Two at the Table

This Week’s Menu: Two at the Table Menu Week of Jun 5 2016

We have a fun mix of old and new recipes this week and, with apologies to Michael at Columbus Wine and Spirits, enough half-finished and unopened bottles of wine in the apartment that we’re going to wing it as far as wine pairings.

On Sunday night we’ll make Epicurious’ Spicy Oven-Fried Chicken, which you may remember we made once before, with pretty good results. We’re going to try a few of the changes that Tony mentioned in his write-up for this recipe, namely, cooking the chicken in two batches (if necessary), skipping the step of drizzling the chicken with butter before it goes into the oven, and turning up the spiciness a notch or two. We’ll make enough to have leftovers so that we’ll have a quick dinner on tap for later in the week when we’re busy. Fried chicken + beer = happiness, so we’ll pair this with a cold IPA to cut through the heat a bit.

We’ll continue with our pescatarian ways on Monday with Food & Wine’s Greek Salad with Oregano Roasted Salmon, another dish that we’ve made successfully before. We’ll have to see what wines we have on hand to pair with this one, but a crisp white is probably going to be our best bet.

On Tuesday night, we’ll make a new dish: Epicurious’ Lemony Milanese Chicken with Arugula Salad. We seldom make foods that require breading and frying, as it can be a little time-consuming and a little messy, but this dish is easy enough that we’re going to give it a go. We’ll try our luck with a lighter red or even a rose for this dish.

Tony will be at a work event on Wednesday, so Kim will be left to her own devices. We have a very easy recipe planned for Thursday: Grilled Open-face Ham, Brie, and Arugula Sandwiches, which should be a snap to make. We’ll try serving some of the bread and butter pickles that Tony made last weekend on the side, or, if these prove to be too sweet, some cornichons we bought at Le District last Sunday. 

We’ll have the left over fried chicken on Friday night and make another new favorite on Saturday: Real Simple’s Linguine with Broiled Garlic and Clams. We’ve made this dish before and enjoyed it very much; it’s easy and incredibly flavorful. We should have another bottle of white stashed away somewhere, so that will be our wine paring for this dish.

This Week’s Menu: Two at the Table Menu Week of May 29 2016

Since we won’t be doing any cooking on Thursday, Friday, or Saturday this week, as Tony will be on his own on Thursday night and we’ll be at The Governor’s Ball on Friday night and the ballet on Saturday night, we tried to find some fun new recipes to start the week.

As part of our long weekend, we planned a trip on Sunday to Le District, a fun French market in the Financial District. We thought it would be fun to make something French, ideally with ingredients we were able to find at the market. We settled on Rachel Khoo’s Green Bean Bundles with Herb Lentil Salad. (If you Google that exact term, you will find the recipe on Google Books.) As it turned out, we were able to get all of the most important ingredients at the market: green beans, cheese, prosciutto and of course, lentils. Michael at Columbus Wine and Spirits threw us for a bit of a loop with his pairing suggestion for this dish: a dry Riesling from Napa Valley, namely, a 2014 Trefethen. If you follow our blog you know that Kim adores Rieslings (the drier the better). You also know that we tend to shy away from American wines. Michael was really testing us with this one!

Dinner Monday night will be sliders with some fun toppings: in addition to tomatoes, mustard, and both cheddar and bleu cheese, we’ll also have Recipe Girl’s Bread and Butter Pickles (which you may remember from the great pickle-off from June and July of last year) and Easy Pickled Onions from the Shared Appetite blog. We’ll have the sliders with New Belgium’s Citradelic Tangerine IPA.

On Tuesday night, we’ll have seafood: Food & Wine’s Red Snapper with Asparagus and Chorizo. We’ve been lucky that the asparagus this spring has been fantastic, so if it seems like we’re making it two or three times a week, it’s because we probably are. We’ll pair this dish up with a 2014 Domaine du Petits Cloches Anjou Villages.

