Two at the Table

On Wednesday night, Tony made Ina Garten’s French Chicken Pot Pies from her “Make it Ahead” cookbook. He assembled the pies in the late afternoon, which meant all he had to do right before Kim got home was to put them in the oven. Here, he explains what he did:

I’ll start by saying this is not a typical weeknight dinner, though, to be fair, the recipe never claims that it is. I was able to pull it off because I was home all day, but when we make these again (and we will!), it will either be on a weekend, or possibly on a Monday night, if we’re able to do the prep and assembly on a Sunday. The recipe doesn’t say the maximum amount of time you can leave the pies in the fridge before cooking; it only says a minimum of 30 minutes. Keeping in mind that raw eggs are used to “glue” the puff pastry to the rim of the bowl and to brush the top of the pie, I would be comfortable letting these sit in the fridge for 24 hours before cooking them.

The first step was to cook the chicken breasts. Since I was cutting the recipe in half, I used two, bone-in, skin-on breasts, which I patted dry with paper towels, brushed with olive oil, and sprinkled generously with salt and pepper. I cooked the breasts in a 350 degree oven for 35 minutes, during which time I worked on the rest of the filling.

There was a bit of prep work involved, but since I was cutting the recipe by 1/3 (the full recipe makes six pies), I did have to do some careful measuring and weighing. The last thing I wanted was to overfill the bowls, which would have made for some very messy pies with soggy crusts, or worse, under-fill them, which would have made for a less than satisfying dinner. Fortunately, the recipe translates all of the very general measurements (such as 4 leeks and 5 carrots) into cups, which made the math much easier to do. So, instead of 4 cups of chopped leeks, I prepared 1 and 1/3 cups and instead of 2 cups of carrots, I prepared 2/3 of a cup. For the mushrooms, rather than try to figure out what 1/3 of 8 ounces was, I converted to metric (What can I say? I am a math nerd at heart!) and measured out exactly 76 grams of mushrooms. If you don’t have a scale, can’t work with metric units, or aren’t neurotic, you can just use half of an 8 ounce package of mushrooms. I also measured out 1/6 of a cup of flour simply by filling our 1/3-cup measuring cup half-way. I was a little more generous with the garlic and tarragon, as I figured going heavy here would add more flavor without causing the bowls to overflow. I cut those measurement in half, mincing up 2 teaspoons of garlic and 1/8 of a cup (or one-half of a 1/4 cup) of fresh tarragon leaves. Last but not least, I measured out 95 grams of frozen peas. As usual, I figured I would measure and add the liquid ingredients as I went along.

I next sautéed the leeks and carrots in butter over medium-high heat for about 10 minutes. I then added the garlic, mushrooms, and tarragon and cooked everything for 5 minutes more. I very carefully sprinkled in the flour – I wanted to avoid just dumping it in, which would have created clumps – and cooked the ingredients for another half a minute or so.

I then added about 6.5 ounces of chicken stock, or 1/3 of the 20 ounces called for in the recipe. Rather than buying bottle of cream sherry just to use in this recipe, I substituted white wine and added two tablespoons to the pot. Because I was using a pretty large pot without much liquid in it, I never really got to the “boil” stage; the mixture simmered for a few minutes and then reached what I fought was the right level of thickness. I added the heavy cream (a little over an ounce), plus some salt and pepper, and let everything simmer for five minutes more.

By this time, the chicken had come out of the oven and rested for a few minutes, but wasn’t quite cool enough to work with. Even though I had taken the pot off the heat, I didn’t want to let the rest of the filling get dried out, so I just cut up the still-hot chicken until I had about 1 and 2/3 cups. (The breasts were large, so I had most of a piece left over when I was done.) As you may know, a big part of the reason for letting meat rest before you cut it is to let it reabsorb its juices; cutting meat when it’s hot lets all that flavor escape. To solve for this, when I added the chicken to the pot, I also poured in the juices that were still on the cutting board. I then added the peas and stirred everything together.

I then started to work on the puff pastry. I found two plates that were a little bigger than the edges of the bowls I was going to use for the pies. I rolled out the pastry dough, which I had let defrost, until it was large enough to accommodate the two plates. I laid the plates down on the pastry and using a sharp paring knife, I cut around the edges until I had two circles about 6 1/2 inches across.

