make something from our new copy of Ina Garten’s “Make It Ahead” cookbook, and we decided on Coquilles St.-Jacques. (The link will take you to slight adaptation of the recipe that was published in The New York Times.) We didn’t make this dish very much ahead of dinnertime (we made the breadcrumbs on Wednesday night and put the assembled gratin dishes in the fridge for maybe 30 minutes before they went into the oven), but we were having it on a Friday night, so we knew we’d have plenty of time to cook. Here’s how it came together: 

This dish took me a little longer from start to finish that the one hour mentioned in the Times recipe; I needed about an hour and a half. I think this was partly due to never having made it before and partly due to a small mistake in making the sauce. That said, it was a huge success: Kim doesn’t really like scallops, but she thought this was the best preparations she had ever had.

As usual, I started with the prep steps, which were pretty easy: I diced some shallots, sliced some cremini mushrooms caps, minced some parsley, and grated some Gruyère that we had left over from the Brussels Sprout, Bacon, and Gruyère Frittata we made right before the New Year. We were halving this recipe, but decided to go lighter on the scallops (the full recipe calls for two pounds of scallops, but we bought a little more than half a pound) and heavier on the mushrooms. I used the larger sea scallops rather than the smaller bay scallops, so I had to quarter them, which I did right before putting them in the gratin dishes.

With the prep work done, I started in on the cooking. The first step was to make the sauce. This began just little like making the béchamel for the Lasagna with Meat Sauce that we had for our Anniversary Dinner: butter and flour, whisked together. This one came together very differently though, as it was much thinner and browned very quickly, which I think was due to the higher butter to flour ratio. I was cooking over low heat, so I was pretty sure I hadn’t burned anything, but a quick check of the photo in the cookbook reassured me that I hadn’t ruined dinner.

I did goof on the next step though. The recipe says to add the clam juice and “whisk again, until it [the sauce] is smooth and thick” and then to add the cream, curry powder, salt, and pepper and bring everything to a boil: I added all of these ingredients at the same time. No harm done, but I probably ended up cooking the sauce longer than I would have otherwise, just to make sure it was thick enough. At this point, the sauce smelled amazing – like a really good New England clam chowder. I got the pot to a boil and let it simmer, stirring ever minute or so (basically, whenever a skin started to form on the sauce), while I worked on the mushrooms.

I sautéed the shallots in butter for about 5 minutes and then added the mushrooms and cooked those for about 10 minutes. I then added the cognac and let that cook away, after which I added some salt and pepper. I’m very bad about tasting as I go, which is the best way to check for flavoring, so I sometimes under season food. I did taste this time and was a little worried because both the sauce and the mushrooms seemed very salty to me. There’s was not much I could do at this point, so I added the mushrooms to the sauce as directed. When it all came together in the gratin dish, however, the seasoning was perfect.

While the mushrooms and the sauce were cooking, I also prepared the bread crumbs by stirring them together in a bowl with parsley, Gruyère, and just enough olive oil to moisten the bread a bit.

It was now time to assemble and cook. I buttered two gratin dishes and laid half the cut-up scallops in each one. I spooned the cream and mushroom sauce over the scallops and then topped everything with the bread crumb mixture. I put the gratins on a foil lined baking pan and put the pan into a 400 degree oven. After about 20 minutes, dinner was ready.

As I mentioned above, this dish was a really hit. The breadcrumbs were nicely toasted, the cheese was melty, and the scallops were cooked perfectly. The sauce was excellent as well: it was rich and creamy without being heavy and had a nice, tangy note from the clam juice and curry powder. We paired this with the remaining bottle of the 2013 Claudio Morelli Bianchello del Metauro that our friends at Wines by the Flask recommended for our New Year’s Day Indoor Barbecue, put on some music, (The Hot Sardines, if you’re wondering; clearly, we’re pretty obsessed with food!) for a wonderful Friday night dinner.

Last night we made Grilled Portobello Spinach Salad from The Skinnytaste Cookbook.” This was another super-easy weeknight dinner with tons of flavor. Here’s how it went:

The first step was to mix up the marinade. Not much work involved here, other than chopping up a little garlic, but I did make one slight change to the recipe. Rather than mix the marinade in a bowl, add the mushroom caps, and toss to coat, I put the mushrooms in a shallow glass pan, mixed the marinade in a mixing cup, and poured it over the tops and bottoms of the mushroom. I think this might have helped the marinade soak in better, especially when I poured it onto the bottom of the mushrooms and let them sit, as the bottoms are a bit porous.