Wednesday night will feature The Kitchn’s Spicy Panzanella Salad, made with French bread that we bought at Le District. We’ve made panzanella many times before, but this recipe features a bit of heat from a jalapeño pepper. Michael tossed another curveball our way for this recipe and suggested an Italian wine but a varietal that isn’t often associated with Italy: Chardonnay. We had our reservations about this one (we’ve had some really, really bad Chardonnays, the last of which scared us off Chardonnay almost for good), but Michael has never steered us wrong, so we’ll give this 2013 La Spinona Langhe Chardonnay a try.

This Week’s Menu: Two at the Table Menu Week of May 22 2016

We’re still sticking pretty close to our pescatarian menu, with one seafood and three vegetarian dishes this week.

We’re going to the Harlem EatUp on Sunday afternoon and we’re excited to try food from all sorts of fun restaurants like Red Rooster, Miss Mamie’s Spoonbread, Harlem Tavern, and The Cecil, not to mention Make My Cake, the fantastic bakers that made the red velvet cake we had at our wedding. We’ll try and maintain some semblance of self-control at the event, but we have a sneaking suspicion that we won’t be very hungry when dinner time rolls around. We’ll probably just have some cheese and bread and maybe a little wine.

Kim will be at a Junior League meeting on Monday, so Tony will be on his own, but on Tuesday night, we’ll have Real Simple’s Salmon Salad with Herbed Yogurt. We’ll pair this up with a 2014 Sevre et Maine Muscadet recommended by our friend Michael at Columbus Wine and Spirits.

We have a family event Wednesday night, so we’ll have dinner out, but we’ll be back in the kitchen on Thursday night making The Minimalist Baker’s Gingery Thai Kale Salad with Cashew Dressing. We thought we could stump Michael with this recipe, but he found a 2011 Pierre Richard Cotes du Jura.

We’ll be making two recipes from The Kitchn to close out the week. On Friday night we’ll make Couscous and Goat Cheese Stuffed Tomatoes and on Saturday night we’ll have One-Pot Orzo with Feta, Olives, and Artichokes. Both recipes are fairly easy to make, so we’ll have plenty of time to enjoy dinner. We’ll have the tomatoes with a 2014 Vivanci Rioja Blanco and the orzo with a 2014 Domaine Sigales Assyrtiko-Athiri Santorini.

This Week’s Menu: Two at the Table Menu Week of May 15, 2016

We have a quiet week as far as making dinner because we have lots of fun social plans, so we’re going to post a few lunch recipes too, just to keep things interesting.

We went to the Yankee game Sunday afternoon with our friends Jeff and Marie. As per usual, we ate our share of fun ballpark food, so we’ll have a little snack at most for dinner.

While Kim has a meeting at the New York Junior League on Monday, Tony will be out for dinner with his buddies, so Kim will be on her own once she gets home. While our dinner plans are different, we’ll probably have the same thing for lunch: The New York Times’ Green Garlic Tabbouleh. Kim made tabbouleh a few weeks go, but this recipes gives things a fun twist by using spring garlic, which is in season right now, but not for much longer.

Kim is going to a lecture Tuesday night and Tony will probably end up working late, so we’ll either meet up somewhere for dinner or just meet at home and order in. On Wednesday, Tony will be having dinner at a work event, so Kim will be on her own. Again, different dinners, same lunch, in this case The Minimalist Baker’s 30-Minute Portobello Mushroom Stir Fry. We’ve found that despite Lent being long over, we’re still skewing pretty vegetarian/pescatarian, and this dish fits the bill, though Tony may add a little chicken to it to mix things up.

Kim will be back at the New York Junior League on Thursday, so Tony will be on his own for dinner. On Friday, we’re going to an event organized by Tony’s university alumni organization: an exhibit of the works of Robert Ryman to be held at the Dia:Chelsea on West 22nd Street. We’ve had a lot of fun at previous alumni events, so we’re looking forward to this one. We’ll probably grab dinner somewhere near the gallery.