Now, I was in the home stretch. I filled the two bowls with the chicken and veggies; all my careful math paid off as the bowls were filled perfectly. I beat one egg with a tablespoon of water and used that to brush the top of the bowls. I carefully laid the pastry dough on the bowls and just as carefully pressed it down and around the top of each bowl. I brushed the top of each pie with the egg wash, sprinkled on some fleur de del and fresh ground black pepper, and cut three one-inch slits in the top of each pie. I then put the pies in the fridge, where they rested for about 2 hours.

Right before Kim got home, I put the bowls on a parchment-paper-lined baking pan and slid the pan into a 400 degree oven, where the pies baked for about 35 minutes.

The pies came out perfectly: the tops were golden brown and the filling was hot and bubbly. The pies were not overfilled and the crust was crunch on top and soft without being soggy underneath. While the filling could have used a little more salt and pepper, the tarragon came through very clearly and gave a classic recipe an interesting twist. We paired up the pies with a very hoppy Sierra Nevada Hop Hunter IPA. Kim was so kind as to say that the pies were better than the ones we get from Harriet’s Kitchen, a local restaurant known for, among other things, its chicken pot pies. We haven’t given up on Harriet’s, but we are definitely making this dish again!

On Tuesday night, Tony made Food Network’s Broiled Bluefish with Tomato, Olive, and Caper Compote, with a side of brown rice. Here’s how it went:

First off, this dinner, especially if I had left out the brown rice, which takes about an hour (!) to cook, is definitely a weeknight meal. Even with the rice, I was able to go from start to finish in exactly an hour. Without the rice, I don’t think it would have been any trouble to meet or beat the 40 minute cook time estimate noted in the recipe.

Since it took the longest time to prepare, I started the rice first. I knew that if I kept the lid on the rice, as the last step in the cooking directions say to do, I could keep it warm for a while if it was done before the fish (the last thing to be cooked) was ready to be plated.

As is my preference, I prepped everything before starting to cook. As I’ve noted in earlier posts, this can take a little longer, as you can’t take advantage of the fact that you can prep some things while other things are cooking, but I find it easier to work this way. This recipe lends itself to this prep-in-advance-approach, because the ingredients for the compote go into the pan in two batches. First, you cook the onion, garlic, jalapeno, and celery for about 4 minutes, and then you add the tomatoes, olives, and capers and cook for another 2 minutes. A this point, you remove the pan from the heat, stir in the lemon juice and parsley, and cover the pan to keep everything warm.

Cooking the bluefish couldn’t be any easier: you brush it with olive oil, sprinkle it with salt and pepper, and put it under the broiler for about 5 minutes. Though you could probably pull it off, I wouldn’t recommend trying to cook the fish and make the compote at the same time, for two reasons. One, I think letting the compote sit, even for the five or so minutes while the bluefish broils, helps the flavors combine. Two, at least in my experience, leaving food under the broiler even somewhat unattended is usually a bad idea.

The fish was cooked perfectly – a little crispy on top and cooked all the way through, but not overdone. The compote was a nice pairing, as the briny, salty ingredients (capers and olives) complement the fish, while the other ingredients, especially the tomato and onion, provide a nice counterpoint. (We must have gotten a dud jalapeño, because there wasn’t much heat to speak of in this dish, which was fine.) As we noted in the menu write up, Michael at Columbus Wine & Spirits suggested an Italian white for this dish, a 2013 Feudi di San Gregorio Greco di Tufo. The wine and fish went together quite well, making for a lovely weeknight dinner.

This Week’s Menu: Two at the Table Menu Week of September 27 2015 

We’ve been on a bit of an unplanned hiatus for the past several weeks and while we’ve been cooking like we always do and making lots of fun recipes, we haven’t had time to post our menus or write up the dishes. Things have settled down a bit, so we’re going to try to get back on track, starting this week. Tony will be home (he’s taking a little staycation as he gets ready to start a new job next week), so he’ll have time to make several new dishes – and take lots of great photos!

On Sunday, we’re going to Yankee Stadium with our friends Rachel and John for our last regular season game this year. We’ll have our fill of ballpark food, so dinner Sunday night will probably be cheese and crackers, if we’re hungry at all.

On Monday night, Kim will be at a New York Junior League meeting, so Tony will be on his own. He’s getting together with his friends Lynee and Peter, two ardent Green Bay Packers fans, to watch Monday Night Football.

Since blue fish was very highly rated on Fresh Direct, on Tuesday night we’ll be making The Food Network’s Broiled Bluefish with Tomato, Olive, and Caper Compote. We’ll pair this dish up with a 2013 Feudi di San Gregorio Greco di Tufo, also suggested by Michael at Columbus Wine & Spirits. 