The next step was to make the dressing for the spinach salad, which took no time at all.  I put the spinach in a large bowl, added the dressing, and tossed the spinach until it was well coated.

The last step was to cook the mushrooms. I put our grill pan over medium heat – at least eventually; I started on medium-high, which was a little too hot, but did create some nice grill marks! I cooked the mushrooms for about five minutes per side, basting frequently as the recipe instructs. I then sliced the caps, plated the salad, sprinkled on some slices, sun-dried tomatoes and shaved parmesan, and laid the mushrooms on top. All told, dinner took well under 30 minutes to make.

This dish was really a great combination of flavors – earthy mushrooms, sweet tomatoes, salty cheese, slightly bitter spinach – and light, but satisfying. We’re going to keep this one in mind whenever our work schedules are a little crazy and we want a quick dinner, or whenever we’re in the mood for something vegetarian, or whenever we just want something truly delicious!

Last night, we made Real Simple’s Pan Roasted Steak with Creamed Kale. This was a perfect weeknight dinner – it only took about 30 minutes. It:

I didn’t have to do much in the way of prep for this dish. I just sliced up some garlic, cut the stems off the kale, and then tore the kale into pieces. In retrospect, I should have removed the stems from the kale entirely (this post on Barbecued Chicken with Short-Cut Collard Greens will give you a tip on how to do that). The kale turned out great but there were a few “stemmy” pieces that we could have down without.

I wanted to make sure that the kale and steak were done at the same time so I really looked at the timing of  the recipes. The kale basically gets cooked in two steps. In the first step, which takes a total of about 12 minutes, you want to make sure the kale is wilted. In the second step, which takes another 7 minutes, you mix cream and water into the kale. I figured this second step was more than enough time to cook the steak, especially since we like our meat on the rare side of medium-rare. (The is also a final step with the kale, when you add the cannelloni beans and warm them through, and I used this time to let the steak sit before slicing it.) Though I halved the steak part of the recipe, I made all of the kale, because: a) we really like kale, b) we didn’t want to have half a can of cannelloni beans floating around the fridge, and c) we really like kale.

Once the kale was wilted and the cream was added to the pot, I cooked the steak in an oven proof skillet, but, at Kim’s wise suggestion, avoided using a non-stick pan, so as to get a better sear on the steak. We adjusted the cooking time way down – about 2 minutes per side on the stove top and then about 3 minutes in the 425 oven. The steak was perfect – it came out of the oven with the center registering 130 degrees on the meat thermometer for a perfect medium rare. All that was left to do was slice the steak and serve it over the kale.

The kale turned out really well; aside from the stem issue mentioned above, it was soft without being mushy and had a nice creaminess to it. We did spice it up a little bit (literally) by sprinkling on a few red pepper flakes.  We paired this up with a Zinfandel that we received as a holiday gift for another lovely weeknight dinner.

Two at the Table_Menu_Week of January 4 2015

After all the fun cooking we did on New Year’s Day and for our Anniversary Dinner, we thought we would plan an easier week this week. That said, we’re still going to try three new recipes.

We decided to order in Sunday night from our favorite Mexican place. Monday night was also a simple decision, as we still had six servings of lasagna in the fridge!

On Tuesday, we made Real Simple’s Pan Roasted Steak with Creamed Kale. We figured this would be a quick an easy recipe and it absolutely was. (Check back in tomorrow for the write-up!)

We visited Chelsea Market in New York City the day after New Year and bought a copy of Gina Homolka’s “The Skinnytaste Cookbook.” It’s filled with delicious recipes (and beautiful photos!) and we’re going to make one on Wednesday: Grilled Portobello Spinach Salad. (If you want the recipe, you will have to but the cookbook – a wise investment if you ask us!)

We’ll be ready for more lasagna on Thursday night, but we feel like cooking again Friday night. Kim’s parents gave us a copy of Ina Garten’s latest cookbook, “Make It Ahead”, so we we’re itching to make a recipe from it. We weren’t quite sure where to start, when inspiration stuck in the form of the New York Times Sunday Magazine, which featured Ina’s recipe for Coquilles St.-Jacques. We’re going to try it Friday night. We’re cheating, technically, because we won’t make anything ahead, but we have a feeling we’re going to get into the habit with this new cookbook!

We’ll basically eat out all day on Saturday, as we’re taking a day trip to Boston to see the “Goya: Order and Disorder” exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts and Mark Rothko’s Harvard Murals at the Harvard Art Museums, so no cooking then, but we’ll be back at it with a new menu next week!