We have tickets to the ballet on Saturday, but will probably have dinner at home in the form of Food 52’s Cilantro Lime Salmon Cakes with Chipotle Mayo. If you’ve been following our blog for the past few weeks, you might notice that this is the third time we’ve had the recipe on our weekly menu. We really want to make it, but just haven’t been able to get to it yet. We’re committed to making it this week though and know we will enjoy it!

This Week’s Menu: Two at the Table Menu Week of May 8, 2016

Last week turned out to be a little busier that we thought it would be work-wise, with both of us coming home a couple of times with no interest in cooking. This happens from time to time so as always, we stayed flexible and are going to “recycle” a few recipes into this week. Here’s what we have planned.

We’re going to the Yankees-Red Sox game Sunday night and will have dinner at the Stadium, but we’ll have dinner at home Monday night. We will make Food 52’s Green Goddess Chicken Sandwiches, which we planned to make last week. We still have the 2015 La Nymphe Tavelin the fridge, so we’ll also do the original wine pairing that we planned.

We’re taking our cats George and Henry to the vet for a regular check up Tuesday night, so we will order in either right before or right after their appointment. Kim will be out with friends Wednesday night, so Tony will be on his own. He’ll have leftovers, specifically, the asparagus that he made with the swordfish and carrot romesco earlier in the week last week and the cowboy steak from our fun Cinco de Mayo dinner.

On Thursday night, we’ll make a new recipe that Kim found: Saveur’s Thai Fish Burgers. We might have beer with this one, but if we can find the time, we’ll take the recipe to Columbus Wine and Spirits and see if we stump Michael with it.

We’ll be out celebrating a friend’s birthday on Friday night. We have tickets to a Jazz at Lincoln Center concert on Satruday, but will make time to have dinner at home before the show. We’ll recycle another of last week’s recipes Food 52’s Cilantro Lime Salmon Cakes with Chipotle Mayo. While this dish is similar to Thursday night’s dinner, we think they are different enough that we’ll enjoy them both equally. Plus, we’ve been on such a big seafood kick lately that we’ll probably enjoy both dishes either way! 

This Week’s Menu: Two at the Table Menu Week of May 1 2016

While we didn’t post our menu last weekend, which we can chalk up to focusing instead on a food photography session on Saturday and a portrait photography session on Sunday, we did make some great dishes, like Ina Garten’s Chicken with Morels and Saveur’s Charred Asparagus and Egg Salad, as well as two great shellfish recipes: The New York Times’ Steamed Clams with Spring Herbs and Food & Wine’s Mussels with Cava and Roasted Carrot Romesco. We’re back to our regular schedule this week a recipe of our own (mostly) invention on Monday, an old favorite on Friday, and three new recipes during the week. Here’s what we have planned:

On Monday night, we’ll use up the carrot romesco we made to go along with the mussels mentioned above. We’ll have the romesco sauce on some grilled swordfish, as we’ve done before. Since we’ll have the grill pan going for the swordfish, we’ll also grill some asparagus, which we’ll top with some shaved manchego cheese and a sprinkle of Spanish paprika. We’ll pair this with a 2014 Lobster Reef Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand, which Michael from Wines by the Flask suggested. (As an aside, Lobster Reef has one of the best logos we’ve seen in a long time!)

Monday night’s dinner will be a new recipe: The Kitchen’s Toasted Farro Salad with Fresh Peas, Pea Shoots, and Herbs. We’ve never made farro before, but we’ve had such good success with quinoa, we thought we would give this dish a try. We’ll serve this with a 2014 Alpha Estate Sauvignon Blanc, a Greek wine that Michael suggested.