We’ll be making another new recipe on Wednesday night: Ina Garten’s French Chicken Pot Pies. (Please note that the link will take you to the Food Republic website, where you can find the recipe.) We’re going to pair this up with a 2012 Audebert & Fils Saint Nicolas de Bourgueil, a Cabernet Franc, also suggested by Michael.

On Thursday, we’ll be making a Food & Wine recipe that we have made before and posted to the blog: Grilled Fontina, Mushroom, and Sage Sandwiches . We’re going to put a bit of a spin on this by drizzling truffle oil in on the sandwiches. Rather than pairing this up with a wine, we’re going to pair it up with a hoppy IPA.

On Friday night, we’re going to do something a bit extravagant and make Giada DeLaurentis’ Lamb Osso Bucco. This isn’t a very complicated dish, but it does take several hours to make, so he’ll probably start it in the late afternoon so it will be ready when Kim gets home from work. We’ll pair this up with a Pietro Rinaldi Barbaresco, which was a very generous and thoughtful going away gift from Tony’s boss.

We’re having dinner out on Saturday night – a few beers at West End Hall, a new beer hall on the Upper West Side, followed by dinner at Lolo’s Seafood Shack, so we won’t be doing any cooking.

That’s it for this week. Please check in as the week goes in to see how each dish went!

Tony was very excited to try this recipe from epicurious.com for Spicy Oven-Fried Chicken. Here’s how it turned out for him:

I started by making the brine, which was as simple as whisking together buttermilk, oil, hot pepper sauce (I used Tabasco), mustard, garlic, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1/2 teaspoon pepper in a large bowl. I then added one sliced-up onion and the chicken pieces (I used drumsticks and thighs, but you can use whatever you like) to the bowl; I turned the pieces several times to make sure they were well-coated. I put the bowl in the fridge for a total of three hours, taking it out once to turn the chicken.

While the chicken was marinating in the buttermilk mixture, I made the coating. I mixed  unseasoned breadcrumbs (I was a little short of the 1 cup called for in the recipe, so I added a little bit of panko breadcrumbs to make up the difference), Parmesan cheese, flour, thyme, paprika and cayenne pepper in a shallow glass dish and put it aside.

Once that was done, I prepped two small sheet pans by lining them with aluminum foil and placing a rack in each pan. My preference would have been to use one large pan, but given that our oven is a little narrow, I knew I needed to use two pans to hold all the chicken. I planned to both rotate each pan a few times and switch them, moving the pan on the higher oven rack to the lower one and vice versa, so that everything would cook evenly.

After three hours of marinating time, I started preheating the even to 450 degrees and got ready to bread the chicken. I took each piece out of the buttermilk, picked off any stray onions (I knew they would burn if I didn’t), dredged each piece of chicken in the breadcrumbs, and distributed all the pieces between the two racks. I tried to use the technique of using one hand for the wet step of getting the chicken out of the brine and one for the dry step of breading it, but, as you might expect, it still got a little messy. As a final step, I drizzled the chicken with melted butter before placing it in the oven.

The idea behind trying the recipe was my desire (obsession?) to make fried chicken without stinking up our small apartment with the smell of oil. I was able to avoid doing that, but because I had to open the oven several times to move the sheet pans around, the apartment still managed to get a little smoky. I don’t know if it was the butter that fell onto the sheet pan burning or the fat from the chicken doing the same, but I wasn’t quite expecting it to happen. I think the fact that the oven was at 450 degrees contributed to the situation as well.

Despite a little bit of smokiness, which was solved by opening some windows and turning on a fan, dinner was a huge success. The chicken was moist and delicious and while it wasn’t super crispy, it did have a nice crunch. The heat from the Tabasco in the buttermilk marinade and the cayenne pepper in the bread crumb coating was noticeable without being overwhelming. We had the chicken for lunch over this past weekend and it was just as good slightly cold as out-of-the-oven warm.

When I make this recipe again, I plan to try to get the chicken into one pan, even if it means making the chicken in two batches. (There is no way on earth I am making this recipe without making enough for leftovers!). We loved the chicken, but I will play with the recipe a bit. I think I’m also going to skip the “drizzle with butter” step (it probably helped make the chicken a little crispier, but I don’t think we will miss it) and also cook the chicken at a more-standard-for-chicken 350 degrees instead of 450. I might also turn up the spiciness a bit and use more tabasco and cayenne pepper.

This Week’s Menu: Two at the Table Menu Week of Aug 3, 2015

We have a busy baseball schedule this week, with a game on Tuesday night with our friends Alexandra and Eric and a game Saturday afternoon with our friends Marie and Jeff. We’ll have dinner at the ballpark on Tuesday night and, if the past is any guide, we won’t be all that hungry for dinner Saturday night. We’ll have another Queens adventure planned for Friday night, during which we’ll hit a Brazilian restaurant called Pao de Quiejo. Even with our busy schedule, we still have four fun recipes planned for this week.

On Sunday night, we’ll be having Stuffed Heirloom Tomatoes, a recipe we found in “In Style” magazine. Heirloom tomatoes are pretty much at their peak right now and this recipe stuffs them with tasty things like couscous, chanterelle mushrooms, and tzatziki. We’ll be pairing this with a 2012 Trimbach Gewürztraminer suggested to us by Michael at Wines by the Flask.

Monday night’s dinner is going to be completed in two parts. We read a great article in the New York Times about Sevillian Gazpacho, which, in southern Spain is not eaten as a soup, but enjoyed as an ice-cold drink.  We thought it would be fun to make and as the recipe says the soup needs to be chilled at least 6 hours or overnight, we decided to make this on Sunday night and enjoy it before dinner on Monday.  The main course on Monday will be Andalusian-Style Swordfish. We picked this recipe because swordfish was rated very highly on Fresh Direct and because we wanted something that would pair well with the gazpacho. We’ll have this with a 2013 Domaine de la Pinardiere Muscadet. 

Our last Queens adventure took us to a Greek restaurant in the Ditmars neighborhood. Kim was so inspired by our dinner that she found a recipe for Greek Salad Tartines with White Beans. We’ll have this on Wednesday night with a 2013 Quinta da Lixa’s Aromas das Castas from Portugal.

Thursday night will be a recipe of our own invention: Spicy Pork Tenderloin Tacos with Cilantro and Grilled Pineapple. We’re going to start with one of our favorite recipes, Chili-Glazed Pork, and use that as the basis for the tacos. We’ll pair this with a nice, cold, hoppy India Pale Ale.

This Week’s Menu: Two at the Table Menu Week of July 26 2015

We have some fun plans later in the week–dinner with friends at the Cosmopolitan Club (which is where we had our wedding reception, so it will always hold a special place in our hearts) Thursday night and then a party at our friends Jimmy and Elaine’s place Saturday night–but we’ll be doing plenty of cooking to start the week.

One of the challenges of cooking in a small apartment is that some dishes can really stink up the place. Among the worst offenders are deep-fried foods, which we tend to avoid making in general, but even more so because of the aforementioned problem. However, Tony has been dying to make fried chicken this summer. He thought back to when we made Grilled Skirt Steak with Parsley Oregano Sauce and Baked Tostones. Tostones (plantains) are usually deep-fried, but we found a great recipe from Skinnytaste for a baked version and they were fantastic. Tony searched and found a recipe on epicurious.com for Spicy Oven-Fried Chicken. He’ll tackle this Sunday night because while it’s not too complicated, it does require brining the chicken in buttermilk for a few hours, which is hard to do on a weeknight. This recipe will not only let Tony experiment with a new technique, but also give him a taste of something close to the hot chicken that we missed out on in Nashville when we had barbecue for lunch twice. Tony stands by this decision, but he wishes we had time for one more lunch in Nashville! 

When we looked at Fresh Direct this week, we saw that whole red snapper was very highly rated. We searched and found a recipe on Food & Wine for Whole Roast Fish with Lemon and Herbs. This recipe looks simple a delicious so we’re looking forward to making it for dinner Monday night.  We’ll pair this up with a simple salad.

After our trip to Le District last week, inspired by all the great food and ingredients, we made Rachel Khoo’s Terrine Forestiere or Wild Mushroom Terrine. It was very easy to make and rich and satisfying to eat, plus it made for a great lunch at work on Monday. We wanted to make another Rachel Khoo recipe this week and decided on her Tomatoes Stuffed with Crab for Tuesday night. This recipe uses prepared crab meat, so we won’t have to boil, crack, and pick a bunch of crabs to make it. Not that doesn’t sound fantastic, but it’s more than we can manage on a weeknight.

Kim was in the mood for pizza Wednesday night and found a recipe on a blog new to us: Brooklyn Supper, which features recipes that use seasonal ingredients. Kim loves figs and they are very much in season right now, so she’s going to make Fig, Manchego and Arugula Pizza for us Wednesday night. We’ll be using pre-made dough, which will save lots of time, and we’re not going to skimp on the figs or manchego cheese!