We’ve been easing our way back into eating meat after our mostly meatless Lent, and on Tuesday we’ll make Food 52’s Green Goddess Chicken Sandwiches. We’ve made green goddess dressing several times before, but this will be the first time we’ll have it with chicken. We bought some small loaves of French bread to use in place of the hamburger buns called for in the recipe. We’ll have the sandwiches with a rose, specifically, a 2015 La Nymphe Tavel, also courtesy of Michael.

We’ll make another Food 52 recipe on Thursday, namely, Food 52’s Coffee Marinated Flank Fajitas with Pico de Gallo. This will be our first time making steak since the start of Lent (so, in at least two months) and it will be a nice treat. We pair this up with some cold beer, possibly an IPA, but more likely something a little lighter.

Last but not least, we’ll be making Food 52’s Cilantro Lime Salmon Cakes with Chipotle Mayo on Friday. We’ve had this dish a couple of times before, as a simple weeknight dinner and as part of our wine and food pairing with Wines by the Flask. We’ll have beer again, most likely a Ballast Point Grapefruit Sculpin IPA. We think the beer’s hopiness will be a nice counterpoint to the spiciness of the chipotle mayo and it’s grapefruit flavor will complement the lime in the salmon cakes.

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

After an unplanned hiatus of a couple of weeks, we’re back and with an almost exclusively seafood menu for the week. The dishes will also allow us to use up some of the things we have in the freezer. We’ll have beer with most of these dishes, since they lend themselves so well to being paired with it, but we’ll probably sneak in bottle of rose somewhere along the way.

We’re going to our first Yankee game of the season on Sunday afternoon and as is usually the case, we probably won’t feel much hungry for dinner Sunday night. If we do decide to make dinner (or to just make a few lunches for the week), we’ll make the Kitchn’s Quinoa Bowl with Kung Pao Edamame. We had this a few weeks ago and it was both simple to make and super-flavorful. Plus, we still have some edamame in the freezer.

Kim will be at a New York Junior League meeting Monday night, so Tony will be on his own for dinner. He’ll use up the remaining red snapper that we bought at the Southold Fish Market when we made out trip to Greenport, Long Island a few weeks ago. We usually make Elie Krieger’s version, which features a chipotle cream. Tony will mix things up a bit and have the fish tacos with avocado, cilantro, and lime dressing leftover from when we made Tuna and Black Bean Burrito Bowl with Cilantro-Lime Dressing.

On Tuesday night, we’ll use the rest of the monkfish we bought on our trip to Greenport to make The New York Times’ Monkfish Rolls. We both love lobster rolls in the summer time and we’ve read about monkfish being “the poor-man’s lobster” enough times to want to give this recipe a try.

On Wednesday night, we’ll continue the seafood theme and make Elie Krieger’s Baked Shrimp with Tomatoes and Feta (and Orzo). We haven’t made this dish in a while and are looking froward to making it again. 

On Thursday night, we’ll keep with the theme of using up leftovers from the freezer and make two pizzas using dough we’ve been saving for a little while. The first is a standard Tomato, Mozzarella, and Basil and the second is one we dreamed up ourselves: Onion, Olive, and Goat Cheese, which will use the goat cheese we purchased at Catapano Dairy Farm.

One of the challenges of cooking in a small, New York apartment is that making anything that involves frying makes the whole apartment smell like oil. (Cooking fish sometime snakes the apartment smell very fishy, but that’s a risk with which we’re a lot more comfortable!) Plus, it makes a huge mess. From time to time, we try to make recipes that involve baking foods that are usually fried. We had great success with this approach when we made Spicy Oven-Fried Chicken over the summer. So, for our final dinner of the week on Friday, we’re going to try our hand at making The New York Times’ Baked Fish and Chips. We’re very curious to see how this comes out!

This Week’s Menu: Two at the Table Menu Week of March 27, 2016

We took a couple of weeks off from the blog as we were away for a long weekend in Florida and it took some time to get ready for the trip and to get back in the swing of making dinner after we got home. We have three new recipes for this week, plus some leftovers from a couple of weeks ago that have been storing in our freezer. As we hoped, even though Lent is over, our menu is still very much geared toward seafood and vegetarian dishes.