The week wraps up with the previously mentioned dinner at the Cos Club on Thursday night and then we’ll order in on Friday night so that Kim can bake a special treat to take to Jimmy and Elaine’s on Saturday.

This Week’s Menu: Two at the Table Menu Week of July 19 2015

While we have some fun plans this week (a Yankee game with our friends Tom and Sharon on Sunday and tickets to see “Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s bold new musical about the founding father and first Secretary of the Treasury, followed by dinner at El Original on Saturday), aside from what will probably be a slightly busier-than-usual work week, we should have plenty of time to cook. So, we’ve picked out four new recipes to try.

The first two play to our new-found realization that we like Asian flavors a lot more than we think we do. (This was further supported by a recent trip to Papa’s Kitchen in Woodside, Queens, a great Filipino restaurant where we not only enjoyed chicken adoba and deep fried pork belly plus green beans in coconut milk, but also sang karaoke. But that’s a story for another post.) Dinner on Monday night will feature two recipes from Food 52: Ginger Glazed Soy Salmon and Thai Style Spicy Pickled Cucumber Relish. Both parts of this meal seem very easy and perfect for a weeknight. Dinner on Tuesday night will feature a recipe from Yellow Table: Korean-Style Grilled Flank Steak with Spicy Cucumbers and Sticky Rice. This dinner will be a little more complicated, as we have to make steak, rice, and the cucumbers, but it all seems very doable. If you’re wondering why our first two meals of the week are so heavy on cucumbers, it’s because Tony miscalculated by a factor of two how many cucumbers he would need for his recent pickle-making project…

We’ll probably order in on Wednesday night, but on Thursday night, we’re going to indulge Tony’s recent obsession with one-pot pasta dishes. Last week, we made Martha Stewart’s One-Pot Pasta and despite our concerns going in, it was great. We’re trying a new recipe, from a blog that we found just this week: The View from Great Island. The recipe is for One Pot Farmer’s Market Pasta and includes a lot more veggies–like asparagus, broccoli, and bell pepper among others. We’re even more curious to see how this dish turns out, since there will be a lot more in the pot, but less water than the other recipe (3 1/2 cups versus 4 1/2 cups).

On Friday night, we’re making Tasting Table’s Tomatillo Shakshuka. We’ve made a version of this dish before using plum tomatoes, which was delicious. Having made the “red” version, we’re excited to make the “green” version. We may have another Queens dining adventure in us, so we may go out for dinner Friday night, but if we do, we’ll just make the shakshuka for lunch on Saturday. We have two pound of tomatillos in the fridge, so one way or another, this dish is getting made!

If you’ve been following our blog, you know we don’t make very much Italian food and rarely make pasta. There are two reasons for this. The first, paradoxically, is that Tony LOVES Italian food, which is not surprising, giving that he ate it about six days a week, every week, from the time he could eat solid food to the day he left home for college, and if given the chance, he would revert back to something close to that schedule. The second is that even making a pot of pasta is a bit of a project, at least in small kitchen. You have to bring a big pot of water to boil, cook the pasta, strain the pasta through a colander, and, if you’re doing it right, return the pasta to the pot (or another pan) so you can combine it with the sauce. Making sauce, of course, takes more time and means another pot or pan to wash. (Store-bought sauce out of a jar is not an option; Tony’s Very Italian Mother and Very Italian Father would disown him if he tried.) It’s a surprising amount of work and mess for what should be a simple meal.

So, when we got an e-mail from Food 52 that contained a link to a recipe for Martha Stewart’s One-Pot Pasta, we were intrigued. The recipe, as the name implies, directs you on how to make a pasta dinner in one pot, without having to bring quarts and quarts of water to a full boil or making a separate sauce. Here, Tony tells you how it turned out.

I was excited by this recipe, but also very skeptical. Despite the implied assurance in the recipe that stirring and turning the pasta with tongs frequently during cooking would keep everything from clumping together, I was anticipating the very real possibility of a culinary disaster. I took a page from our cats George and Henry and decided that curiosity – Does this approach to making pasta really work?! – should win out. I’m glad I did.

It only took a few minutes to slice the onion and garlic and cut the grape tomatoes in half, so prep was pretty minimal. The first cooking step for making this dish couldn’t be simpler: put everything – linguine, cherry tomatoes, onion, garlic, red pepper, basil, olive oil, salt, pepper, and water – in a pan. The only catch is that you have to use a “straight sided skillet” (I used our trusty Dutch oven) and that the linguine “should lay flat” (the linguine didn’t lie perfectly flat, as the Dutch oven was a little too small for that, but came close enough). Once the ingredients are in the pot, you bring the mixture to a boil over high heat. I timed it and the mixture took 8 minutes to come to a boil.

As the pasta boils, and as the instructions note, you have to stir the pasta to keep it from clumping together. This wasn’t the near-constant stirring Kim had to do when she made the Red Wine and Mushroom Risotto, but I did have to keep a close eye on things. After about 9 more minutes, almost all the water was absorbed and the pasta was done. I divided the pasta among two plates (for dinner) and two plastic containers (for leftovers), shaved some Parmesan cheese over the linguine, and we were ready for dinner.

Much to our delight, our skepticism proved to be unfounded: the pasta was cooked pretty much perfectly and while I forgot some key ingredients (fresh basil in the pasta and more basil plus olive oil for serving) and didn’t use anywhere near enough cheese, it tasted pretty good too. The onions and tomatoes softened nicely; the onions kept a little bit of their crunch and the tomatoes didn’t get too mushy. The residual pasta water helped the sauce and cheese stick to the pasta.

We will definitely make this again when we need to get dinner on the table in 30 minutes, and will probably experiment with it too. We talked about adding sliced black or Kalamata olives to the cooked pasta to give it more of a Mediterranean flair. We could also see adding cooked sausage or shrimp to the pasta to take it in another direction. I’m also curious to see what happens if all you put in the pot is pasta and water.

We hope you try this recipe at home and have as much success with it as we did. Please let us know if it turns out as well for you as it did for us.  Just don’t tell my mom and dad!

This Week’s Menu: Two at the Table Menu Week of July 12 2015

We had a fantastic time in Nashville over the weekend. We enjoyed lots of great food – especially barbecue! – and lots of fun music. We also made time to visit both the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum as well as the Frist Center for the Visual Arts. We didn’t get home too late on Sunday (about 8:30), but it was late enough that after we were welcomed home by our cats George and Henry and unpacked, all we felt like for dinner was some cheese and French bread. We didn’t place our usual Fresh Direct order (we were too busy exploring Nashville!), so this week’s menu is pretty simple. 

That said, we did a try a new recipe last night: Martha Stewart’s One-Pot Pasta,  a recipe we were alerted to by an e-mail from Food 52. The idea behind the recipe, as the name implies, is that you can make an entire pasta dinner (with sauce) in one pot in about 10 minutes once the water in the pot starts to boil. We were a bit skeptical (Tony’s Very Italian Mother would definitely not go for this recipe!), but gave this one a go because we got home very late. Check back later in the week and we’ll let you know exactly what we did and how it turned out.

Kim has a Junior League event Tuesday night, so Tony will be on his own. He’s not quite sure what he will do for dinner, but with the Major League Baseball All Star Game scheduled to be played, hot dogs and beer – plus the bread and butter pickles Tony made last weekend – will probably feature prominently in his plans.

On Wednesday night we will, at long last, come hell or high water, make the Grilled Cheese Sandwiches with Truffle Oil. We’ve been pushing them to the next week for a few weeks now, not because we didn’t want to make the, but simply because we never seemed to get home with enough energy to cook on the nights when we originally plan to make the sandwiches. That kind of excuse making ends Wednesday night.

We’re seeing the Foo Fighters at Citi Field Thursday night, so we’ll have dinner there. We are really hoping that the Shake Shack stand will be open, because a Shack Burger and a beer sound like the perfect dinner at the ball park, even if it is enemy territory (Citi Field is home to the New York Mets) and there isn’t a ball game going on. 

We have another Queens adventure planned for Friday night. For those of you that don’t know that borough of New York City, it is truly a cultural, linguistic, and culinary melting pot. If there’s a kind of food you’re craving, from Greek to Peruvian to Pakistani, you can probably find it somewhere in Queens. We’re trying to find a good Filipino restaurant, mostly because we’ve never had Filipino food before. We’re looking at Papa’s Kitchen in the Woodside neighborhood, but are still doing some research.

We plan to go to Le District, the new French market place on the West Side waterfront Saturday afternoon (our original plans to go there on the Fourth of July fell through), so we’re hoping to get some inspiration for dinner there.  We’re thinking that a Rachel Khoo recipe might be called for, so we may just bring our cookbooks along and see what looks good in the market and what dishes we can make using it!