Today is Easter and as we do every year, we’ll be spending it with Tony’s parents. We’re looking forward to seeing them again and to enjoying Tony’s mom’s pasta and sauce. 

We’ll try a new recipe on Monday: Food & Wine’s Harissa Spiced Salmon with Israeli Cous Cous. We’ve never worked with harissa before, so we’re excited to give it a try. We’ll pair this with a 2013 St. Innocent Pinot Noir from the Willamette Valley in Oregon. Our wines choices tend to skew French and Italian, with some Spanish, Greek, and South American wines thrown in, so an American wine is a bit of a departure for us.

On Tuesday night, we’re making a modified version of a recipe Kim found in Real Simple magazine: Tuna and Black Bean Burrito Bowl with Cilantro-Lime Dressing. The recipe was from an ad for Bumble Bee Tuna, but we decided to up the ante and buy a nice tuna steak and use that instead. This made sense to us, not only because Bumble Bee launched a recall recently, but also because fresh fish sounded so much better than canned. We’ll have this with a Spanish wine, a 2014 Navaherreros Blanco de Bernabeleva.

Kim will be at a New York Junior League meeting Wednesday night, but we still want to have dinner together, so we decided to make something that would take almost no time at all: leftover Skinnytaste’s Spicy Black Bean Burgers with Chipotle Mayonnaise. The frozen patties only take about 15 minutes to cook, so we’ll be able to have dinner on the table in no time at all. We’ll have the spicy burgers with a Goose Island IPA.

We’re planning our annual spring trip to Greenport, Long Island for Saturday, so we’ll be having dinner there that evening and will probably order in or go out Friday night so that we’ll have time to pack and be ready for an early departure Saturday morning. We still plan on finishing the week strong on Thursday night by making a dish from a new recipe (Saveur Magazine’s Charred Asparagus and Egg Salad), using a new ingredient (white asparagus), including a food that Tony does not really like all that much (hard-boiled eggs). We’ll have this with a Antonin Rodet Vire-Clesse Le Virolis, a French white that we haven’t had before.

This Week’s Menu: Two at the Table Menu Week of March 6 2016

We have another week of fun, almost exclusively vegetarian recipes planned for the next seven days.

On Sunday night, we’ll make the The Newlywed Kitchen’s Red Wine and Mushroom Risotto. You might remember we planned to make this dish on Friday of last week, but we were pretty wiped out when we got home and decided to order in sushi instead. We like to pair sushi with India Pale Ales, so we had a chance to try a new one: Ommegang Brewery’s Nirvana IPA.

Tony will be out to dinner with friends Monday night, so Kim will be on her own. On Tuesday, we’ll make Rachel Khoo’s Poisson Meuniere, which we’ll have with a side of sautéed spinach. We’ll dress the spinach with a rice wine vinaigrette and sprinkle it with garlicky panko, both of which we have left over from last week, when Tony made Food & Wine’s Kale Salad with Garlicky Panko. We’ll pair the fish with a rose from the North Fork of Long Island, namely, a 2015 from Wolffer Estate. We’ve had mixed success with local wines, but Michael at Columbus Wine and Spirits had us try the 2014 last year and we loved it, so we have high hopes for the 2015 vintage.

We’ll order in on Wednesday, but on Thursday, we’ll make the New York Times’ Shakshuka with Feta. This is a super-flavorful egg dish that we’ve made a few times and are looking forward to having again. Michael suggested a red wine for this dish: a 2014 Paranag Kir-Yanni from Macedonia, Greece. 

On Friday night, we’ll be making skinny taste’s Quinoa Stuffed Peppers. (Please note that the link will take you to the Recipe Girl blog, not the skinnytaste blog, but you should spend time on both sites!) This is an easy dish, but the peppers do take quite a while to cook, so we decided it was ideal for a Friday, because we’ll have the extra time to make it and a chance to sit and relax while the peppers cook. We’ll have this with a 2014 Altesino Toscano Rosso. 

We’ll be home on Saturday night and will make something a bit more involved, but only a bit: Smitten Kitchen’s Mushroom Bourguignon. We’re still talking about the Rachel Khoo recipe for Boeuf Bourguignon that we made in January, so we thought the vegetarian version would be perfect for our Lent menu. We’ll have this with a bottle of French wine, a 2012 Chateauneuf-Du-Pape, that Tony received as a gift from a dear friend and that we have been saving for a special dinner.

This Week’s Menu: Two at the Table Menu Week of February 28, 2016

This week, we tried to find recipes that are quick and easy but that also make enough leftovers to help us plan our lunches for the week. Tony was especially motivated to take this approach after a week of somewhat repetitive lunches brought from home (spinach and mushroom enchiladas for the fourth time in two weeks) and slightly boring (below-average sushi) and downright horrible (a soggy, bitter, soggy, overly-eggplanty, soggy, under-seasoned (did we mention soggy?) grilled vegetable wrap) lunches purchased at work. Before you feel too bad for him, you should know that Tony cheated on the Lent rules this past Monday by eating a pretty large piece of red velvet cake, though it should be said, at a colleague’s going away party.

On Sunday we’ll start with Ina Garten’s Spinach Gratin, a recipe that is pretty easy to make, but that uses a couple of larger pots/dishes, so it’s ideal for a Sunday. This recipe makes quite a bit: eight servings as a side dish, so we figure we’ll get at least two lunches out of it too. We’ll pair this up with a 2013 Puligny Montrachet from Columbus Wine and Spirits.

We’ll make another Ina Garten recipe on Monday night: Tuna and Hummus Sandwiches. This one couldn’t be much easier: it’s a simple but flavorful tuna salad that is piled up on sourdough bread spread with hummus and then topped with radishes. (We decided to buy hummus rather than make it, though Kim makes excellent hummus.) The tuna will make for some great lunches this week, especially since the flavors of the salad develop over time. We’ll have the sandwiches with a 2010 Lacryma Christi.

On Tuesday night, we’ll make a dish that we tried to make a couples of weeks ago: Real Simple’s Linguine with Broiled Garlic and Clams. We say “tried to make” because this dish counts as one of our very, very few culinary disasters. Let’s just say that Tony learned that when a recipe says “six inches from the broiler,” it’s probably a good idea to listen, especially if you’re cooking things in a Pyrex dish. (In his defense, he did have enough sense to put a baking pan under the dish, so the mess was at least contained.) We managed to salvage a few clams, but lost out on all the tasty wine and garlic broth that they were steamed in. So, we’ll make this dish again and pair it with a 2014 Graci Etna Bianco.

We’ll take break and order in on Wednesday and then make a very simple dish on Thursday: Food & Wine’s Kale Salad with Garlicky Panko. The recipe suggests serving the salad with a fried egg on top, so we’ll give that a try. We’ll also serve some sourdough toast, using the leftover bread from the tuna sandwiches we’ll have Monday night. We’ll have the salad with a 2013 Notre Dame de Cousignac Lirac. We’ll only dress some of the salad so that if we want to bring it for lunch later in the week it won’t be soggy.

We’ll wrap up the week on Friday night with a dish we made once before and thought was both beautiful and delicious: The Newlywed Kitchen’s Red Wine and Mushroom Risotto. As you can see from the post when we first made this dish, it comes out a very interesting purple. We’ll have the risotto with a 2013 Chassange Montrachet. Again, plenty of leftovers!

We have big plans Saturday night – we’ll be attending the New York Junior League’s Winter Ball – so no cooking for us, but we’ll be back next week with more fun, easy, Lent-friendly, recipes!